Automatic Generation of Software Component Wizards based on the Wizard Pattern

Abstract

When a software component is used, it is often necessary to set initial values in many of its attributes. To set these initial values appropriately, the user of the component must ascertain which attributes are needed to be initialized, and set them programmatically to suitable initial values. The work involved in this sort of initialization can be alleviated by attaching a wizard interface to the target component itself and setting the initial values visually from the wizard. However, there are large development costs associated with devising suitable initial value candidates and producing a new wizard to use these initial values for each individual component. In this paper, we propose a system whereby application programs that use a target component are subjected to dynamic analysis to discover which attributes and initial values are set most often during thr running of the component. The proposed system generates and attaches a wizard, which supports application programmers to initialize the component visually by using these initial values, to the component. The proposed system can be recognized as a system for applying the Wizard pattern to each component automatically. Experiments have shown that the attributes and their initial values chosen for initialization by generated wizards closely resemble the expectations of the component’s original developers. We have thus confirmed that the proposed system can bring about a substantial reduction in wizard development costs.