Change management and consistency maintenance in software development environments using object oriented attribute grammars

Abstract

In this paper, we consider describing software development environments (SDEs) using a computational model OOAG (Object Oriented Attribute Grammar) [Shi89] [SK90], which incorporates functions for managing changes and maintaining consistency. In SDEs, the change managenent and consistency maintenance are key issues and OOAG is suitable for describing them. Software objects in SDEs have many derived values, and software objects and their derived values have complex relations with each other. Careless human activities often cause inconsistencies among software objects and it usually costs a lot to recover them. OOAG provides declarative descriptions to re-compute automatically derived values based on change propagation and to check relations among software objects, which help recovering activities of programmers.

OOAG treats SDEs as aggregated active objects, i.e. tree structures, where software products are distributed. Managing changes of derived values and consistency among software objects are described over tree structures in declarative manner. Attributes associated with nodes are re-computed automatically, if necessary.

OOAG is a computational model with the following extensions to standard attribute grammars(AGs): (1) OOAG can change tree structures depending upon their attribute values. (AGs that have this function are called higher order attribute grammars [HM89] [TC90]). (2) OOAG can describe message passing which pastes temporary attributes and their attribution rules to the tree structure.

The aim of this paper is to show that our approach of treating SDEs as aggregated objects is natural and OOAG's features are suited for the task of describing change management and consistency control in structure-oriented software development environments.