Welcome to:

Course CS6201: Software Reuse (2010)

Last changed: Tuesday, April 13, 2010

This page contains the following course information:

Course instructors Important dates Latest News Course objective Prerequisites

Presentations Project

Grading policy Lecture outline

Tools for the Project FAQ

Readings for the course (download sources via links, start reading immediately and continue during the course)

To download lecture notes: Lecture Notes

Course Instructor

JARZABEK, Stanislaw, S15-06/08, ext. 2863, 96255863, e-mail:

Course info

Lectures: Wed 18:30-20:30 SR5 (COM1/201), first lecture: January 13, 2010

Consultation Hours: Wed 16:00 - 18:00, in my office, S15-06/08

Exam: 27 APR 2010 Morning

Presentation schedule (updated March 22, 2010)

Please refer to topics for presentations for readings related to presentations.

At least one week before the presentation, please let me know pointers to papers that you use for presentation, and I will circulate it to all the students.

Date	Students	Topic	Lectures
24 Feb	Li Lirong	Topic A: Programming language features for generic design and reuse (programming language D 2.0 and others)	XVCL briefing, set #2
3 March	Venkat Ramanan	Topic 1: Aspect-Oriented Programming	Software clones and Buffer library study, set #3
10 March	Marcel Boehme	Topic B: Reuseware: Invasive Software Composition	Software clones and Buffer library study, set #3
17 March			Guest lecture by Ulf Pettersson, ST Electronics (Info-Software Systems) Pte Ltd
24 March	Ye Hai Feng and Sai Nay Lynn	Topic 7: Web technologies	Software clones and Buffer library study, set #3
7 April	Bui Trong Anh and Vu Tinh Ky	Topic 8: Model-Driven Development (MDD)
14 April	Petrus Cornelis Johannes Bruin	Topic 11: SCM support for reuse and product lines

Important dates (updated Monday, December 07, 2009)

Dates

Presentations

Project

First four weeks: Jan 13 – Feb 3, lectures only

by Jan 21

Form presentation teams and select presentation topic from

topics for presentations.

e-mail to me:

Team name

Topic selected for presentation (topic number and title)

Team members

student matric number	student name	e-mail
etc.

by Feb 11

Form project teams (if different from presentation team)

e-mail to me:

Team name

Team members

student matric number	student name	e-mail
etc.

Include one-page project description.

Feb 10

from this week, each session will consist of 1 h. lecture and 1 h. presentation

presentations start

Feb 13 – 21

Recess week

March 5

project draft due

Sunday April 25 midnight

final project report due

Please submit softcopy of your report and code in zipped file.

Latest News:

Posted April 10, 2010

Project report deadline: All the CA work in courses must be completed before exams start; the deadline for project report is Sunday April 25 midnight

Please submit softcopy of your report and code in zipped file.

Posted April 10, 2010

Readings for the exam

Posted March 3, 2010

You can download lecture notes Berkeley DB case study.pdf, CS6201-4-more on PL.pdf, and CS6201-5-DA.pdf

Posted March 1, 2010

Presentations are graded by both students and instructor.

Please grade and comment on student presentations and enter into this form Student presentation grades and comments.xlsx

Return the form to me after last presentation, latest by 17 April. Thank you.

Posted February 12, 2010

You can download lecture notes set #3 Lecture Notes

Updated slides set #1: LN\CS6201-1-intro updated 12Feb2010.pdf

Added pointers to clone detectors in Tools section

Updates in section Readings for the course

I reorganized papers and annotated them with additional information. I added papers describing difficulties in achieving generic solutions (avoiding duplication) for reuse with PHP:

Rajapakse, D.C. and Jarzabek, S. “Practical Limits of Applying Dynamic Page Generation Techniques in Web Application Design: a Trade-off Analysis,” ICSE 2007; – shows how PHP falls short of addressing systematic reuse

Rajapakse, D. and Jarzabek, S. “Towards generic representation of web applications: solutions and trade-offs,” Software, Practice & Experience, Volume 39 Issue 5, April 2009, pp. 501 – 530, Published Online: 27 Nov 2008 – extends ICSE’07 paper with explanation how XVCL can be applied on top of PHP for better reuse

Reading plan for coming weeks

For lectures Feb 17 and 24: Please check papers in Section Readings for Lecture Notes sets #1 and #2 – introduction to SPL and XVCL: [1]-[5] [7][9]

For lectures March 3 and 10: papers in Section Readings for Lecture Notes set #3 - Problem of similarity patterns, software clones and generic design

Posted January 26, 2010

Readings:

Please continue reading throughout the course based on Readings for the course

Posted December 6, 2009

If you plan to take the course, it is advisable that you start reading Readings for the course as early as you can.

