Refactoring software can be hard and time-consuming. Several refactoring tools assist developers in reaching more readable and maintainable code. However, most of them are characterized by long feedback loops that impoverish their refactoring experience. We believe that we can reduce this problem by focusing on the concept of Live Refactoring and its main principles: the live recommendation and continuous visualization of refactoring candidates, and the immediate visualization of results from applying a refactoring to the code. Therefore, we implemented a Live Refactoring Environment that identifies, suggests, and applies Extract Method refactorings. To evaluate our approach, we carried out an empirical experiment. Early results showed us that our refactoring environment improves several code quality aspects, being well received, understood, and used by the experiment participants. The source code of our tool is available on: https://github.com/saracouto1318/LiveRef. Its demonstration video can be found at: https://youtu.be/_jxx21ZiQ0o.

Any software system that has a considerable growing number of features will suffer from essential complexity, which makes the understanding of the software artifacts increasingly costly and time-consuming. A common approach for reducing the software understanding complexity is to use software visualizations techniques. There are already several approaches for visualizing software, as well as for extracting the information needed for those visualizations. This paper presents a novel approach to tackle the software complexity, delving into the common approaches for extracting information about software artifacts and common software visualization metaphors, allowing users to dive into the software system in a live way using virtual reality (VR). Experiments were carried out in order to validate the correct extraction of metadata from the software artifact and the corresponding VR visualization. With this work, we intend to present a starting point towards a Live Software Development approach.

Cloud computing has emerged as the de facto approach for providing services over the Internet. Although having increased popularity, challenges arise in the management of such environments, especially when the cloud service providers are constantly evolving their services and technology stack in order to maintain position in a demanding market. This usually leads to a combination of different services, each one managed individually, not providing a big picture of the architecture. In essence, the end state will be too many resources under management in an overwhelming heterogeneous environment. An infrastructure that has considerable growth will not be able to avoid its increasing complexity. Thus, this papers introduces liveness as an attempt to increase the feedback-loop to the developer in the management of cloud architectures. This aims to ease the process of developing and integrating cloud-based systems, by giving the possibility to understand the system and manage it in an interactive and immersive experience, thus perceiving how the infrastructure reacts to change. This approach allows the real-time visualization of a cloud infrastructure composed of a set of Amazon Web Services resources, using visual city metaphors.

Application frameworks are a powerful technique for large-scale reuse, but require a considerable effort to understand them. Good documentation is costly, as it needs to address different audiences with disparate learning needs. When code and documentation prove insufficient, developers turn to their network of experts. Nevertheless, this proves difficult, mainly due to the lack of expertise awareness (who to ask), wasteful interruptions of the wrong people and unavailability (either due to intrusion or time constraints). The DRIVER platform is a collaborative learning environment where framework users can, in a non-intrusive way, store and share their learning knowledge while following the best practices of framework understanding (patterns). Developed by the authors, it provides a framework documentation repository, mounted on a wiki, where the learning paths of the community of learners can be captured, shared, rated, and recommended. Combining these social activities, the DRIVER platform promotes collaborative learning, mitigating intrusiveness, unavailability of experts and loss of tacit knowledge. This paper presents the assessment of DRIVER using a controlled academic experiment that measured the performance, effectiveness and framework knowledge intake of MSc students. The study concluded that, especially for novice learners, the platform allows for a faster and more effective learning process.

Application frameworks are a powerful technique for large-scale reuse but often very hard to learn from scratch. Although good documentation helps on reducing the learning curve, it is often found lacking, and costly, as it needs to attend different audiences with disparate learning needs. When code and documentation prove insufficient, developers turn to their network of experts. The lack of awareness about the experts, interrupting the wrong people, and experts unavailability are well known hindrances to effective collaboration. This paper presents the DRIVER platform, a collaborative learning environment for framework users to share their knowledge. It provides the documentation on a wiki, where the learning paths of the community of learners can be captured, shared, rated, and recommended, thus tapping into the collective knowledge of the community of framework users. The tool can be obtained at http://bit.ly/driverTool.

The existence of replicated code in a system makes that system harder to maintain and evolve. To remove replicated code the usual way is to use refactorings. However there are always clones that cannot be removed by refactorings alone. Some are due to lack of composition mechanisms in the underlying programming language. We propose the use of roles to remove such clones since roles provide a finer degree of composition. We sketch four role refactorings to remove code clones and apply them in a case study using the JHotDraw framework. Results show that roles have a positive impact in clone reduction as they were able to remove almost all clones traditional refactorings could not.

This paper presents an approach to analyse the application of tactics in architectural patterns. We define and illustrate the approach using ARCHERY, a language for specifying, analysing and verifying architectural patterns. The approach consists of characterising the design principles of an architectural pattern as constraints, expressed in the language, and then, establishing a refinement relation based on their satisfaction. The application of tactics preserving refinement ensures that the original design principles, expressed themselves as constraints, still hold in the resulting architectural pattern. The paper focuses on fault-tolerance tactics, and identifies a set of requirements for a semantic framework characterising them. The application of tactics represented as model transformations is then discussed and illustrated using two case studies.

