Strategic Project - UI 752 - 2014

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Organizational Unit

Publications

Conclave: writing programs to understand programs

Publication . Carvalho, Nuno Ramos; Almeida, José João; Pereira, Maria João; Henriques, Pedro Rangel

Software maintainers are often challenged with source code changes to improve software systems, or eliminate defects, in unfamiliar programs. To undertake these tasks a sufficient understanding of the system, or at least a small part of it, is required. One of the most time consuming tasks of this process is locating which parts of the code are responsible for some key functionality or feature. This paper introduces Conclave, an environment for software analysis, that enhances program comprehension activities. Programmers use natural languages to describe and discuss the problem domain, programming languages to write source code, and markup languages to have programs talking with other programs, and so this system has to cope with this heterogeneity of dialects, and provide tools in all these areas to effectively contribute to the understanding process. The source code, the problem domain, and the side effects of running the program are represented in the system using ontologies. A combination of tools (specialized in different kinds of languages) create mappings between the different domains. Conclave provides facilities for feature location, code search, and views of the software that ease the process of understanding the code, devising changes. The underlying feature location technique explores natural language terms used in programs (e.g. function and variable names); using textual analysis and a collection of Natural Language Processing techniques, computes synonymous sets of terms. These sets are used to score relatedness between program elements, and search queries or problem domain concepts, producing sorted ranks of program elements that address the search criteria, or concepts respectively.

2014Conference object

Open access

Comment-based concept location over system dependency graphs

Publication . Pereira, Nuno; Pereira, Maria João; Henriques, Pedro Rangel

Software maintenance is one of the most expensive phases of software development and understanding a program is one of the most important tasks of software maintenance. Before making the change to the program, software engineers need to find the location, or locations, where the changes will be made, they need to understand the program. Real applications are huge, sometimes old, were written by other person and it is difficult to find the location of the instructions related to a specific problem domain concept. There are various techniques to find these locations minimizing the time spent, but this stage of software development continues to be one of the most expensive and longer. The concept location is a crucial task for program understanding. This paper presents a project whose main objective is to explore and combine two Program Comprehension techniques: visualization of the system dependency graph and concept location over source code comments. The idea is to merge both features in order to perform concept location in system dependency graphs. More than locate a set of hot instructions (based on the associated comments) it will allow to detect the other instructions (the whole method).

2014Conference object

Open access

Converting ontologies into DSLs

Publication . Fonseca, João Manuel Sousa; Pereira, Maria João; Henriques, Pedro Rangel

This paper presents a project whose main objective is to explore the Ontological-based development of Domain Specific Languages (DSL), more precisely, of their underlying Grammar. After reviewing the basic concepts characterizing Ontologies and Domain-Specific Languages, we introduce a tool, Onto2Gra, that takes profit of the knowledge described by the ontology and automatically generates a grammar for a DSL that allows to discourse about the domain described by that ontology. This approach represents a rigorous method to create, in a secure and effective way, a grammar for a new specialized language restricted to a concrete domain. The usual process of creating a grammar from the scratch is, as every creative action, difficult, slow and error prone; so this proposal is, from a Grammar Engineering point of view, of uttermost importance. After the grammar generation phase, the Grammar Engineer can manipulate it to add syntactic sugar to improve the final language quality or even to add semantic actions. The Onto2Gra project is composed of three engines. The main one is OWL2DSL, the component that converts an OWL ontology into an attribute grammar. The two additional modules are Onto2OWL, converts ontologies written in OntoDL (a light-weight DSL to describe ontologies) into standard OWL, and DDesc2OWL, converts domain instances written in the DSL generated by OWL2DSL into the initial OWL ontology.

2014Conference object

Open access