| Abstract |
Much of the complexity of software arises from interactions between
disparate concerns. Even when such concerns are largely independent, they
are compressed into a single representation of the source code. This
increases the complexity of the code and obfuscates its overt
functionality.
Unfortunately, it is not always feasible to simply introduce a new
programming abstraction, as concern code may be tightly coupled to its
surrounding context. Attempting to modularize such code would violate the
principle of low inter-module coupling, and would likely require complex
integration semantics. For example, debugging code is tightly coupled to
its
context and is tangled with other concerns throughout the software system.
We present an editor-based approach to this problem called "software
plans."
The idea, inspired by architectural design, is to develop the software as
multiple views that each present the code for concerns of interest in
their
proper context. Programmers can develop independent plans, and then
reconcile them to create the final system. We present data from two case
studies that investigate how different programmers identify and relate
concerns in software. We also present a formal model of code that replaces
the traditional sequence-of-bytes representation with one that explicitly
represents concerns within code blocks that are potentially shared among
plans. We discuss the interaction of editing operations with that model,
and present a prototype implementation.
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