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Modeling and visualizing object-oriented programs with Codecharts

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The design of computing systems can only properly succeed if it is well-grounded in theory, and … the important concepts in a theory can only emerge through protracted exposure to application.

– Robin Milner

Abstract

Software design, development and evolution commonly require programmers to model design decisions, visualize implemented programs, and detect conflicts between design and implementation. However, common design notations rarely reconcile theoretical concerns for rigor and minimality with the practical concerns for abstraction, scalability and automated verifiability. The language of Codecharts was designed to overcome these challenges by narrowing its scope to visual specifications that articulate automatically-verifiable statements about the structure and organization of object-oriented programs. The tokens in its visual vocabulary stand for the building-blocks of object-oriented design, such as inheritance class hierarchies, sets of dynamically-bound methods, and their correlations. The formalism was tailored for those pragmatic concerns which arise from modeling class libraries and design patterns, and for visualizing programs of any size at any level of abstraction. We describe design verification, a process of proving or refuting that a Java program (i.e. its native code) conforms to the Codechart specifying it. We also describe a toolkit which supports modeling and visualization with Codecharts, as well as a fully-automated design verification tool. We conclude with empirical results which suggest gains in both speed and accuracy when using Codecharts in software design, development and evolution.

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Notes

  1. Adapted to our presentation.

  2. In particular as implied by the first (“A program must be continuously adapted or else it becomes progressively less satisfactory”) and second (“As a program evolves its complexity increases unless work is done to maintain it”) laws of software evolution [2].

  3. Christopher Strachey said about this dissociation: “It has long been my personal view that the separation of practical and theoretical work is artificial and injurious. Much of the practical work done in computing, both in software and in hardware design, is unsound and clumsy because the people who do it have not any clear understanding of the fundamental design principles of their work. Most of the abstract mathematical and theoretical work is sterile because it has no point of contact with real computing” [3].

  4. This work was further developed into a Theory of Classes in the Typed Predicate Logic [38].

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Raymond Turner for his support throughout this research, which was funded in part by the Research Promotion Fund and the Knowledge Transfer Innovation Fund from the University of Essex, and by the EPSRC. We also wish to thank Olumide Iyaniwura, Gu Bo, Maple Tao Liang, Dimitrious Fragkos, Omololu Ayodeji, Xu Yi and Christina Maniati for their contributions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science & Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

    A. H. Eden & E. Gasparis

  2. School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

    J. Nicholson

  3. University of Hawaii, Honolulu, USA

    R. Kazman

  4. Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

    R. Kazman

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  1. A. H. Eden
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  2. E. Gasparis
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  3. J. Nicholson
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  4. R. Kazman
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Correspondence to A. H. Eden.

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Eden, A.H., Gasparis, E., Nicholson, J. et al. Modeling and visualizing object-oriented programs with Codecharts. Form Methods Syst Des 43, 1–28 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-012-0181-1

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