Implicit context: easing software evolution and reuse

  • Authors:

  • Robert J. Walker;Gail C. Murphy

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, 201-2366 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada;Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, 201-2366 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada

  • Venue:
  • SIGSOFT '00/FSE-8 Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering: twenty-first century applications
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Software systems should consist of simple, conceptually clean software components interacting along narrow, well-defined paths. All too often, this is not reality: complex components end up interacting for reasons unrelated to the functionality they provide. We refer to knowledge within a component that is not conceptually required for the individual behaviour of that component as extraneous embedded knowledge (EEK). EEK creeps into a system in many forms, including dependences upon particular names and the passing of extraneous parameters. This paper proposes the use of implicit context as a means for reducing EEK in systems by combining a mechanism to reflect upon what has happened in a system, through queries on the call history, with a mechanism for altering calls to and from a component. We demonstrate the benefits of implicit context by describing its use to reduce EEK in the Java™ Swing library.