A transformation-based approach to context-aware modelling

Context-aware computing is a paradigm for governing the numerous mobile devices surrounding us. In this computing paradigm, software applications continuously and dynamically adapt to different “contexts” implying different software configurations of such devices. Unfortunately, modelling a context-aware application (CAA) for all possible contexts is only feasible in the simplest of cases. Hence, tool support verifying certain properties is required. In this article, we introduce the CAA model, in which context adaptations are specified explicitly as model transformations. By mapping this model to graphs and graph transformations, we can exploit graph transformation techniques such as critical pair analysis to find contexts for which the resulting application model is ambiguous. We validate our approach by means of an example of a mobile city guide, demonstrating that we can identify subtle context interactions that might go unnoticed otherwise.     

A Graph-Based Metamodel for Object-Oriented Software Metrics

Metrics are essential in object-oriented software engineering for several reasons, among which quality assessment and improvement of development team productivity. While the mathematical nature of metrics calls for clear definitions, frequently there exist many contradicting definitions of the same metric depending on the implementation language. We suggest to express and define metrics using a language-independent metamodel based on graphs. This graph-based approach allows for an unambiguous definition of generic object-oriented metrics and higher-order metrics. We also report on some prototype tools that implement these ideas.We thank Kim Mens, Roel Wuyts and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on drafts of this paper.     

Automated generation of program translation and verification tools using annotated grammars

Automatically generating program translators from source and target language specifications is a non-trivial problem. In this paper we focus on the problem of automating the process of building translators between operations languages, a family of DSLs used to program satellite operations procedures. We exploit their similarities to semi-automatically build transformation tools between these DSLs. The input to our method is a collection of annotated context-free grammars. To simplify the overall translation process even more, we also propose an intermediate representation common to all operations languages. Finally, we discuss how to enrich our annotated grammars model with more advanced semantic annotations to provide a verification system for the translation process. We validate our approach by semi-automatically deriving translators between some real world operations languages, using the prototype tool which we implemented for that purpose.     

Applying and combining three different aspect Mining Techniques

Understanding a software system at source-code level requires understanding the different concerns that it addresses, which in turn requires a way to identify these concerns in the source code. Whereas some concerns are explicitly represented by program entities (like classes, methods and variables) and thus are easy to identify, crosscutting concerns are not captured by a single program entity but are scattered over many program entities and are tangled with the other concerns. Because of their crosscutting nature, such crosscutting concerns are difficult to identify, and reduce the understandability of the system as a whole. In this paper, we report on a combined experiment in which we try to identify crosscutting concerns in the JHotDraw framework automatically. We first apply three independently developed aspect mining techniques to JHotDraw and evaluate and compare their results. Based on this analysis, we present three interesting combinations of these three techniques, and show how these combinations provide a more complete coverage of the detected concerns as compared to the original techniques individually. Our results are a first step towards improving the understandability of a system that contains crosscutting concerns, and can be used as a basis for refactoring the identified crosscutting concerns into aspects. M. Ceccato is a PhD student in ITC-irst in Trento, Italy. He received his degree in Software Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 2003. The master thesis concerned the Re-engineering of an existing big-sized data warehouse application. The project was developed in the Information Technology department in Alcoa Servizi. His research interests are on source code analysis and manipulation, especially for the the migration of object-oriented code to aspect-oriented programming. He collaborates with King’s College London and Loyola College in Maryland on the automatic support for this migration process. He has been involved in the organization and in the program committee of a number of AOP-related events, such as Late Workshop, in Chicago (2005) and in Bonn, Germany (2006), held within the major Aspect Oriented Programming conference (AOSD) and 3rd European Workshop on Aspects in Software (EWAS’06) in Enschede, The Netherlands. Marius Marin is a Ph.D. researcher in the Software Evolution Reseach Laboratory at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. He was granted an engineering degree by the Technical University of Civil Engineering, Bucharest, in 2000, and Licentiate in Economic Computer Science from the Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, in 2002. Before starting his Ph.D. studies, he worked as a software engineer in industry. His main research interests are in the area of reverse engineering, software modularization and modeling, and aspect-oriented software development. He is the main author of the publicly available aspect mining tool FINT and he publishes at international conferences in the aforementioned topics. He has been involved in program- and organizing committees of several workshops related to aspect mining. Kim Mens obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, on “architectural conformance checking,” for which he used a declarative meta-programming approach. After his Ph.D. he became a full-time professor (chargé de cours) at the Université catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve (UCL). In addition to his current interest in logic meta-programming and intensional views, Kim Mens is one of the originators of the reuse contracts technique for automatically detecting conflicts in evolving software. He has been formally involved in several research networks related to software evolution. He has a strong interest in object-oriented and aspect-oriented software development and has actively participated in the organization of several workshops and conferences on those topics. He combines all these different research interests under the common denominator of co-evolution (between source code and earlier life-cycle software artifacts). Other research topics that fit this common theme and in which he is interested are software architecture, software maintenance, reverse engineering, software transformation, software restructuring and renovation, aspect mining and evolution of aspect programs. L. Moonen is an assistant professor in the Software Evolution Research Lab at Delft University of Technology and a researcher at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), the Netherlands. His research interests are the design and development of advanced program analysis tools and techniques that support development, maintenance and evolution of large software systems. Concrete topics include the reverse engineering and exploration of views on software systems and their use for understanding and assessing software quality attributes such as evolvability, reliability and security. Dr. Moonen received an MSc (cum laude, Computer Science, 1996) and PhD (Computer Science, 2002) from the University of Amsterdam. He is one of the founders of the Software Improvement Group, a company that specializes in tools and consultancy to help organizations solve their legacy problems. He publishes regularly at, and serves on organizing-, steering- and program committees of, international workshops and conferences on reverse engineering (WCRE), source code analysis (SCAM), software maintenance (ICSM), program understanding (ICPC), reengineering (CSMR), aspect mining (Dagstuhl 06302, TEAM) and software security (CoBaSSA). Paolo Tonella is a senior researcher at ITC-irst, Trento, Italy. He received his laurea degree cum laude in Electronic Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 1992, and his Ph.D. degree in Software Engineering from the same University, in 1999, with the thesis “Code Analysis in Support to Software Maintenance.” Since 1994 he has been a full time researcher of the Software Engineering group at ITC-irst. He participated in several industrial and European Community projects on software analysis and testing. He is the author of “Reverse Engineering of Object Oriented Code,” Springer, 2005. His current research interests include reverse engineering, aspect oriented programming, empirical studies, Web applications and testing. Tom Tourwé obtained the degree of Licentiate in Computer Science in 1997 and Ph.D. in Science in 2002 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is currently associated to the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he works as a post- doctoral researcher in the Ideals project. His main research interests lie in the broad area of software engineering, and include aspect-oriented software evolution and re-engineering in particular. He published several peer-reviewed articles on these topics in international journals and conferences, and organised a number of workshops on those themes.     

