Developer refinement of runtime architectural structure

Abstract

Runtime architecture is important because it helps reason about quality attributes such as performance and security. We conducted an on-site field study to help us understand how developers understand object relationships, and what tool features a developer might need to convey their mental model of object relationships.The subject of our study was an experienced, professional programmer. We asked the developer questions to check if he understood which tiers objects belonged to, and whether certain objects were conceptually part of other objects. We also took an initial runtime architecture and refined it to convey his intent. The developer's mental model seemed to agree with the one supported by the current, batch-oriented approach for extracting architectures.This indicates that an interactive tool that allows making an object conceptually part of another, and abstracting away a low-level object would be useful to iteratively refine an initial object model.

Extraction of ownership object graphs from object-oriented code

“…In a previous case study [5], we had developed a classification of the possible refinements that can be performed on an extracted OOG (Table 2). In this study, we used qualitative protocol analysis, and coded the refinements that the maintainer requested using the same classification model.…”

“…In our experience, getting access to professional programmers in commercial organizations or in open-source projects to evaluate research technologies, especially ones such as ours that are labor intensive, can be a challenge. One of our previous evaluations, a field study [2], required spending a full week on-site then following up to refine the OOG [5]. Third, the system already has some documentation: a few entity-relationship diagrams that explained the database schema and a high-level diagram [7, Figure 5.2] that shows that the system follows the client-server architectural style.…”

“…To avoid breaking the code in some cases, the extractor made a generic container take an imprecise type argument such as Object, Serializable or Cloneable. These imprecise declared types in the code can also lead to imprecise edges in 1 @Domains({ "owned" }) 2 @DomainParams({ "U", "L", "D" }) 3 abstract class AbstractStandaloneInput ... { 4 protected @Domain("owned<D>") 5 List<Serializable> references; 6 ... the OOG, i.e., more edges than soundness requires. The annotations revealed many instances of representation exposure, which gives external code access to the private state of an object and breaks encapsulation.…”

A case study in evaluating the usefulness of the run-time structure during coding tasks

“…We previously conducted a field study to help us understand how developers understand object relations, and what tool features they need to convey their mental model of the system [6]. In that study we provided a professional developer with an initial run-time architecture and refined it to convey his intent, but we did not use the refined diagram to do a code modification task.…”

Oogie

“…One type of software architecture view, or way of seeing the code, is the runtime view, which abstracts sets of objects into components and data structures. This is useful for tasks related to performance, reliability and security [1].…”