From: CRDGW2::CRDGW2::MRGATE::"SMTP::MWSUN.MITRE.ORG::NIGAM" Date: 3-AUG-1989 18:24:53 Description: Software Engineering Digest v6n38 Return-Path: Received: by mwsun.mitre.org (5.54/SMI-2.2) id AA13986; Thu, 3 Aug 89 17:05:46 EDT Date: Thu, 3 Aug 89 17:05:46 EDT From: nigam@mwsun.mitre.org (Alok Nigam) Message-Id: <8908032105.AA13986@mwsun.mitre.org> Organization: The MITRE Corp., Washington, D.C. To: soft-eng-dist@mwunix.mitre.org Subject: Software Engineering Digest v6n38 Software Engineering Digest Thursday, 3 August 1989 Volume 6 : Issue 38 Today's Topics: Object-Oriented Reading List Addendum to Object-Oriented Reading List Re: maintenance strategies/tools ------------------------------------------------------------ Date: 1 Aug 89 21:15:16 GMT From: Edward Berard Subject: Object-Oriented Reading List Some people have asked me for a reading list on object-oriented technology. What follows is a partial reading list. [My own current list contains about 300 entries, and is by no means comprehensive.] I hope you will find this list of use. -- Ed Berard (301) 353-9652 -------------------------- Readings In Object-Oriented Technology by Edward V. Berard Berard Software Engineering, Inc. If you are interested in reading about any rapidly evolving technology, it is best to keep the following in mind: % Read more than one source. Look for sources which have different, and possibly conflicting, views of the material. It is often difficult to determine fundamental facts when only one viewpoint is present. % Very often, authors confuse concepts with implementations. Ask yourself if the author is discussing a concept, or a particular implementation of the concept. % Always be on the lookout for new sources. In the software technology arena in particular, significant changes can take place in less than a month. % Take care to distinguish between differing viewpoints and conflicting viewpoints. There are many topic areas in object-oriented software technology, and literally thousands of books, articles, tutorials, and proceedings devoted, in whole, or in part, to object-oriented software concepts. What we will present here is some of the representative reading material. Just because an item is included in this reading list does not mean that it is recommended without qualifications, nor does it mean that it is an authoritative source on a topic. However, the material listed here is intended to help you understand more about the technology. Object-Oriented Programming Object-oriented programming books most often tend to focus on programming language aspects of object-oriented technology. However, many fundamental concepts can be found in the books mentioned below: [Cox, 1986]. B.J. Cox, Object Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1986. [Goldberg and Robson, 1983]. A. Goldberg and D. Robson, Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1983. [Meyer, 1988]. B. Meyer, Object-Oriented Software Construction, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1988. [Keene, 1989]. S.E.Keene, Object-Oriented Programming in Common Lisp, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1989. [Stroustrup, 1986a]. B. Stroustrup, The C++ Programming Language, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1986. Object-Oriented Requirements Analysis There are a number of publicly available courses on object-oriented requirements analysis. Since the technology is still new, these courses present many differing viewpoints and approaches. There is, however, one book on the topic: [Shlaer and Mellor, 1988]. S. Shlaer and S.J. Mellor, Object-Oriented Systems Analysis: Modeling the World In Data, Yourdon Press: Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1988. Object-Oriented Design/Development Most of the work which has been done in the area of object-oriented life-cycle issues, outside of object-oriented programming, has been accomplished within the Ada community. Some representative sources on OOD are: [Abbott, 1983]. R.J. Abbott, "Program Design by Informal English Descriptions," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 26, No. 11, November 1983, pp. 882 - 894. [Booch, 1982a]. G. Booch, "Object Oriented Design," Ada Letters, Vol. I, No. 3, March- April 1982, pp. 64 - 76. [Booch, 1986a]. G. Booch, "Object Oriented Development," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. SE-12, No. 2, February 1986, pp. 211 - 221. [Goldsack, 1985]. S.J. Goldsack, Ada for Specification : Possibilities and Limitations, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1985. [Heitz, 1988]. M. Heitz, "HOOD: A Hierarchical Object-Oriented Design Method," Proceedings of the Third German Ada Users Congress, January 1988, Gesellschaft fur Software Engineering, Munich, West Germany, pp. 12-1 - 12-9. [Masiero and Germano, 1988]. P. Masiero