A Concept-Centric Environment for Software Evolution in an Agile Contextards an Open Adaptive Development Environment

Evolving a software implementation requires that the developer has a good understanding of what the system does. In practice however a lot of domain knowledge about the software that was available when the system was first conceived is only available to the current developer in an implicit form. Furthermore, even when the domain knowledge is available in an explicit form, the developer also needs to know to which part of the implementation the knowledge applies to. Unfortunately this knowledge is often detached from the implementation which forces the developer to re-establish the link retroactively. Moreover, as a result of short term development economics, developers will often neglect to document and couple the domain knowledge about a system in favor of writing code. This results in a passive source of documentation that will quickly become out-of-date. This dissertation presents a concept-centric environment which is based upon a symbiotic integration of the programming environment (code level) and the domain knowledge environment (concept level). It allows a developer to capture domain knowledge in an explicit form, which is coupled to the corresponding implementation. Moreover it enables the active participation of the domain knowledge in providing the functionality of the software. This installs a bi-directional interaction between the concept level and the code level which can be used to create a documented and malleable implementation of a software system.