M.S. Thesis Defense - Dmitry Kirilov

Date: 15 Apr, 2008
Time: 2:00 PM
Location: 105 Atanasoff Hall
Topic: PANORAMA - a tool to deal with multiple decompositions of a software system
Major Professor(s): Carl K. Chang and Simanta Mitra


Abstract:

Design and development of any large/complex system consists of hierarchical decomposition of the system into modules. This is necessary for two critical reasons: a) to allow distribution of design and development work and b) to manage complexity of design. For example, a web based software may be decomposed into client, server, and database. However, there are many alternative ways to decompose a system. For example, we may be interested in putting into a module everything related to logging or everything related to security. Once we decide on a particular way to decompose the system - and partition the code in that way, the alternative ways of looking at the system become inaccessible to us. The code for those alternative decompositions typically cut across the modules of the chosen decomposition.

Aspect oriented Programming is one approach to dealing with this problem. However, researchers have pointed out several problems with the AOP approach. We propose a different approach to dealing with this problem and have developed a prototype tool (PANORAMA) for demonstration purposes. The basic idea is that users can specify information about alternate decompositions of a system and can see views (whenever needed) of these alternate decompositions and how they crosscut. A case study is presented to evaluate the prototype.