Browsing by Author "Walker, Rob"

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    Branching and merging: an investigation into current version control practices
    (ACM, 2011) Phillips, Shaun; Sillito, Jonathan; Walker, Rob
    The use of version control has become ubiquitous in software development projects. Version control systems facilitate parallel development and maintenance through branching, the creation of isolated codelines. Merging is a consequence of branching and is the process of integrating codelines. However, there are unanswered questions about the use of version control to support parallel development; in particular, how are branching and merging used in practice? What defines a successful branching and merging strategy? As a first step towards answering these questions, we recruited a diverse sample of 140 version control users to participate in an online survey. In this paper, we present the survey results and 4 key observations about branching and merging practices in software development projects.
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    Case Study in Simulated Concurrent Development and Evolution: Investigating the Theme Approach
    (2004-12-20) Mahmud, Shafquat; Walker, Rob
    AOSD aims at improving key software engineering properties (such as traceability, comprehensibility, and evolvability) through the separation and modularization of crosscutting concerns. The majority of AOSD research focuses on individual software engineering activities (such as implementation or requirements) in isolation. One exception to this trend is the Theme approach of Clarke and colleagues, which considers the derivation of implementations from requirements through design. Evidence is currently meager for or against the claims to this approach. This paper describes a case study involving the development and evolution of a benchmark system to evaluate these claims. Alternative decision are examined to consider whether one or more feasible development processes exist in applying Theme. Lessons learned from the study are discussed for their generalizability to other scenarios.
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    An Implementation of Declarative Event Patterns
    (2004-12-20) Viggers, Kevin; Walker, Rob
    ion to be expressed as context-free patterns of events, and for the occurrences of these patterns to alter the course of the program s execution. As a companion to a conference paper introducing DEPs, this technical report covers an initial realization of our declarative event pattern language that leverages the power and applicability of aspect-oriented programming (AOP). We have added to AspectJ (a popular Java implementation of AOP) two straight forward language constructs to support the recognition of patterns of events. Our proof-of-concept implementation takes programs implemented in AspectJ augmented with our DEP constructs and translates them into programs implemented in standard AspectJ, equipped to recognize and respond to patterns of events as they occur in the execution of the system.