CPSC 533 Project Status

1
CPSC 533 Project Status Reid Holmes Andrew
Chan March 17, 2003
2
The Problem

• Software systems are huge and complex
• Difficult for a developer to understand the
  structure
• Difficult to estimate how a change to a system
  will affect its behavior

3
The costs

• Developers may introduce unintended side-effects
  because they do not understand the system
• Adding features or fixing bugs may take longer
  than expected

4
Solutions

• Language features to promote abstraction
• For large systems, still too much detail
• Design documents that document the structure of
  the system
• Does the implementation conform to them?

5
Solutions

• Software tools to capture what has been
  implemented

6
Current Research

• Hausi Müller, University of Victoria
• Rigi Project
• Margaret-Anne Storey, University of Victoria
• SHriMP Project
• Rigi and SHriMP are available for free download

7
Evaluation

• Issues with scalability
• No structure is inferred by these tools
• Issues with navigation
• Easy to get lost when navigating
• Focus, but not much context
• Results after 10 years of work?

8
Introducing Prawn

• Leverage new software analysis and information
  visualization tools
• Enable a developer to
• discover key components in a system
• learn how they are interconnected
• determine how a change to the system could affect
  it

9
Introducing Prawn

• Focus on visualizing Java systems
• Scalability goal lay-out and interact with a
  program the size of JEdit
• 20 packages
• 644 classes
• 5014 methods
• about 23 270 method calls

10
(No Transcript)
11
Infrastructure

• Programming in Java
• Source analysis based on FEAT (Feature
  Exploration and Analysis Tool)
• Developed by Martin Robillard in SPL
• Visualization using ZVTM (Zoomable Visual
  Transformation Machine)
• Downloadable from SourceForge

12
Current Status

• Successfully analyzed the Java run-time library
• 314 packages
• 8216 classes
• 73 845 methods
• API for querying analysis database
• Scalable framework for displaying system

13
Questions?
Image borrowed from www.prawnography.net