Software Environment Architecture and Analysis Tools

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This award provides support for a portion of the work of the Arcadia project. Arcadia is a major, joint research effort the aim of which is to gain fundamental understandings about desirable architectures for the integration of software tools into environments and particularly in support of software testing, analysis and evaluation. Arcadia is an experimental research project which aims to gain these understandings through the creation and experimental evaluation of an actual environment prototype--Arcadia-1. A key innovative feature of the approach being taken by Arcadia is to consider software processes to be items of software themselves and to view an environment as a mechanism for specifying, compiling and interpreting these processes, using software tools and software workers as interpretation primitives. Work at the University of Massachusetts on the Arcadia project will focus on two important aspects of software development environments, namely object management and analysis tools. The object management mechanisms will be a central feature of the Arcadia environment architecture. On the one hand, it will serve to organize and orchestrate the myriad pieces of a software project being created and maintained by users of an environment. In addition, it will constitute the primary structuring and integration mechanism for the environment itself, since all the tools and information structures comprised by an environment can and should be viewed as objects subject to management. Analysis tools and their integration are an important focus of Arcadia, both as a test case for the environment architecture's extensibility and integration capabilities and as a contribution to expanding the power and usefulness that environments offer to their users. This project will focus on two classes of analysis tools: software testing tools and tools for analyzing concurrent and distributed systems. Major experimental research efforts are needed to provide basic understandings of overall software development environments. The Arcadia project is a significant effort toward achieving those understandings.