Software Process Improvement Network
(A-SPIN)
Automated Restructuring of Component-based Software using DMS,
by Dr. Ira Baxter, Semantic Designs
Overview:
Successful software systems are under intense pressure to evolve. Most evolution tasks are carried out by hand, which limits the scope of practical evolution, and thus ultimately determines when the system can not longer service its demands. Automated tools can carry out what are ''impossible'' changes, such as radical restructuring of application code. This talk will sketch the DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit, a tool designed for making massive software code changes and show its principles of operation. We will then examine an ongoing effort using DMS, to restructure an existing source code base for a distributed avionics application comprising some 6000 C++ components, where the problem is to change the way all components interact with one another and the distributed component infrastructure
About the Speaker:
Dr. Baxter has been involved with computing since 1966, building operating systems for the first 15 years of his career. To understand why they were so similar and yet different, he went and studied software reuse, focusing on design reuse, receiving his doctoral degree in 1990. Since then, he worked at Schlumberger, automatically generating PDE-solver generator for CM-5 supercomputers for severlal years, and then consulted for Rockwell International on industrial automation software engineering tools for several years. In 1995, he founded Semantic Designs (www.semdesigns.com), to build commercial tools that will radically improve the methods and economics of software enhancement and maintenance, based on the design reuse ideas, where he is presently CEO and cheif architect of DMS, tools for automatically modifiying large-scale software systems. Dr. Baxter has been a member of the Association for Computing Machinery since 1970, is a Life Member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and is a Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society.