Anthony I. Wasserman

Software engineering issues for mobile application development

This paper provides an overview of important software engineering research issues related to the development of applications that run on mobile devices. Among the topics are development processes, tools, user interface design, application portability, quality, and security.

Tool integration in software engineering environments

This paper has described the various types of tool integration with the goal of illustrating how diverse tools can be effectively integrated into CASE environments. Issues of data integration, control integration, and presentation integration may be viewed as orthogonal and defining a three-dimensional space in which tool integration occurs. The absence of standards has been shown to be a barrier to integration, as various tool developers remain unable to reach agreement on the appropriate point(s) in this space at which integration should occur. As a result, experience with tool integration has been largely at a tool-to-tool level, with little use of standard tool integration mechanisms.

Developing interactive information systems with the User Software Engineering methodology

User software engineering (USE) is a methodology, supported by automated tools, for the systematic development of interactive information systems. The USE methodology gives particular attention to effective user involvement in the early stages of the software development process, concentrating on external design and the use of rapidly created and modified prototypes of the user interface. The USE methodology is supported by an integrated set of graphically based tools. The USE methodology and the tools that support it are described.

The object-oriented structured design notation for software design representation

The development of a notation that supports key software structure concepts and design principles, is discussed. The notation should let designers represent modules, interfaces, hidden information, concurrency, message passing, invocation of operations and overall program structure in a comprehensive way. The authors examine three categories of approach to architectural design: object-oriented design, functional decomposition, and data structure design. They present their design notation, called object-oriented structured design (OOSD) which achieves the above-stated goal. They discuss classes in OOSD, its handling of asynchronous processes, and its design methods and rules. Automated support for OOSD is considered.<<ETX>>

A graphical, extensible integrated environment for software development

Analysis and design are the essential first phases in most software development projects, yet most automated support environments are aimed at the programming phase. This paper describes a workstation-based environment that provides an integrated ensemble of graphical tools for analysis and design coupled to a project database, along with mechanisms for producing declarations, code skeletons, and executable programs. The environment is built on an “open architecture,” in which interfaces to the tools and their associated files are visible and accessible. The open architecture supports customization and extensibility of the tool environment, so that it can be effectively linked with traditional programming tools.

Toward a discipline of software engineering

Despite rapid changes in computing and software development, some fundamental ideas have remained constant. This article describes eight such concepts that together constitute a viable foundation for a software engineering discipline: abstraction, analysis and design methods and notations, user interface prototyping, modularity and architecture, software life cycle and process, reuse, metrics, and automated support.

The future of programming

The nature of programming is changing. These changes will accelerate as improved software development practices and more sophisticated development tools and environments are produced. This paper surveys the most likely changes in the programming task and in the nature of software over the short term, the medium term, and the long term. In the short term, the focus is on gains in programmer productivity through improved tools and integrated development environments. In the medium term, programmers will be able to take advantage of libraries of software components and to make use of packages that generate programs automatically for certain kinds of common systems. Over the longer term, the nature of programming will change even more significantly as programmers become able to describe desired functions in a nonprocedural way, perhaps through a set of rules or formal specification languages. As these changes occur, the job of the application programmer will become increasingly analysis-oriented and software developers will be able to attack a large number of application areas which could not previously be addressed effectively.

The data management facilities of PLAIN

The programming language PLAIN has been designed to support the construction of interactive information systems within the framework of a systematic programming methodology. One of the key goals of PLAIN has been to achieve an effective integration of programming language and database management concepts, rather than either the functional interface to database operations or the low-level database navigation operations present in other schemes. PLAIN incorporates a relational database definitional facility, along with low-level and high-level operations on relations. This paper describes those features informally, showing how the database operations are combined with programming language notions such as type checking, block structure, expression evaluation, and iteration. A brief description of the implementation status is included.

Information system design methodology

There is a great need for a systematic approach to the specification, design, and development of information systems. This article describes the motivating reasons for such an approach and surveys some of the techniques that have been developed to assist the software specification and design activity. A methodology is seen as a combination of tools and techniques employed within an organizational and managerial framework that can be consistently applied to successive information system development projects. The ways that information system development organizations can create and use such methodologies are emphasized.

An object-oriented structured design method for code generation

The overall architecture of a software system has long been recognized as an important contributor to its quality (or lack thereof). A well-structured program not only adheres to guidelines of structured programming, but also exhibits a logical and modular architecture. Modularity was identified as an important characteristic of software systems by Constantine, Gauthier and Pont, Pamas, and many others [Constantine 1968, Gauthier 1970, Pamas 1972].