XPS analysis of the oxidation of palladium model catalysts

The oxidation of 5 and 8 nm palladium particles supported on SiO₂/Si(1 0 0) has been studied with XPS. During oxidation the thickness of the oxide layer increases linearly with time. The lattice rearrangement needed for the formation of a new oxide layer at the metal–oxide interface is probably the rate-determining step. There were no significant differences between the oxidation of the 5 and 8 nm particles. The rate of the oxidation is strongly temperature-dependent. The activation energy for the oxidation is at least 100 kJ/mol. For comparison the oxidation and reduction of a 8 wt% Pd/SiO₂ catalysts was studied. The results indicated that oxidation and reduction of the Pd/SiO₂ catalyst proceeds in a similar way as on the Pd/SiO₂/Si(1 0 0) model catalysts.     

A method for testing and validating executable statechart models

Software and Systems Modeling - Statecharts constitute an executable language for modelling event-based reactive systems. The essential complexity of statechart models solicits the need for...     

On the variation and specialisation of workload—A case study of the Gnome ecosystem community

Most empirical studies of open source software repositories focus on the analysis of isolated projects, or restrict themselves to the study of the relationships between technical artifacts. In contrast, we have carried out a case study that focuses on the actual contributors to software ecosystems, being collections of software projects that are maintained by the same community. To this aim, we defined a new series of workload and involvement metrics, as well as a novel approach— $\widetilde{\mathbf{T}}$ -graphs—for reporting the results of comparing multiple distributions. We used these techniques to statistically study how workload and involvement of ecosystem contributors varies across projects and across activity types, and we explored to which extent projects and contributors specialise in particular activity types. Using Gnome as a case study we observed that, next to coding, the activities of localization, development documentation and building are prevalent throughout the ecosystem. We also observed notable differences between frequent and occasional contributors in terms of the activity types they are involved in and the number of projects they contribute to. Occasional contributors and contributors that are involved in many different projects tend to be more involved in the localization activity, while frequent contributors tend to be more involved in the coding activity in a limited number of projects.     

Dealing with Uncertainties in Fresh Water Supply: Experiences in the Netherlands

Developing fresh water supply strategies for the long term needs to take into account the fact that the future is deeply uncertain. Not only the extent of climate change and the extent and nature of its impacts are unknown, also socio-economic conditions may change in unpredictable ways, as well as social preferences. Often, it is not possible to find solid ground for estimating probabilities for the relevant range of imaginable possible future developments. Yet, some of these may have profound impacts and consequences for society which could be reduced by timely proactive adaptation. In response to these and similar challenges, various approaches, methods and techniques have been proposed and are being developed to specifically address long-term strategy development under so-called deep uncertainty. This paper, first, offers a brief overview of developments in the field of planning under (deep) uncertainty. Next, we illustrate application of three different approaches to fresh water provision planning under uncertainty in case studies in the Netherlands: a resilience approach, oriented to (re) designing fresh water systems in such a way that they will be less vulnerable, resp. will be able to recover easily from future disturbances; a robustness approach, oriented to quantitative assessment of system performance for various system configurations (adaptation options) under a range of external disturbances, and an exploratory modeling approach, developed to explore policy effectiveness and system operation under a very wide set of assumptions about future conditions.