From examples to knowledge to software engineering support and automation

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

During the last two decades, much effort has been made to produce environments and tools to support software development and maintenance, e.g., modeling languages, libraries, etc. However, using these environments and tools is not easy, and only some experts have the necessary expertise and knowledge to use them correctly and efficiently. The goal of our research program is to leverage the knowledge and expertise of this limited number of experts in a way that can benefit to a larger number of developers. To this end, we propose to use examples of usages performed by these experts to learn the necessary knowledge that is operationalized to automate, or to support developers in, the use of these environments and tools. Deriving such examples can take different forms. For instance, when an expert develops a program that correctly uses a library, one can collect execution examples and learn from thempatterns on how to correctly use the library. Such patterns are then, transformed into recommending systems to guide new developers in using such a library. Another illustrative situation is one of manipulating models written according to a domain-specific language. Examples can be derived by observing an expert that manipulates these models, i.e., models before and after a manipulation task. Then, the manipulation tasks can be learned from these examples.