Lifecycle Environments : A Retrospective View of the Contributions of Leon J . Osterweil

Throughout his career, Leon Osterweil has made significant contributions that have impacted the research and state-of-the-practice on development environments. Initially his focus was on programming environments, mostly addressing issues needed to support his work in program analysis. Later his focus expanded to software lifecycle issues, such as flexible component interaction models, efficient system regeneration, and the use of process definitions as the major coordination mechanism to orchestrate the interactions among collections of tools, hardware devices, and human agents. His current research continues to address environment issues, but now the emphasis is on supporting continuous process improvement by providing process languages, execution, simulation, and an assortment of analysis tools for evaluating the effectiveness, safety, and vulnerabilities of processes for a range of domains, from healthcare, to digital government, to scientific workflow. 1. From Program Analysis to Programming Environments The early work on program analysis undertaken by Osterweil and Fosdick [21,37], Ryder [47], Balzer [5] and others initiated a new research direction, where analysis was used not only to assist with compilation but also to help find problems in the code. The early analysis work was primarily concerned with supporting FORTRAN, and Osterweil and Fosdick were working with the Numerical Analysis Group (NAG) in Oxford, England, which was trying to develop efficient and accurate numerical software packages [35] in close collaboration with Argonne National Labs, a major user of such libraries. As discussed in Part I of this book, program analysis has continued to grow as an important research area, as software