Uncertainty can appear in all aspects of software development: uncertainty in requirements analysis, design decisions, implementation and testing. If uncertainty can be dealt with modularly, we can add or delete uncertain concerns to/from models, code and tests whenever these concerns arise or are fixed to certain concerns. To deal with this problem, we developed iArch-U, an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for managing uncertainty modularly in all phases in software development. In this paper, we introduce an overview of iArch-U. The iArch-U IDE is open source software and can be downloaded from GitHub.

Uncertainty can appear in all aspects of software development: uncertainty in requirements analysis, design decisions, implementation, and testing. As the research on uncertainty is so young, there are many issues to be tackled. Modularity for Uncertainty is one of them. If uncertainty can be dealt with modularly, we can add or delete uncertain concerns to/from models, code, and tests whenever these concerns arise or are fixed to certain concerns. To deal with this challenging issue, we propose a modularization mechanism for uncertainty. Agile methods embrace change to accept changeable user requirements. On the other hand, our approach embraces uncertainty to support exploratory development. This paper sets out a focused research agenda for uncertainty in terms of the new modularity vision.

Uncertainty in programming is one of the challenging issues to be tackled, because it is error-prone for many programmers to temporally avoid uncertain concerns only using simple language constructs such as comments and conditional statements. This paper proposes ucJava, a new Java programming environment for conquering uncertainty. Our environment provides a modular programming style for uncertainty and supports test-driven development taking uncertainty into consideration.