KaleidoScope

Overview

KaleidoScope is a software tool supporting developers in investigating a software system's design and architecture based on automated runtime tests. In particular, it provides different design perspectives (such as UML diagrams and dependency structure matrices) as decision support, which are automatically derived from executing scenario-based runtime tests. KaleidoScope allows the developer to navigate through the resulting perspectives as well as to tailor their scopes and abstraction levels.

As a research project, KaleidoScope is subject to an ongoing extension and improvement process. At the moment, KaleidoScope supports the analysis of systems developed in NX or XOTcl with runtime tests specified using STORM or TclSpec. It is planned for future work to provide analysis for JAVA-based software systems.

In particular, KaleidoScope supports a scenario-based and test-driven analysis of a system's software design (as-is design). Currently, we investigate the potential for assessing smells in code and design, and for planning corresponding refactorings.

For more technical and conceptual details as well as for application examples, please take a look into the Related Publications or send us an email.

Bad Smells in Code and Design

Refactoring is a technique for improving the design quality of a software system (see, e.g., Refactoring by Martin Fowler). Bad smells represent candidates for refactoring, since they negatively impact a system's maintainability and evolvability. For detecting smell candidates, in recent years multiple automatic tools have been proposed (smell detectors and refactoring-recommendation systems such as JDeodorant or DECOR).

However, smell-detection tools also produce false positives such as intentional smells (smells that are actually intended by the software developer), e.g., as result of applying a particular design pattern (see, e.g., Design Patterns by the GoF). For this reason, the identified candidates need to be assessed manually by the corresponding engineer for deciding whether, how, and when the candidate should be refactored, as well as for estimating the impact of the potential refactoring.

The cost of additional work caused by bad smells can be measured as part of a software system's Technical Debt (TD).

Decision Support in Smell Assessment

KaleidoScope provides different perspectives for assisting developers in assessing smell candidates. In particular, sequence and class diagrams of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) in different scopes as well as different kinds of dependency structure matrices (DSM; aka design structure matrices) are available reflecting the behavior of the system under test in terms of method-call interactions at runtime.

The perspectives can be tailored by software developers in different ways to provide the information relevant for answering questions on the state of smell candidates (such as specific dependencies or other behavioral details, see Fig. 1). In particular, KaleidoScope supports a scenario-driven identification and assessment of code and design smells.

Related Publications

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• Thorsten Haendler and Gustaf Neumann: Ontology-based Analysis and Design of Educational Games for Software Refactoring, In: Computers Supported Education, Revised Best Papers of CSEDU 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS), Springer. (selected)
• Thorsten Haendler, Gustaf Neumann and Fiodor Smirnov: RefacTutor: An Interactive Tutoring System for Software Refactoring, In: Computers Supported Education, Revised Best Papers of CSEDU 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS), Springer. (selected)
• Thorsten Haendler: A Card Game for Learning Software-Refactoring Principles, In: Proc. of the 3rd International Symposium on Gamification and Games for Learning (GamiLearn@CHIPLAY 2019), Barcelona, Spain, October 2019 (accepted for publication)
• Thorsten Haendler and Gustaf Neumann: A Framework for the Assessment and Training of Software Refactoring Competences, In: Proc. of the 11th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Systems (KMIS 2019), Vienna, Austria, September 2019. (pdf)
• Thorsten Haendler and Gustaf Neumann: Ontology-based Analysis of Game Designs for Software Refactoring, In: Proc. of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2019), Heraklion (Crete), Greece, May 2019. (pdf, doi)
• Thorsten Haendler, Gustaf Neumann and Fiodor Smirnov: An Interactive Tutoring System for Training Software Refactoring, In: Proc. of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2019), Heraklion (Crete), Greece, May 2019. (pdf, doi)
• Thorsten Haendler and Gustaf Neumann: Serious Games for Software Refactoring, In: Proc. of Software Engineering and Management 2019 (SE19). Fachtagung des GI-Fachbereichs Softwaretechnik, February 2019. (pdf, doi)
• Thorsten Haendler and Gustaf Neumann: Serious Refactoring Games, In: Proc. of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-52), Hawaii, USA, January 2019. (Best Paper Nomination) (pdf, doi)
• Thorsten Haendler: On Using UML Diagrams to Identify and Assess Software Design Smells, In: Proc. of the 13th International Conference on Software Technologies (ICSOFT 2018), Porto, Portugal, July 2018. (pdf, doi)
• Thorsten Haendler and Josef Frysak: Deconstructing the Refactoring Process from a Problem-Solving and Decision-Making Perspective, In: Proc. of the 13th International Conference on Software Technologies (ICSOFT 2018), Porto, Portugal, July 2018. (pdf, doi)
• Thorsten Haendler, Stefan Sobernig and Mark Strembeck: Towards Triaging Code-Smell Candidates via Runtime Scenarios and Method-Call Dependencies, In: Proc. of the 9th International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt (MTD 2017) at the 18th International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP 2017), Cologne, Germany, ACM, May 2017. (pdf, slides, doi)
• Thorsten Haendler, Stefan Sobernig and Mark Strembeck: Deriving UML-based Specifications of Inter-Component Interactions from Runtime Tests, In: Proc. of the 31st ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2016), Software Engineering Track, Pisa, Italy, ACM, pp. 1583-1585, April 2016. (pdf, doi)
• Thorsten Haendler, Stefan Sobernig and Mark Strembeck: Deriving Tailored UML Interaction Models from Scenario-Based Runtime Tests, In: Software Technologies, Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS), Volume 586, Springer International Publishing, pp. 326-348, February 2016. (pdf, doi)
• Thorsten Haendler, Stefan Sobernig and Mark Strembeck: An Approach for the Semi-automated Derivation of UML Interaction Models from Scenario-based Runtime Tests, In: Proc. of the 10th International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications (ICSOFT-EA 2015), Colmar, France, SciTePress, 229-240, July 2015. Paper Award (pdf, doi)

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