Exploratory Software Development with Class Libraries

An exploratory study of backtracking strategies used by developers

“…They quickly build prototypes that meet the known requirements of the system. If the prototypes fail in some way or uncover any fundamental flaws of the requirements, they backtrack and refine the requirements [1,2]. Often, the problems themselves are ill-defined [3,4,5].…”

EKSE: A Command Line Interface for EGS-CC based Systems

“…The underlying technology however makes this rather complicated, as it is assumed that an application is composed of various components which are wired together using a technology called Blueprint. 4 This means that all connections between the services offered by one component and the ones required by another one should be provided by XML-based Blueprint files. 5 As we are not restarting the entire command line tool every time that the user is updating some scripts, we cannot change the Blueprint file of the tool on the fly to react to such updates, as this file is only loaded once by the framework when the tool is started.…”

“…As this makes it inconvenient to produce detailed documentation on technical details which might be outdated by the next release, a lot of the documentation foreseen for the final release is not yet present, which necessitates a lot of exploratory development on the side of anyone trying to build new functionality on top of this system. [4] This can be most easily accomplished by using a running instance of an EGS-CC based system and iteratively trying out different versions of the same source code, observing whether they perform the required actions or not, such as calling data-supplying backend services with differently specified filters to practically understand how the filter fields are interpreted. However, the default way of deploying source code in EGS-CC is by rebuilding the changed components and restarting the entire system, as dynamic reloading of components is not yet supported in all cases.…”

A hypertext-based tool for large scale software reuse

“…In practice, however, it is necessary to have selection conditions beyond type or interface correctness to guide the search for modules that are suitable for the given task [3]. From the user's point of view it may sometimes be most important to find the set of modules that offer the intended functionality [9] according to an informal specification.…”

“…The configuration of complex systems from reusable software components requires the search for possible implementations in increasingly large component libraries. The success of this approach strongly depends on efficient methods for finding the appropriate reusable components, which is a very hard task in practice [9]. Thus tools are needed to support this activity.…”