“ Meta - models and Tools for Evolution Towards Component Systems

a) Summary of results This project was concerned with developing tools and models to support the transition towards component-based software development. Results achieved in this project can be grouped according to the themes of the original project proposal: • Towards a Component Meta Model First we consider results related to modeling, manipulating and reasoning about software systems in order to better understand them, i.e., in order to support reverse engineering. In order to understand and evolve a software system, appropriate models are needed. We have developed a meta-model for characterizing software entities called FAMIX and a software " repository " based on this meta-model, called MOOSE. This repository is effectively a platform for exploring software models, and forms the basis of several of the experimental tools developed in the course of this project. [DL01] describes a general methodology for program understanding based on this meta-model and platform. One of the key issues in program understanding is to extract useful information from large amounts of software data. Software metrics can be extremely effective in processing this data, and visualization of metrics helps one to quickly get an overview of the data. CodeCrawler is a generic metrics visualization tool developed within the scope of this project, and applied to large software systems. [ML02] describes a generic graph-based model on top of which metrics can be extracted and [LD02a] presents the metrics that have been applied in reverse engineering experiments in the context of CodeCrawler. Metrics-based visualization works best when applied to simple, direct metrics. In order to recognize and reason about relationships between software entities, however, other approaches are needed. SOUL is a declarative meta-programming language which has been integrated with MOOSE. SOUL has been reimplemented to improve the efficiency, and a library written in SOUL to do static reasoning of Smalltalk programs was refactored. SOUL is now used by around 20 people in 4 countries that use Declarative Meta Programming as the engine to drive research in software engineering regarding met-rics, aspect-oriented programming, framework documentation, evolution, and program understanding. [MMW01b] [MMW01a] present an overview of the work done. [WD01] describes how SOUL is used to reason about object-oriented software artifacts.