CASS - Conceptual Analysis of Software Structure

The CASS Project is concerned with the application of FCA to understanding of software structure.

CASS is one of several research efforts to apply FCA to the understanding of software structure and differs from those in various ways.

The hallmarks of the CASS approach are:

• Many perspectives When organising software structure (an really anything for that matter) there are many competing perspectives. In human thinking there is always a context which promotes some attributes over others. For example when looking for an object to throw the shape is important, but when looking for something to eat the taste and readability is important.

• Small lattices. The user is only ever confronted with small lattices that summarise some aspect of the software structure.

• A dislike of data mining CASS is for visualisation, the interpretation of the structure is up to the human. It is not performed by the machine. CASS does not seek to either (i) automatically restructure code, or (ii) automatically identify areas of good or bad code. Rather it seeks to provide a tool whereby humans can interpret diagrams to understand structures that exist in their code.

• Navigation Spaces CASS uses navigation spaces to combine relations and hierarchies. Hierarchies are essentially partial order relations that can be interpreted by humans meaningfully as a kind of implication. Relations are all the other relations and may have cycles.

The source directory griff/cass contains an old version of CASS. The new version has been integrated into the sarl library (and should perhaps also be split out again).

Currently the CASS code copsists of ruby files and it also serves as an example of how to wrap to construct a custom application.

Features to Implement for CASS

1. Make the navigation spaces a configuration option rather than

being directly coding them in Ruby.

• probably requires then making also an editor for these configuration operations

2. Fix the back button and connect the forward button - more state

needs to be stored for the back button to work, in particular the state information stored in the database is not being modified when the user goes back (it needs to be modified) but should the history also be stored in the database (anonymous nodes are bad, maybe the nodes can be given determined names).

3. Add a wizard which allows additional JAR to be inserted into the current

project.

4. Allow the concept of multiple projects. This is supported quite

well by Kowari, but a little thinking about it needs to be done.

5. Add support for distributive closure

6. Add support for nesting navigatin points (how should such a thing

be accomodated)

7. Make the navigation operations higher level, e.g. focus on should

probably unfold the attribute as well.

8. Add an option to navigate to the source code (connect to Eclipse

for this, or perhaps to a java doc source).