Information Sciences

The importance of reusing approved design solutions is widely recognized in software engineering. Object-oriented frameworks, design patterns, etc., are ways to reuse ex-isting knowledge. However, some problems remain, particularly how to guide the ap-plication developer to reuse so that the design is eventually implemented in a software project. FRED (FRamework EDitor) is a prototype of a task-driven architecture-oriented programming environment that can be used to implement architectural solutions. Ar-chitecture-specific instructions are given to the tool as specialization patterns; these formal specifications make it possible to automatically compute how to implement design solutions during the software development process. FRED manages the im-plementation process as a gradually progressing work, where each step is recorded and may have effects to the steps to come. This enables, for instance, documentation and source code generation that uses application-specific names familiar to the appli-cation developer. Further, the application developer can be instantly notified if he vio-lates the architectural rules embodied by the given specialization patterns. This thesis describes the FRED environment. A goal-oriented approach is intro-duced to model design solutions as a set of specialization patterns. We also explain the mechanism to produce a sequence of programming tasks to implement the solu-tion. To experiment with the environment, an industrial framework was annotated with thirteen specialization patterns