While a number of research systems have demonstrated the potential value of program transformations, very few of these systems have made it into practice. The core technology for such systems is well understood; what remains is integration and more importantly, the problem of handling the scale of the applications to be processed. This paper describes DMS, a practical, commercial program analysis and transformation system, and sketches a variety of tasks to which it has been applied, from redocumenting to large-scale system migration. Its success derives partly from a vision of design maintenance and the construction of infrastructure that appears necessary to support that vision. DMS handles program scale by careful space management, computational scale via parallelism and knowledge acquisition scale via domains.

Conventional software engineering tends to focus on a small part of the software life cycle: the design and implementation of a product. The bulk of the lifetime cost is in the maintenance phase, where one must live with the product previously developed. Presently, we have little theory and fewer tools to help us manage the maintenance activity. We contend that a fundamental cause of the difficulty is the failure to preserve design information. This results from an over preoccupation with the synthesis and maintenance of code. We offer an alternative paradigm: make the design the central focus of the construction process-get code as a byproduct; make the design the central focus of the maintenance process-preserve revised designs and get code as a byproduct. A transformational scheme for accomplishing this is presented. We call it the Design Maintenance System. The programming roles change radically from coding instances for ill defined specifications to specifiers of functionality and (compiler like) implementation methods. Specification and implementation method debugging would then become prominent activities. The design scheme and change management procedures are illustrated with a simple data processing application. We sketch an ongoing implementation

Article Free Access Share on Objects and domain engineering (panel) Authors: Sanjiv Gossain Cambridge Technology Partners Cambridge Technology PartnersView Profile , Don Batory University of Texas at Austin University of Texas at AustinView Profile , Hassan Gomaa George Mason University George Mason UniversityView Profile , Mitch Lubars Scientific and Engineering Software Inc. Scientific and Engineering Software Inc.View Profile , Christopher Pidgeon Cambridge Technology Partners Cambridge Technology PartnersView Profile , Ed Seidewitz NASA Goddard Space Flight Center NASA Goddard Space Flight CenterView Profile Authors Info & Claims OOPSLA '95: Proceedings of the tenth annual conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applicationsOctober 1995Pages 333–336https://doi.org/10.1145/217838.217872Published:17 October 1995Publication History 1citation274DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations1Total Downloads274Last 12 Months19Last 6 weeks2 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

This paper presents some developmental concerns for an expert system in the domain of software design. We discuss the context for such a system and explore the synergism between the human designer and automaton. A gross architecture for the automaton is given. A scenario of interaction between the designer and automaton is presented.