Software Tools

Abstract

The demand for computer software applications steadily increases as numbers of users, problem domains, and application areas grow the need for good tools to support the myriad of activities that occur during software development is thus greater than ever. This article provides an overview of current practice in software tool features and usage. It also surveys research work in the area of software tools, indicating recent and likely near‐future trends in tools development. A section outlines recent directions in software process evolution, product domains and people management. As different software tools are used throughout the software process for different activities, changes in processes, products and project organization have introduced a variety of new demands on tools and tool developers. A categorization of software tools aligned with software process activities is then presented, including examples of tools in the various categories, along with a brief explanation of common terms used to describe software tools. We describe key elements of the structure of software tools, ranging from repository and data management to multiple‐view presentation and editing. We then focus on the key issue of tool integration, outlining current approaches to integration, current research trends, and likely near‐future integration support in software tools. We describe various strategies for supporting collaborative work with different software tools, facilitating improved teamwork with tools. We review and discuss current research, practice, and likely trends in automated support in software tools, alleviating developers of tedious tasks and helping manage ever‐growing software complexity. We conclude with a summary of some important factors in successful tool development and deployment.

A framework for visual notation exchange

“…Other examples include converting a Pounamu, SoftArch or Argo/UML diagram into GXL (for import by tools supporting this exchange format), SVG (for rendering in a SVG-enabled web browser), or VRML (for rendering in a 3D virtual environment web browser plug-in). This is a harder task in many respects to the much more common model-based tool integration [17,30] which focuses on translating between descriptions of software information formats. Translating between notations requires the mapping of descriptions of complex views, which make use of a very wide variety of boxes, lines, colour, positioning and size parameters, text characteristics, annotations and possibly 3D structures.…”

“…a CASE tool diagram into SVG, VRML or GXL exchange formats [5,18,19]. Currently to support these kinds of software visualisation notation exchange a custom converter or translator must be developed [17,16,19]. These take considerable effort to build, test and deploy and are difficult to modify if the notation itself or the tool notation information formats change.…”

A flyweight UML modelling tool for software development in heterogeneous environments

“…Juric and Kuljis [6] present evaluation criteria to assess the extent to which CASE tools support the range of UML language features. A general introduction to software development tools is given in [4]-it puts UML tools in the wider context of the software development environment.…”

Guest editors introduction: special issue on innovative automated software engineering tools

“…By definition, "automated" software engineering needs the support of automation tools, in order to be effective (or even possible) (Grundy and Hosking 2001). Many tools have been developed to support automation, in both narrow and broad domains.…”