and F.S.R. Germano, "JSD As An Object-Oriented Design Method," Software Engineering Notes, Vol. 13, No. 3, July 1988, pp. 22 - 23. [Seidewitz and Stark, 1986b]. E. Seidewitz and M. Stark, General Object-Oriented Software Development, Document No. SEL-86-002, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, 1986. [Stark and Seidewitz, 1987]. M. Stark and E.V. Seidewitz, "Towards a General Object-Oriented Ada Life-Cycle," Proceedings of the Joint Ada Conference, Fifth National Conference on Ada Technology and Washington Ada Symposium, U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, pp. 213 - 222. Object-Oriented Databases Object-oriented databases are not the same thing as relational databases. In effect, object-oriented database technology today is at the same point relational database technology was in the late 1970s. (I know more than a few vendors who would disagree with this point.) Some representative information on the subject can be found in: [Babcock, 1987]. C. Babcock, "Object is DBMS Focus," ComputerWorld, Vol. XXI, No. 40, October 5, 1987, page 25. [Blaha et al, 1988]. M.R. Blaha, W.J. Premerlani, and J.E. Rumbaugh, "Relational Database Design Using an Object-Oriented Approach," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 31, No. 4, April 1988, pp. 414 - 427. [Bochenski, 1988]. B.A. Bochenski, "On Object-Oriented Programming, Databases," Software, Vol. 8, No. 11, September 1988, page 42. [Dittrich and Dayal, 1986]. K. Dittrich and U. Dayal, Editors, Proceedings of the 1986 International Workshop on Object-Oriented Database Systems, IEEE Catalog Number 86TH0161-0, IEEE Computer Society Press, Washington, D.C., 1986. [Scannell, 1988]. T. Scannell, "Freeform DBMS the 'Object' of Startup Company's Affection," Mini-Micro Systems, Vol. XXI, No. 2, February 1988, pp. 16 - 22. [Shriver and Wegner, 1987]. B. Shriver and P. Wegner, Editors, Research Directions in Object-Oriented Programming, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987. [Weiss, 1987]. R. Weiss, "Why Object-Oriented Databases?," Electronic Engineering Times, No. 465, December 21, 1987, page 23. [Wile and Allard, 1987]. D.S. Wile and D.G. Allard, "Worlds: an Organizing Structure for Object-Bases," SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 22, No. 1, January 1987, pp. 16 - 26. Object-Oriented Computer Hardware Even computer hardware can be constructed in an object-oriented manner. Here are two references: [Myers, 1982]. G.J. Myers, Advances in Computer Architecture, Second Edition, John Wiley & Sons, New York, New York, 1982. [Organick, 1983]. E. Organick, A Programmer's View of the Intel 432 System, McGraw-Hill, New York, New York,1983. General Object-Oriented Technology References There are a number of general references on object-oriented technology, including: [ACM, 1986a]. Association for Computing Machinery, Special Issue of SIGPLAN Notices on th Object-Oriented Programming Workshop, Vol. 21, No. 10, October 1986. [ACM, 1986b]. Association for Computing Machinery, OOPSLA '86 Conference Proceedings, Special Issue of SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 21, No. 11, November 1986. [ACM, 1988a]. Association for Computing Machinery, OOPSLA '87 Addendum to the Proceedings, Special Issue of SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 23, No. 5, May 1988. [ACM, 1988b]. Association for Computing Machinery, OOPSLA '88 Conference Proceedings, Special Issue of SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 23, No. 11, November 1988. [Gill, 1988]. P. Gill, "MIS Slowly Warms Up to Object-Oriented Programming," ComputerWorld, Vol. XXII, No. 8, February 22, 1988, pp 71 - 76. [Millikin, 1989]. M.D. Millikin, "Object Orientation: What It Can Do For You," ComputerWorld, Vol. 23, No. 11. March 13, 1989, pp. 103 - 113. [Peterson, 1987a]. G.E. Peterson, Tutorial: Object-Oriented Computing, Volume 1: Concepts, IEEE Catalog Number EH0257-6, IEEE Computer Society Press, Washington, D.C., 1987. [Peterson, 1987b]. G.E. Peterson, Tutorial: Object-Oriented Computing, Volume 2: Implementations, IEEE Catalog Number EH0257-6, IEEE Computer Society Press, Washington, D.C., 1987. [Shriver and Wegner, 1987]. B. Shriver and P. Wegner, Editors, Research Directions in Object-Oriented Programming, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987. ------------------------------ Date: 2 Aug 89 01:03:13 GMT From: Edward Berard Subject: Addendum to Object-Oriented Reading List It seems that my earlier posting left out the wonderful work being done in Europe, i.e., the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP). In addition, I included the addendum to the conference proceedings for OOPSLA '87, but failed to include the original proceedings. This posting should fix that. Please remember that there are literally thousands of sources (books, articles, and proceedings) which discuss object-oriented concepts. -- Ed Berard (301) 353-9652 ---------------------------------------------- [ACM, 1987]. Association for Computing Machinery, OOPSLA U87 Conference Proceedings, Special Issue of SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 22, No. 12, December 1987. [Bezivin et al, 1987]. J. Bezivin, J.