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.

SQM and CSMR 2009

Last week, I was in Kaiserslautern to attend the 2009 version of SQM and CSMR. Both the workshop and the main conference were hosted at Fraunhofer IESE, which turned out to be an excellent host.

All of the conferences I have attended up until now lasted only for a day, so I did not really know what to expect of four days of presentations. I was a little bit afraid that I would not be able to pick up any new information on the last day, but everything turned out to be fine. Every day brought at least two interesting presentations, and definitely one interesting conversation about the current research somebody is doing. I have met several interesting people (who might be interested in doing some research together), and picked up quite a few new ideas. Unfortunately, it is too much to write down all at once, but I will try to post updates on this on a more regular basis.

What I found particularly interesting was the fact that several people mentioned the same two things on various occasions. The first one is that PhD students should not start from scratch when they are implementing their ideas. Although some students are using more generic development frameworks (like for example Eclipse), there are still people out there that start everything from scratch. This does tend to take up a lot of time and usually results in tools that "should be publicly available before I finished my thesis, I just want to clean it up a bit first". I am not really sure how this problem can be solved (and neither did the people at the Industry Panel Discussion), but I do hope that my future tools will not suffer the same fate.

The second thing that was repeated a few times is the call for more empirical evidence for the usefulness of ideas and tools. However, the lack of publicly available industrial systems and cost-data makes it hard for the average researcher to provide this evidence. Fortunately, there are ways to overcome this issue. One could, for example, work together with companies that have access to this type of data. Just a matter of sending and e-mail and explain your ideas and needs to the right person I guess... ;)

Migration to the nine-headed monster

After some recent activity on the psat-dev mailinglist I became aware of the (lack of) available builds for php-sat. Even though the development speed is not what I would want it to be (so much fun things to do, so little hours in a day!) I still believe it is important to release early and often.

Fortunately, Eelco Dolstra had some time to migrate php-front, php-sat and php-tools to Hydra, the new Nix-based continuous build system. After some tweaking we now again have access to unstable build for all PSAT-projects. Go Hydra!

[Trivia] generating eclipse project dependencies with maven2

When we migrated to maven2 a few months back we had little problems, accept that we could not figure out how to automatically generate project dependencies for eclipse. Apparently, maven1 has a special tag for this, but this did not make it into maven2.

Recently, (and by that I mean a few weeks back, just didn't bother to post this yet) one of my co-workers found out that you can simple pass the location to your eclipse-workspace to the eclipse:eclipse tag:

mvn eclipse:eclipse -Declipse.workspace=/path/to/your/workspace

and we all lived happily ever after ...