Section: Overall Objectives

Presentation

Over the last decades, computer science has delivered various insights how to organize software. Via structured programming, modules, objects, components and agents, software systems are these days more and more evolving into “systems of systems” that provide services to each other. Each system is large, uses incompatible — new, outdated or non-standard — technology and above all, exhibits failures. It is becoming more and more urgent to analyze the properties of these heterogeneous and large software systems and to refactor and transform them in order to keep them up-to-date. With the phletora of languages and technology platforms it is becoming very difficult and very expensive to construct tools to achieve this.

The main challenge of this project is to address this problem by (a) developing language-parametric techniques for analysis and transformation that are (b) embedded in an scalable and reliable tool infrastructure. We will use the service paradigm itself to build better (better quality, better flexibility and better performance) tools for analysis and transformation of software systems. To this end, we will study fact extraction (to extract information from existing software systems), refactoring and transformation (to improve them), and reliable middleware to act as tool composition foundation.

The innovative aspects of this project are twofold: fact extraction, refactoring and transformation are approached in a single conceptual framework and service-orientation will be used as the basis for their implementation. In this way tool compositions can be validated and software workbenches and massively parallel services can be created that open up new horizons for software understanding and transformation. The breadth, depth and volume of software that can be analyzed and improved in this way is significant.