Mittwoch, 19.1., 14 Uhr s.t., MZH 1400, im Rahmen der
Vorlesung Softwaretechnik

DMS: Software Tool Infrastructure

ABSTRACT

Presented by Ira D. Baxter.

Software systems continue to grow in size, complexity, and heterogeneity
of structure. Manual methods for designing, implementing, and modifying
software systems are becoming less effective. Tools to analyze
application code to extract low level details ("static analysis") or
architecture are becoming increasingly necessary. But the purpose of
analysis is to support *change*. This talk will describe the DMS
Software Reengineering Toolkit, a general purpose source code analysis
and transformation system.

DMS is a kind of generalized compiler, parameterized by language
descriptions, analysis tasks and modification tasks, with mature
language front ends for C, C++, C#, Java, Python, COBOL and a number of
other languages, allows DMS to be applied to a wide variety of analysis
and transformation tasks. DMS provides a kind of amortized
infrastructure for tools in the same way that an OS provides amortized
infrastructure for conventional application software; without the
infrastructure, the cost of tools is much higher and delivery times are
much longer. Its generalization allows also DMS to be used for an
amazing variety of software engineering tasks.

This talk will cover briefly the inspiration behind DMS:  capturing and
reusing *design* information, to provide an incremental model of
software construction and maintenance.

The talk will provide some description of the DMS infrastructure,
including a program transformation system, a flow analysis engine, and
parallel execution foundations.  We will discuss a number of
applications, including fully automated conversion of the mission
software of an aircraft, large-scale architecture restructing of a C++
application system, architecture extraction for mainframe software,
test coverage, as well as duplicate code detection.

We will end with some discussion about what is difficult to do with
tools like DMS: first-principals specifications, reasoning about
software configurations, deep inference, acquisition of sufficient
knowledge to enable broad use, and learning curve skills.

Bio:

Dr. Baxter is CEO and CTO of Semantic Designs, Inc., the company behind
the DMS toolkit. He has been involved with computing since 1966, working
with digit circuits. He discovered software in 1967 and learned to
program on IBM 1401 and 1620s. He implemented one of the first
commercial minicomputer timesharing systems on a Data General Nova in
1970, before receiving his B.S. in Computer Science (1973). In 1976, he
started Software Dynamics, a systems software house, where he designed
compilers, time-sharing and distributed network operating systems. The
similarity in concepts and dissimilarity in implementation of the
various OSes suggested that managing designs was key to managing
long-lived software systems, and turned Ira's interests towards deeper
software engineering research. In 1990, he received a Ph.D. in Computer
Science from the University of California at Irvine, where he studied
Software Engineering, focusing on design reuse using transformational
methods. Dr. Baxter spent several years with Schlumberger, working on a
PDE-solver generator for CM-5 supercomputers (Sinapse). He was
consulting Research Scientist for Rockwell International, focusing on
industrial control automation software engineering tools for several
years.

In 1995, he founded Semantic Designs, to build commercial tools that
will radically improve the methods and economics of software enhancement
and maintenance. Dr. Baxter is the architect and one of the main
implementers of DMS, and the architect and implementer of the PARLANSE
parallel programming language. At Semantic Designs, he provides
consulting to Fortune 100 companies on automated software analysis,
transformation and domain-specific synthesis methods. For the last
decade, he has been SD's principal management, supporting marketing and
sales, and provides project vision, management and technical
architecture to SD's large custom-software customers.

His shoe size is 11 1/2.