Ademar Aguiar

WikiWiki weaving heterogeneous software artifacts

Good documentation benefits every software development project, especially large ones, but it can be hard, costly, and tiresome to produce when not supported by appropriate tools and methods.The documentation of a software system uses different artifacts, namely source code, for low-level internal documentation, and specific-purpose models and documents, for higher-level external documentation (e.g. requirements documents, use-case specifications, design notebooks, and reference manuals). All these artifacts require continual review and modification throughout the life-cycle to preserve their consistency and value.Good software documents are often heterogeneous, i.e., they combine different kinds of contents (text, code, models, images) gathered from separate software artifacts, a combination usually difficult to maintain as the system evolves over time, considering that source code, models and documents are typically produced and maintained separately in multiple sources using different environments and editors.This paper presents a wiki that helps on quickly weaving different kinds of contents into a single heterogeneous document, whilst preserving its semantic consistency. The fundamental goal of this wiki (XSDoc Wiki) is to reduce the development-documentation gap by making documentation more convenient and attractive to developers. An example taken from the JUnit framework documentation helps to illustrate the features more relevant to do such weaving.

AGILIPO: Embedding Social Software Features into Business Process Tools

In today’s changing environments, organizational design must take into account the fact that business processes are incomplete by nature and that they should be managed in such a way that they do not restrain human intervention. In this paper we propose the embedding of social software features, such as collaboration and wiki-like features, in the modeling and execution tools of business processes. These features will foster people empowerment in the bottom-up design and execution of business processes. We conclude this paper by identifying some research issues about the implementation of the tool and its methodological impact on Business Process Management.

Patterns for consistent software documentation

Documentation is an important part of the captured knowledge of a software project, providing a flexible and effective way of recording informal contents. However, maintaining documentations consistency requires a considerable effort. Existing solutions encompass different tools and approaches that support the process of creating, evolving and using documents and other artifacts derived from the software development process. Based on existing literature and expertise, we have identified the key problems and solutions for documentation consistency. In concrete, four distinct patterns and their relations were identified, which are here described --- Information Proximity, Co-Evolution, Domain-Structured Information and Integrated Environment.

Adaptive Object-Modelling: Patterns, Tools and Applications

Adaptive Object Models, though a well-known architectural pattern, is seldomly used in software projects where, due to their nature, would highly benefit from it. Characteristics such as complexity, reduced literature and case-studies, lack of reusable framework components, and fundamental issues as those regarding runtime evolution, drive developers away. By overcoming these barriers with a set of patterns, tools and applications, and addressing pending research problems, Adaptive Object Models can dramatically alter the way developers design their software. This paper presents a survey in the field, describes the preliminary contributions and outlines the ongoing doctoral work.

A minimalist approach to framework documentation

Good documentation is crucial for the success of frameworks. In this research, a new documenting approach is proposed combining existing document styles in a kind of “minimalist” framework manual with a special emphasis on framework understandability and usability, rather than on describing framework design. Benefits and drawbacks are evaluated from frameworks of different domains and complexity.

Incremental knowledge acquisition in software development using a weakly-typed Wiki

Software development is a knowledge-intensive activity and frequently implies a progressive crystallization of knowledge, towards programming language statements. Although wikis have proved very effective, for both collaborative authoring and knowledge management, it would be useful for knowledge acquisition to better support team awareness and the recognition of knowledge structures, their relations, and their incremental evolution. This paper presents Weaki, a wiki prototype especially designed to support incremental formalization of structured contents that uses weakly-typed pages and type evolution. Weaki was applied in academic settings, by students of Software Engineering Labs.

Towards detecting and solving aspect conflicts and interferences using unit tests

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm that aims at solving the problem of crosscutting concerns being normally scattered throughout several units of an application. Although an important step forward in the search for modularity, by breaking the notion of encapsulation introduced by Object Oriented Programming (OOP), AOP has proven to be prone to numerous problems caused by conflicts and interferences between aspects. This paper presents work that explores the proven unit testing techniques as a mean to help developers describe the behavior of their aspects and to advise them about possible conflicts and interferences.

Disciplined composition of aspects using tests

A large part of the software development effort is typically spent on maintenance and evolution, namely on adding new and unanticipated features. As aspect-oriented programming (AOP) can be easily used to compose software in non-planned ways, many researchers are investigating AOP as a technique that can play an important role in this particular field. However, unexpected interactions between aspects are still a major problem that compromise AOPs applicability, especially in large projects where many developers, often including new team members, are involved in the process. This paper addresses the issues of aspect conflicts and interactions and proposes a technique to help compose aspects in a disciplined way using a test-driven development approach. A simple example for a banking system helps on illustrating the technique.

Software Knowledge Capture and Acquisition: Tool Support for Agile Settings

Knowledge plays a key role in software development, and the effectiveness of how it is captured into artifacts, and acquired by other team members, is of crucial importance to a projects success. The life-cycle of knowledge in software development is derived from the adopted artifacts, practices and tools. These axes are here reviewed from a knowledge capture and acquisition perspective, and several open research issues are identified. The present work is being carried out in the context of the authors doctoral research. The research objectives are derived from the presented open issues, and a research strategy is outlined. Some preliminary results are also presented.

Patterns for effectively documenting frameworks

Good design and implementation are necessary but not sufficient prerequisites for successfully reusing object-oriented frameworks. Although not always recognized, good documentation is crucial for effective framework reuse, and often hard, costly, and tiresome, coming with many issues, especially when we are not aware of the key problems and respective ways of addressing them. Based on existing literature, case studies and lessons learned, the authors have been mining proven solutions to recurrent problems of documenting object-oriented frameworks, and writing them in pattern form, as patterns are a very effective way of communicating expertise and best practices. This paper presents a small set of patterns addressing problems related to the framework documentation itself, here seen as an autonomous and tangible product independent of the process used to create it. The patterns aim at helping nonexperts on cost-effectively documenting object-oriented frameworks. In concrete, these patterns provide guidance on choosing the kinds of documents to produce, how to relate them, and which contents to include. Although the focus is more on the documents themselves, rather than on the process and tools to produce them, some guidelines are also presented in the paper to help on applying the patterns to a specific framework.