You can download lecture notes set #1 and #2 from Lecture Notes

Let me know if you find any broken links, especially in Readings for the course

----- End of Latest News ----

Course objective

The objective of the course is to familiarize students with principles, practicalities and key research issues in software reuse and, in particular, a Product Line approach to reuse. This course is based on lecture notes and reading of selected chapters from books and papers. Topics include principles of software design, design for reuse, software Product Lines, domain engineering, component-based software engineering, generative techniques and industrial case studies. In recent decades, we have observed proliferation of many trends in software technology, making promises that have remained mostly unfulfilled. The course will emphasize the interplay between some of those trends and the way they contribute to the overall goal of improving software quality and productivity. Active participation of students in project, discussions and research topic presentations is expected. Students are exposed to mixed-strategy reuse approach, in which conventional OO and component-based techniques are complemented with meta-programming technique of XVCL (xvcl.comp.nus.edu.sg). Mixed-strategy achieves considerably higher rates of reuse than conventional methods alone.

Prerequisites

Students attending the course should:

have interest in software engineering and software development methods,
be familiar with software engineering principles (such as modularization, information hiding, etc.) and
have some programming experience and understanding of software design problems.

Conduct of the course

During first four weeks of the term, the instructor will provide motivation and background for studying reuse.

In the remaining weeks, there will be a lecture followed by student presentations and discussion. Finally, you will do a project.

Students should read sources provided at: Readings for the course

Presentations in the class

Presentations are graded by both students and instructor.

Please grade and comment on student presentations and enter into this form Student presentation grades and comments.xlsx

Return the form to me after last presentation, latest by 17 April. Thank you.

During presentations, we shall study topics in software reuse based on topics for presentations. You can also propose your own topic for presentation provided it is related to the theme of the course, requires approval of course instructor.

Depending on the number of students, presentations will be done either individually or in teams. There should be maximum 9 teams, giving one-hour presentations. You will choose your topic for the presentation in the second week of the course, once we know the exact number of students registered in the course.

By January 21: Form presentation teams and let me know your selected topic for presentation (based on topics for presentations) by sending e-mail as follows:

Topic number and title

Team name

student matric number	student name	e-mail
etc.

The first presentation will be on the 5th week of the course.

Important: before presentation:

Read guidelines in: Conduct of the Presentations

Send presentation slides (PDF) to the instructor or to all course participants one day before your presentation.

Position papers

I strongly recommend that after each class your write a brief position paper (1/2-1 page) for each topic discussed during lectures and student presentations. In a position paper, summarize what you have learnt, provide your own comments, point out controversial issues, indicate open problems, etc. You will find position papers very useful at the end of the course and during exam preparation. You do not submit positions to the instructor.

Project See Project Details

Project is to give students hands on experience in implementing reusable software. You will use a generative technique of XVCL developed in our lab, along with conventional reuse mechanisms of OO and component-based techniques.

You will do projects in teams (preferably the same as presentation teams), or you may choose to do a project individually, up to you.

Project schedule, milestones and deliverables

Due date

Deliverable

February 4

Send by e-mail :

Project teams (if different from presentation team)

e-mail to me:

Team name

Team members

student matric number	student name	e-mail
etc.

One-page project description

March 5

Draft Project Report

send by e-mail

Draft Project will not be marked based on the contents. Based on the Draft Report, I will provide you with feedback on the project progress.

Describe the work accomplished. Highlight problems.

If there are changes to project objective, scope, deliverables and/or project schedule, please describe.

Sunday April 25, midnight

Final Project Report

Please submit softcopy of your report and code in zipped file.

The final project report will be marked based on the contents, clarity, originality and quality of the XVCL solution and project documentation.

Project mark is computed as follows:

1. Draft Project Report: For a Draft Report submitted on time, you will get 3 marks out of the 30 marks for the whole project. Late draft will be accepted, but you do not get 3 marks.

2. Final Project Report: The penalty for the late final project is 2 marks for each day. Reports will be accepted until April 23 (inclusive).

Grading policy

A final grade for the course will be derived as follows:

team project - 30%,
presentation and participation in discussions – 10%; presentation will be marked by other students (5%) and by the instructor (5%).
final exam - 60%.

Exam questions will be related to the lectures, project, and presentations.

Topics covered in the course, lecture schedule

The lectures will emphasize a software Product Line (PL) approach to reuse (other names of PL are a program family or product family). A PL comprises a collection of similar systems (for example, payroll systems). PL members may share certain user requirements, a database, user interface or may run on the same platform. Often, PL members display similarities in more than one of the above areas. Systematic, reuse-based development and maintenance of Product Lines emerges as one of the most promising ways to increase software productivity and quality.

