Stanley M. Sutton

IMP: a meta-tooling platform for creating language-specific ides in eclipse

Programming language design remains a vital field, with interest in languages targeting concurrency, scripting, and aspects, as well as in domain-specific languages. Full-featured integrated development environments (IDEs) have become critical to the adoption of new languages. A key factor in the success of these IDEs is the provision of services specifically tailored to the language. However, modern IDE frameworks are large and complex, and the cost of constructing a language-specific IDE from scratch remains prohibitive IMP is an IDE meta-tooling platform intended to relieve much of the burden of IDE development in Eclipse. IMP combines a language-independent framework, generators for partial implementations of language-specific services, and support for the completion of service implementations by programming at various levels of abstraction. Unlike much of the previous work, IMP permits signigicant customization of IDE appearance and behavior and accommodates incremental elaboration of the IDE; it also makes significant reuse of code and assists during the IDE development process. IMP-based IDEs are in use in research projects in IBM, including within IMP itself. IMP is available as an open-source release from SourceForge.net

Hyper/J#8482;: multi-dimensional separation of concerns for Java#8482;

This note presents an overview of this ICSE 2002 tutorial.

The problem of private information in large software organizations

Coordination of project stakeholders is critical to timely and consistent software delivery. In this short paper we present the problem of private information as a guiding framework or lens through which to interpret coordination dynamics within software organizations. We provide evidence of this problem in the form of specific challenges, collected via interviews from a diverse set of extended (i.e., non-development) stakeholders in a globally distributed software development organization.

Aspect-Oriented software development and software process

Aspect orientation is an increasingly promising approach to software development. It affords benefits deriving from advanced separation of concerns, including concern modeling, encapsulation, extraction, and composition. These may enable the development and evolution of software on a higher semantic level, with unprecedented control and flexibility. Aspect orientation may hold similar benefits for software process. Aspect orientation has implications for process on three levels: aspect-oriented products, aspect-oriented processes, and aspect-oriented process languages. It also facilitates insight into how the software-process spectrum may be unified. Macroprocess and microprocess concerns do not overlap, but some relationship between them is necessary. The relating of macroprocess concerns and microprocess concerns is the concern of a mesoprocess level, the principal home for process engineering, the purpose of which is to realize the ends of the macro level in terms of the means provided by the micro level. Aspect orientation should also benefit to a rigorous, orderly, and effective discipline of process engineering.

Advancing process modeling, simulation, and analytics in practice

If you take a broad view, there are many ways ahead for software process modeling and simulation. One way to broaden the view is to include not just software processes but also systems and service processes. Another is to address not just technical processes but also business processes. In any scope, impact can be strengthened by combining modeling and simulation with analytics. A way to assure longevity of the field is to solve problems in practice. These afford a variety of ways to make contributions, including both applied and fundamental. Challenges that must be overcome in achieving practical results are getting access to practitioners, acquiring useful data, and getting your solution adopted (among others). More empirical studies and experience reports are needed. But there are many routes by which contributions may flow to and from the field.

Software process simulation - at a crossroads?

Software process simulation (SPS) has been evolving over the past two decades after being introduced to the software engineering community in the 1980s. At that time the SPS technology attracted a great deal of interest from both academics and practitioners in the software process community—even to the extent of being one of the recommended techniques for achieving multiple Key Process Areas of Level 4 of the Capability Maturity Model Integration. However, in recent years, the growth of SPS seems to have slowed along with the number of reported applications in industry. This article summarizes the special panel that was held during ICSSP 2012 whose goals were to assess whether this technology remains applicable to todays software engineering projects and challenges and to point out the most beneficial opportunities for future research and industry application. Copyright

Concepts in the definition of an enterprise development process

Integrated Product Development - IPD - is an enterprise-wide process used by IBM to develop technology products including hardware, software, and services. IPD has been in use at IBM for over a decade and has been very effective at increasing efficiency and reducing costs across the whole product life cycle. Within IBM Software Group, IPD at the top level is defined informally through natural-language documents, ad hoc diagrams, and a database of well-defined deliverables. Some key concepts in the SWG IPD definition include a clear statement of the principles on which the process is based, widespread references to business goals, frequent use of governance-oriented formulations, a clearly defined structure for the high levels of the process, a relative lack of concern about lower levels of the process structure, and an emphasis on the characterization of participant roles. The relative lack of formal and semantic rigor in the SWG IPD definition might seem to open the door to a number of problems in process specification and execution. However, this seems to have allowed the process definers to focus on those aspects of the process that are most important and to present those in a natural way. In the context of an organization that is dedicated to the success of the process, this has been an effective approach.