A 5 star system!

My presentation on JFall 2009 went very well, there was a big audience (they barely fit into the room) and there was lot's of interaction going on during the talk. People where asking critical questions and provided good comments.

The topic seemed to make people pretty enthusiastic. Especially the examples of a really complex method, the biggest method and a method with a lot of parameters.

In the presentation I answered the following two questions: 1) what is a 5-star system, and 2) how can I get one? The answer to the first question is: "a system that receives the highest rating in the TUVit Trusted Product Maintainability Certification". I explained what this certificate entails and how the complete procedure works (something which is also summarized over here).

The second question is answered by the following mantra: "make sure that your code is small, simple and specific".

If you cannot make your code small, simple and specific, take a step back and look at the abstract picture (the overall design) of your project. Why does this design disallow you to make your code small, simple and specific?

Can you model stuff differently? Is there a way to abstract over details that clutter your code? How can this type of functionality be grouped in a better way? Try to determine why the design (or your framework) is restricting you and solve that problem. The result will be a more maintainable system.

Naturally, these answers are just the core of the talk, a more complete overview of the presentation is provided by the Atos Application and Development blog (Dutch). For those interested, the slides can be found here.

All and all a nice experience, on to JSpring 2010!?

A 5 star system?

This week I received notice that my proposal for a presentation at the J-Fall 2009 was accepted. So on the 11th of November I will be discussing what a 5-star system is and how to get it. For those of you who cannot wait to find out what it means to get stars for your system can take a quick look over here.

The full abstract of the presentation can be found here (in Dutch). If you want to attend you should register yourself over here.

Hope to see you in Bussum!

I present, you present ....

Last week I was in Canada for the ICSM 2009 (combined with a very relaxing vacation btw) where I got to present my first paper of my PhD. The room was a filled with about 50 attendees and, even though I was a bit nervous, the presentation went pretty well. There where some interesting questions and comments, and even a small discussion that had to be taken off-line (which is now again on-line).

During the rest of the ICSM I talked to various people about the presentation and the paper and it seems that the topic certainly appeals to several people. Which is good to know since I think I will be spending some more time in researching it.

For those of you that are interested in the slides, please take a look at the slides page of the ICSM, or just follow the direct link.

To be honest, these slides are not exactly the ones I used during the presentation. I cheated a little bit by splitting a slide 22 in two slides, just so that you can actual see the contents of a table. In the original version there was an animation that removes the numbers before showing the crosses, but this behavior is not transferred to the pdf-version of the slides. I can tell you from personal experience that it will increase your blood pressure if you notice this when you are giving your presentation.

Anyhow, at least I learned now to check the pdf-version of my slides before I give I a presentation, just in case the laptop on which I made the presentation does not play nicely with the available beamer :)

A first chapter

Yesterday morning at about 5.48 am I received an email with the following message:

We are pleased to inform you that your paper, entitled
    Criteria for the Evaluation of Implemented Architectures
has been accepted for publication as a FULL RESEARCH PAPER in the conference proceedings.

The e-mail was send by the ICSM 2009 Research Program Co-Chairs. It also explained that out of the 162 research papers submitted, 35 were accepted as full research papers (21.6% acceptance ratio). A nice beginning of my PhD thesis :)

Abstract:

Software architecture evaluation methods aim at identifying potential
maintainability problems for a given architecture. Several of these
methods exist, which typically prescribe the structure of the
evaluation process. Often left implicit, however, are the concrete
system attributes that need to be studied in order to assess the
maintainability of implemented architectures.

To determine this set of attributes, we have performed an empirical
study on over 40 commercial architectural evaluations conducted during
the past two years as part of a systematic ``Software Risk Assessment''.
We present this study and we explain how the identified attributes can be
projected on various architectural system properties, which provides an
overview of criteria for the evaluation of the maintainability of implemented software architectures.

Solving bad smells

Last week I took some time to checkout the JDeodorant Eclipse plugin. The plugin was introduced to me at CSMR 2009 by Nikolaos Tsantalis. The demo he gave me already showed some potential, and playing around with the plugin confirmed this first impression.

Installing the plugin was easy, I just followed the installation instructions on the website. At first I used the tool on one of our smaller projects to find refactorings for long methods. After some minutes the results showed a long list of refactor-candidates. Unfortunately, this lists also contained many propositions to move, for example, all statements of a method to a new method. Even though it is a theoretically correct proposition it does not really make sense in general.

Since I did not feel like analyzing the complete list I tried a different approach. I first used checkstyle to find potential candidate methods and let JDeodorant analyze these files one at a time. This does not only speed up the process of finding the candidates, it also provides a list that is way easier to handle. Using this approach I found some new ideas for a several smaller refactorings in just a few minutes.

In the end I think that, even though it still has some rough edges, this plugin can be very useful. Anyway, the plugin is definitely put onto my watch list.