Week 1: Software Product Line (SPL) approach: concepts and examples

Week 2: XVCL motivation and overview

Week 3, 4: XVCL Briefing

--- XVCL is a language, method and tool for reuse that you will use in your project xvcl.comp.nus.edu.sg

Week 5, 6: Software clones and elimination of software redundancies

Week 7. More about SPL, domain engineering

Week 8. Domain Analysis

analysis of requirements for PLs
techniques for modeling commonalties and variations across PL members
Feature-Oriented Domain Analysis
case studies: modeling a Facility Reservation System domain, a generic Failure Detection system,

Week 9, 10. SPL case studies

References

Books related to various topics of the course, available in our library, in case you have special interest in certain topics:

Effective software maintenance and evolution: Reuse-based Approach /S. Jarzabek

Facts and fallacies of software engineering / Robert L. Glass.

Software product lines : practices and patterns / Paul Clements, Linda Northrop.

Generative programming : methods, tools, and applications / Krzysztof Czarnecki and Ulrich W. Eisenecker

Program generators with XML and Java / J. Craig Cleaveland.

Reuse based software engineering : techniques, organization, and measurement / Hafedh Mili ... [et a

Aspect oriented software development / Robert E. Filman ... [et al.].

I. Readings for the course

XVCL and its applications are described in Part II of the book Jarzabek, S. Effective Software Maintenance and Evolution: Reused-based Approach, Auerbach, CRC Press Taylor and Francis, May 2007

The book available in the Forum CO-OP. Selected chapters (in draft form) you can download via links below.

Book chapters and papers related to lectures on product lines, XVCL and general reading . You can download all the papers via links, read as you like.

A. Readings for Lecture Notes sets #1 and #2 – introduction to SPL and XVCL

[1] XVCL technology summary

[2] Highlight of XVCL as a variability management mechanism for software Product Lines

[3] Controlling Software Complexity by Unifying Similarity Patterns - explains the software similarity phenomenon and XVCL in context of software complexity; also, highlights relation to component and other technologies

[4] Selected chapters from Effective Software Maintenance and Evolution: Reused-based Approach (not for wide distribution):

Conventional method support for managing changes during maintenance and evolution

Mixed-strategy approach – an overview

[5] XVCL Tutorial.

[6] Step-by-step introduction to XVCL (optional)

General SPL readings:

[7] Deelstra, S., Sinnema, M. and Bosch, J. “Experiences in Software Product Families: Problems and Issues during Product Derivation,” Proc. Software Product Lines Conference, SPLC3, Boston, Aug. 2004, LNCS 3154, Springer-Verlag, pp. 165-182

[8] Krueger, C. “Eliminating the Adoption Barrier,” Point-Counter Point Column, in IEEE Software, special issue on Initiating Software Product Lines, July/August 2002, pages 28-31 http://www.biglever.com/papers/PointCounterPoint.pdf

[9] P. Jensen “Experiences with Product Line Development of Multi-Discipline Analysis Software at Overwatch Textron Systems,” 11^th International Software Product Line Conference, SPLC 2007, Sept. 2007, pp. 35 – 43

[10] Christof Ebert & Michel Smouts “Tricks and Traps of Initiating a Product Line Concept in Existing Products,” ICSE’03

B. Readings for Lecture Notes set #3 - Problem of similarity patterns, software clones and generic design

Selected chapters from Effective Software Maintenance and Evolution: Reused-based Approach (not for wide distribution):

A study of cloning in Buffer library

Buffer library is a good example of clones that are difficult to eliminate using conventional techniques. We can also view Buffer library as a special type of an SPL, in which each buffer class is a member of SPL. At the same time, it is a good case study from which to learn what XVCL can do and how to use it.

In Section 6 in XVCL Tutorial there is a simple introduction to XVCL, complemented by explanation of the XVCL solution for Buffer library.

See case study “Eliminating redundancies” at xvcl.comp.nus.edu.sg. There is a step-by-step explanation of the solution.

Detailed analysis of cloning and XVCL solution for Buffer library also described in:

Mixed-strategy approach to generic design – based on Jarzabek, S. and Li, S. ”Unifying clones with a generative programming technique: a case study,” Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice, John Wiley & Sons, Volume 18, Issue 4, July/August 2006, pp. 267-292, extended version of ESEC-FSE’03 paper

[1] Jarzabek, S. “Genericity - a “Missing in Action” Key to Software Simplification and Reuse,” discusses generic design; gives a glimpse of many projects with XVCL and lessons learned; contains more comprehensive description of software similarity problem; this is extended version of paper published in 13^th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, APSEC’06, IEEE Comp. Soc., 6-8 December 2006, Bangalore, India, pp. 293-300