Roles are not a new concept, but they have been used in two different ways: as modeling concepts in a static view and as instance extensions in a dynamic view. For these views only the dynamic offers supporting languages. The static view, although proving the utility of roles in modeling, does not offer a programming language that allows developers to use roles all the way from modeling to programming. We try to overcome this by presenting our role language JavaStage, based on the Java language. We do this by designing and implementing a simple framework and then compare the results with its OO equivalent. Our results show that static roles are in fact useful when used in code and that JavaStage features expand role reuse.

Although roles have been around for a long time they have not yet reached mainstream programming languages. The variety of existing role models may be a limiting factor. We believe that for roles to be widely accepted they must enhance code reuse. An outcome would be a library of roles. We present and discuss what we feel are the characteristics that a role model must have to enable reusable and player-independent roles. In this paper we present our role model and JavaStage, a role language that extends Java, with examples of reusable roles. Finally, we present our steps towards the building of a role library, by presenting the roles developed from the analysis of the GoF Design Patterns. The results obtained, we developed roles for 10 of the 23 GoF patterns, are promising.

Providing efficient access to information can be approached in different ways, but ultimately implies the creation of an Index, represented with an indexing language, like a Taxonomy, a Thesaurus, an Ontology or a Folksonomy. Each of these languages strikes a different balance between the effort to create and maintain the index, the effectiveness of knowledge capture, the guidance that readers can get, and how efficiently they can get it. Furthermore, in a world in which more and more information is available, two issues gain particular importance in the creation of an index: how can it be done collaborative, and how can the index abstract and express information more richly.

An Adaptive Object Model (AOM) is a common architectural style for systems in which classes, attributes, relationships and behaviors of applications are represented as metadata, allowing them to be changed at runtime not only by programmers, but also by end users. Frequently, behavior is added to AOM systems by increasingly adding expressiveness to the model. However, this approach can result in a full blown programming language, which is not desirable. This pattern describes a solution for adding behavior to AOM systems by using metadata to identify points in the application where behavior can be dynamically added. This solution may limit the expressive power of the model, but can also simplify it, since points of extension are well defined in the system.

Meta-architectures, also known as reflective architectures, are a specific type of software architectures that are able to inspect their own structure and behavior, and dynamically adapt at runtime, thus responding to new user requirements or changes in their environment. In object-oriented programming, these architectures rely on a small set of core concepts that provide them the means to describe themselves, thus becoming "closed". These three core patterns can be found in almost every object-oriented meta-architecture: Everything is a Thing, Closing the Roof, and Bootstrapping. By delving into the inherent problems they try to solve, and the forces that shape those problems, a developer will improve his ability to adequately make architectural and design choices to build and evolve systems with high-adaptability needs.

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 project's 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 author's doctoral research. The research objectives are derived from the presented open issues, and a research strategy is outlined. Some preliminary results are also presented.

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.

Software development is a social activity. Teams of developers join together to coordinate their efforts to produce software systems. This effort encompasses the development of a shared understanding surrounding multiple artifacts throughout the process. Frameworks are a powerful technique for large-scale reuse, but its complexity makes them hard to understand and learn how to use. Developers resort to their colleagues for help and insight, at the expense of time and intrusion, as documentation is often outdated and incomplete. This paper presents an approach to harness this collective knowledge of the team through a collaborative environment. Teams can share, rank and recommend their learning knowledge without too much intrusion and follow best practices of framework understanding.

Even if we have recognized many short-term benefits of agile methods, we still know very little about their long-term effects. In this panel, we discuss the long-term perspective of the agile methods. The panelists are either industrial or academic representatives. They will discuss problems and benefits related to the long-term lifecycle system management in agile projects. Ideally, the panel's outcome will provide ideas for future research.

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is a powerful programming technique with the objective of improving modularity by encapsulating crosscutting concerns. The nature of AOP makes it prone to unexpected and harmful interactions between the different components of a system. The claim behind this PhD is that unit tests can be used to detect these interactions. In this paper we explain how these can be accomplished. A brief state of the art, work plan and a support tool (drUID) are also presented.

Object-oriented frameworks are a powerful reuse technique but they are also very complex and difficult to design. Framework’s design aims at separating the invariant aspects across several applications in a domain – frozen spots – from the aspects that vary among applications and thus must be kept flexible and customizable – hot spots. The flexibility and extensibility provided at hot spots is usually achieved by following common design patterns, which are often hard and tiresome to identify without proper documentation. This paper proposes a reverse engineering approach to identify the design patterns used in a framework, using a high-level hot spot representation. The goals of this work include: researching a design approach that produces usable intermediate reuse information; defining a representation for design patterns based on meta-patterns; and developing a supporting tool to automate the reverse engineering process.