Advances in Software Engineering : Comprehension, Evaluation, and Evolution

Software engineering is a rapidly growing and changing field. Over the last dec­ ade, it has gained significant popularity, and it is now heralded as a discipline of its own. This edited collection presents recent advances in software engineering in the areas of evolution, comprehension, and evaluation. The theme of the book addresses the increasing need to understand and assess software systems in order to measure their quality, maintain them, adapt them to changing requirements and technology, and migrate them to new platforms. This need can be satisfied by studying how software systems are built and maintained, by finding new paradigms, and by building new tools to support the activities involved in devel­ oping contemporary software systems. The contributions to the book are from major results and findings of leading researchers, under the mandate of the Consortium for Software Engineering Re­ search (CSER). CSER has been in existence since 1996. The five founding in­ dustrial and academic partners wanted to create a research environment that would appeal to the applied nature of the industrial partners, as well as to ad­ vance the state of the art and develop fresh expertise. The research projects of the Consortium are partially funded by the industrial partners, and partially by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Technical and administrative management of the Consortium is provided by the National Research Council of Canada-specifically by members of the Software Engi­ neering Group ofthe Institute for Information Technology. Front Matter....Pages i-xxviii Introduction....Pages 1-19 Front Matter....Pages 21-21 Object-Oriented Metrics: A Review of Theory and Practice....Pages 23-50 Studies of the Work Practices of Software Engineers....Pages 51-72 Assessing the Usefulness of the TkSee Software Exploration Tool....Pages 73-93 Clones Occurrence in Java and Modula-3 Software Systems....Pages 95-110 Front Matter....Pages 111-111 Pattern-Based Design Recovery with SPOOL....Pages 113-135 Approaches to Clustering for Program Comprehension and Remodularization....Pages 137-157 Automatic Architectural Clustering of Software....Pages 159-176 Discovering Implicit Inheritance Relations in Non-Object-Oriented Code....Pages 177-193 Front Matter....Pages 195-195 Design Properties and Evolvability of Object-Oriented Systems....Pages 197-224 Using Textual Redundancy to Study the Maintainability of Source Code....Pages 225-241 Building Parallel Applications Using Design Patterns....Pages 243-265 Front Matter....Pages 267-267 The SPOOL Design Repository: Architecture, Schema, and Mechanisms....Pages 269-294 The Software Bookshelf....Pages 295-339 Dynamic Documents Over the Web....Pages 341-360 Support for Geographically Dispersed Software Teams....Pages 361-385 Parsing C++ Code Despite Missing Declarations....Pages 387-406 Towards Environment Retargetable Parser Generators....Pages 407-437 Back Matter....Pages 439-467 ADVANCES IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING is a comprehensive edited survey thematically organized into four parts: Empirical Studies, Architectural Recovery, Maintainability, and Tool Support. Contributions to the volume derive from significant results and findings of leading researchers, under the mandate of the Consortium for Software Engineering (CSER), a Canadian industry-research initiative. Central themes--the comprehension, evaluation, and evolution of software systems--address the key needs to understand software systems construction and maintenance, to assess their quality, to adapt them to evolving requirements and technology, to migrate them to new platforms, and to discover new paradigms and build new tools to support these activities. Topics and features:+ Includes several case studies and problems based on actual systems used by industrial research partners of CSER+ Examines the current challenges facing large-scale and legacy systems, for which substantial investments may be assoc The proposed volume will contain both practically usable research as well as reviews of different areas of interest in the software engineering literature, such as clone identification. The contents of the various sections will provide a better understanding of known problems as well as detailed treatment of advanced topics. Consequently the book consolidates the work and findings from leading researchers in the software research community. The book is relevant to real-world problems and not merely based on toy examples; many of the chapters include results and examples of industrial-strength software. A chapter is dedicated to tools that can readily be used in addressing many of the problems encountered with software. Some of the key software engineering topics addressed are maintainability, architectural recovery, code analysis, software migration, empirical studies, and tool support