Customizing lotus notes to build software engineering tools

  • Authors:
  • Jun Ma;Holger M. Kienle;Piotr Kaminski;Anke Weber;Marin Litoiu

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada;University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada;University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada;ExperEdge Technology Partners, Victoria, Canada;IBM Toronto Lab, Toronto, Canada

  • Venue:
  • CASCON '03 Proceedings of the 2003 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Many software engineering research tools are stand-alone applications that have trouble interoperating with other development tools and do not fit well into the software developers' established work processes. Our main hypothesis is that in order for new tools to be adopted effectively, they must be compatible with both existing users and existing tools.Typically, software engineering teams in an organization share a set of common applications for their development activities that are a permanent part of each developer's everyday workflow. Among these applications are shrink-wrapped office tools such as IBM® Lotus®Notes®, which are used for tasks such as e-mail, scheduling, and project reports and presentations. These office tools are highly integrated and offer a mature, well-tested working environment, which can be customized to provide support for advanced software engineering tasks.This paper describes RENotes, a reverse engineering tool built by customizing Lotus Notes. RENotes targets software developers who use Notes as part of their work environment. We describe the features of Notes and how they can be used to layer new reverse engineering functionality on top.