-M. Hullot, P. Cointe, and H. Lieberman, ECOOP U87: Proceedings of the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Lecture Notes on Computer Science, Volume 276, Springer Verlag, New York, New York, 1987. [Cook, 1989]. S. Cook, ECOOP U89: Proceedings of the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, British Computer Society Workshop Series, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1989. [Gjessing and Nygaard, 1988]. S. Gjessing and K. Nygaard, ECOOP U88: Proceedings of the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Lecture Note on Computer Science, Volume 322, Springer Verlag, New York, New York, 1988. ------------------------------ Date: 2 Aug 89 17:15:57 GMT From: john foster Subject: Re: maintenance strategies/tools > Does anyone have any experience with trying to "reverse engineer" to > a proper maintenance environment? (or know anybody who does?) My group here at British Telecom Research Labs has a strong interest in reverse engineering (as part of more general research into software maintenance). We also have past experience of using reverse engineering in the maintenance of switching system software. I hope the following, fairly general, comments might be of some use. > What methods/strategies were employed? There are (at least) three broad strategies to consider: 1. Reverse documentation, involving the use of static analysis etc to create information to help the maintainers 2. Reverse engineering, where you start with the code and attempt to recreate the design/spec information 3. Re-engineering, where you perform step (2) and then recreate the system from the new spec. (BTW, I don't claim that my use of these terms is definitive). Identifier cross-referencing is the lowest level of our reverse documentation work, and we then build on that to gain higher levels of documentation. Parts of that work are described in: Foster, J. R. and Munro, M. "A Documentation Method Based on Cross-Referencing" Proc Conf Software Maintenance 1987, Austin, Texas Fletton, N. T. and Munro, M. "Redocumenting Software Systems Using Hypertext Technology" Proc Conf Software Maintenance 1988, Phoenix, Arizona (John Foster is me; Nigel Fletton is another member of the group here; Malcolm Munro is at the University of Durham (UK) and runs the Centre for Software Maintenance there). We have found reverse documentation extremely useful, even though it can't tell you _all_ the things you want to know (like the reasons behind design decisions). This isn't a commercial plug, incidentally, because we are not in the market as tool suppliers in this area. Reverse engineering (as I define it here) is a more difficult task, but there's a lot of interest and activity. A good example paper is: Sneed, H. M. and Jandrasics, G. "Inverse Transformation of Software from Code to Specification" Proc Conf Software Maintenance 1988 The paper describes a system for reverse engineering from COBOL. Re-engineering is the most expensive of the lot, but of course it also offers the greatest potential gain. IBM have an interesting project involving re-engineering via formal methods: see eg Nix, C. J. and Collins, B. P. "The Use of Software Engineering, including the Z Notation, in the Development of CICS" Quality Assurance, vol 14 no 3, September 1988 > What other tools did you use/can you get on the market for this sort > of work? There's a regularly updated survey on software maintenance tools, published by Software Maintenance News, Staten Island, New York. Sorry I can't quote the full reference right now, but their phone number is (USA) 718-816-5522. > I believe the current idea is to come up with some sort of "expert system" > to handle (some of) the maintenance problems. I personally have my doubts > about such an approach and would be glad to hear any positive or negative > experiences/opinions in this (or related) areas. I'm convinced that expert systems have a lot to offer, although these are early days yet. But people are certainly talking about, and/or experimenting with: - systems to help users register their change requests (with some problem analysis capability) - systems to aid code analysis - systems to aid people writing documentation There are some papers in the proceedings of the software maintenance conferences mentioned above, that give an idea of what's going on. ------------------------------ End of Software Engineering Digest **********************************