Using SCL to Specify and Check Design Intent in Source Code
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
SCL: Static Enforcement and Exploration of Developer Intent in Source Code
ICSE COMPANION '07 Companion to the proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering
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Although they are intended to support and encourage reuse, object-oriented application frameworks are difficult to use. The architecture and implementation details of frameworks, because of their size and complexity, are rarely fully understood. Instead, faced with a framework problem, developers must somehow learn just enough about the parts of the framework required for their task and ask for assistance or muddle through using a trial-and-error approach. In many cases, they misuse the framework by not learning what the framework designer had in mind as the proper solution to their problem. This thesis investigates both the feasibility and the effectiveness of tools support for the problem: The idea is to formalize the patterns to which the code structure of the application should conform, and thereafter detect violations of such patterns with an automated checker program. To capture the know-how knowledge about frameworks use, we introduce the notion of framework constraints: framework constraints are rules that frameworks impose on the code of framework-based applications. The tool consists of a specification language and an associated checker. The specification language, FCL (Framework Constraints Language), is defined to formally specify framework constraints. The semantics of FCL is based on a first-order logic extended with set and sequence operations. Essentially, framework constraints can be regarded as framework-specific typing rules conveyed by FCL specifications and thus can be enforced by techniques analogous to those of conventional type checking. Several case studies have been conducted to evaluate the approach. These include a part of the MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) framework, the law of Demeter, Scott Meyers' C++ guidelines, and the Observer design pattern. Lessons in terms of both the strengths and the limitations of FCL are reported.