Studying Design Intent for Software Evolution and Maintenance

提案编号：0820251标题：研究软件演化和维护的设计意图PI：Dewayne PerryCo-PI：Randolph Bias本研究项目的目标是了解维护设计人员对软件系统的文档需求，并建立这些维护设计人员如何与遗留设计知识交互的模型。管理演化是软件工程的基本挑战之一。在设计过程中，必须考虑与功能需求和非功能需求有关的许多设计决策和权衡。将需求抽象为模型并将这些模型转换为代码的过程产生了设计构件，其中决策被非正式地记录下来？如果有的话。为了通过维护来保存设计决策，当前的研究方法是用设计决策的显式表示作为第一类实体来注释体系结构模型。不幸的是，很明显，我们缺乏工具来评估设计决策建模系统的有效性，将这些系统相互比较，并使用这些分析来推动未来的研究。为了实现我们的研究目标，我们提出了一个实证研究课程，该课程使用调查、专家访谈和直通协议分析作为形成维护设计理论的基础。这一理论将通过实验、协议分析进行验证，并在现实世界的工业环境中通过人种学进行验证。

Proposal Number: 0820251Title: Studying Design Intent for Software Evolution and MaintenancePI: Dewayne PerryCo-PIs: Randolph BiasThe goal of this research project is to develop an understanding of the documentation needs of maintenance designers for software systems and to build a model of how these maintenance designers interact with knowledge about legacy designs. Managing evolution is one of the fundamental challenges of software engineering. During the design process many design decisions and trade-offs concerning functional and non-functional requirements must be considered. The process of abstracting requirements into models and converting those models into code yields design artifacts where decisions are documented?if at all?informally. To preserve design decisions through maintenance, the current research approach is to annotate architecture models with explicit representations of design decisions as first-class entities. Unfortunately, it is clear that we lack the instruments for evaluating the effectiveness of design decision modeling systems, for comparing these systems to each other, and for using these analyses to drive future research. To accomplish our research goals, we propose a course of empirical study that uses surveys, expert interviews, and talk-through protocol analysis as the basis for formulating a theory of maintenance design. The theory will be tested using experimentation by protocol analysis and validated through ethnography in real-world industrial contexts.