Abstract

Intensional views and relations have been proposed as a way of actively documenting high-level structural regularities in the source code of a software system. By checking conformance of these intensional views and relations against the source code, they supposedly facilitate a variety of software maintenance and evolution tasks. In this paper, by performing a case study on three different versions of the SmallWiki application, we critically analyze in how far the model of intensional views and its current generation of tools provide support for co-evolving high-level design and source code of a software system.

Keywords: Case study; Co-evolution; Intensional views and relations; SmallWiki

Article Outline

1. Introduction

2. Experimental setup: SmallWiki

3. IntensiVE

3.1. The intensional view editor

3.2. The view consistency checker

3.3. The relation editor

3.4. The relation checker

3.5. The intensional view displayer

4. Experiment 1 (documenting the structure of SmallWiki 1.54)

4.1. Views

4.2. Relations between intensional views

5. Experiment 2 (Comparing the documentation with SmallWiki 1.90)

5.1. Inconsistent views

5.2. Invalid relations

5.3. Comparing view sizes

5.4. Newly introduced views and relations

6. Experiment 3 (Verifying the design structure of SmallWiki 1.304)

6.1. Inconsistent views

6.2. Invalid relations

6.3. Comparing view sizes

7. Critical analysis and lessons learned

8. Conclusion

References