RIGI: A MODEL FOR SOFTWARE SYSTEM CONSTRUCTION, INTEGRATION, AND EVOLUTION BASED ON MODULE INTERFACE SPECIFICATIONS

• Main Author: MULLER, HANS ALBERT
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: 2007
• Subjects: Computer Science
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1911/16096

This thesis focuses on the structure and version information of large, integrated, evolving software systems. It concerns the definition, readability, understandability, comprehensibility, consistency, and completeness of system descriptions. The major contributions of this thesis are the ${\rm Rigi}\sp{1}$ model, Rigi editor, and the global interface analysis algorithms. A major focus of this research concerns the semantic network data model Rigi. It models the bricks and mortar of large, integrated, evolving software systems. The bricks range from the atomic objects of a module (i.e., definition, implementation, requirement, provision, variant and revision) to the composite objects of a system (i.e., subsystem, subsystem variant, subsystem revision, composition, and configuration). The mortar is an amalgam of dependencies (i.e., structure, compilation, semantic, and revision). The Rigi model is a graph model with a careful definition of the meaning and usage of the nodes and arcs. The Rigi editor deals with the integration of the Rigi model into a software development environment. It assists the designers, programmers, integrators, and maintainers in defining, exploring, understanding, and comprehending the structure of large, integrated, evolving software systems. The system descriptions as produced by the Rigi editor should run as a common thread through the life of a software project. The Rigi editor features the global interface analysis algorithms which analyze, predict, and limit the effects of an editing change in a basic interface of a software system on the entire system. The algorithms improve on the deficiencies of the traditional compilation rule found in strongly-typed, separately-compiled programming languages, which forces the recompilation of definition and implementation modules that are not at all affected by a change in a basic interface. The algorithms assume a software development environment which provides efficient access to the compilation dependencies and the module interfaces of the components being implemented. The algorithms operate on recursive compilation dependency graphs and perform in time O(n log n) where n is the size of the affected graph.