Software Environment Architecture and Analysis Tools

该合同为阿卡迪亚项目的部分工作提供支持。Arcadia是一个主要的联合研究项目，其目标是获得关于将软件工具集成到环境中的理想架构的基本理解，特别是在支持软件测试、分析和评估方面。Arcadia是一个实验研究项目，旨在通过创建和实验评估一个实际的环境原型-Arcadia-1来获得这些理解。Arcadia采用的方法的一个关键创新特征是将软件过程视为软件本身的项目，并将环境视为指定、编译和解释这些过程的机制。使用软件工具和软件工作者作为解释原语。马萨诸塞大学在Arcadia项目上的工作将集中在软件开发环境的两个重要方面，即对象管理和分析工具。对象管理机制将是Arcadia环境体系结构的核心特征。一方面，它将用于组织和编排由环境的用户创建和维护的软件项目的无数部分。此外，它将构成环境本身的主要结构和集成机制，因为由环境组成的所有工具和信息结构都可以而且应该被视为受管理的对象。分析工具及其集成是Arcadia的一个重要关注点，既是环境体系结构的可扩展性和集成能力的测试用例，也是扩展环境为用户提供的功能和有用性的一个贡献。这个项目将集中于两类分析工具：软件测试工具和用于分析并发和分布式系统的工具。主要的实验研究工作需要提供对整个软件开发环境的基本理解。阿卡迪亚项目是实现这些理解的重要努力。

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.