A spreadsheet usually starts as a simple and single-user software artifact, but, as frequent as in other software systems, quickly evolves into a complex system developed by many actors. Often, different users work on different aspects of the same spreadsheet: while a secretary may be only involved in adding plain data to the spreadsheet, an accountant may define new business rules, while an engineer may need to adapt the spreadsheet content so it can be used by other software systems. Unfortunately, spreadsheet systems do not offer modular mechanisms, and as a consequence, some of the previous tasks may be defined by adding intrusive "code" to the spreadsheet.
In this paper we go through the design and implementation of an aspect-oriented language for spreadsheets so that users can work on different aspects of a spreadsheet in a modular way. For example, aspects can be defined in order to introduce new business rules to an existing spreadsheet, or to manipulate the spreadsheet data to be ported to another system. Aspects are defined as aspect-oriented program specifications that are dynamically woven into the underlying spreadsheet by an aspect weaver. In this aspect-oriented style of spreadsheet development, different users develop, or reuse, aspects without adding intrusive code to the original spreadsheet. Such code is added/executed by the spreadsheet weaving mechanism proposed in this paper.
Our term "structure discovery" denotes the recovery of structure, such as the grouping of cells, that was intended by a spreadsheet's author but is not explicit in the spreadsheet. We are implementing structure discovery tools in the logic-programming language Prolog for our spreadsheet analysis program Model Master, by writing grammars for spreadsheet structures. The objective is an "intelligent structure monitor" to run beside Excel, allowing users to reconfigure spreadsheets to the representational needs of the task at hand. This could revolutionise spreadsheet "best practice". We also desc…
We discuss the suitability of spreadsheet processors as tools for programming streaming systems. We argue that, while spreadsheets can function as powerful models for stream operators, their fundamental boundedness limits their scope of application. We propose two extensions to the spreadsheet model and argue their utility in the context of programming streaming systems.
Many large financial planning models are written in a spreadsheet programming language (usually Microsoft Excel) and deployed as a spreadsheet application. Three groups, FAST Alliance, Operis Group, and BPM Analytics (under the name "Spreadsheet Standards Review Board") have independently promulgated standardized processes for efficiently building such models. These spreadsheet engineering methodologies provide detailed guidance on design, construction process, and quality control. We summarize and compare these methodologies. They share many design practices, and standardized, mechanistic pro…
I describe preliminary experiments in documenting Excelsior versions of spreadsheets using semantic wikis and literate programming. The objective is to create well-structured and comprehensive documentation, easy to use by those unfamiliar with the spreadsheets documented. I discuss why so much documentation is hard to use, and briefly explain semantic wikis and literate programming; although parts of the paper are Excelsior-specific, these sections may be of more general interest.
Spreadsheet programmers often implement contingent logic using a nested-IF formula even though this technique is difficult to test and audit and is believed to be risky. We interpret the programming of contingent logic in spreadsheets in the context of traditional computer programming. We investigate the "lookup technique" as an alternative to nested-IF formulas, describe its benefits for testing and auditing, and define its limitations. The lookup technique employs four distinct principles: 1) make logical tests visible; 2) make outcomes visible; 3) make logical structure visible; and 4) repl…
Across an aggregation of EuSpRIG presentation papers, two maxims hold true: spreadsheets models are akin to software, yet spreadsheet developers are not software engineers. As such, the lack of traditional software engineering tools and protocols invites a higher rate of error in the end result. This paper lays ground work for spreadsheet modelling professionals to develop reproducible audit tools using freely available, open source packages built with the Python programming language, enabling stakeholders to develop clearly defined model "oracles" with which to test and audit spreadsheet calc…
Spreadsheets are widely used in various fields to do large numerical analysis. While several companies have relied on spreadsheets for decades, data scientists are going in the direction of using scientific programming languages such as python to do their data analysis due to the support, community, and vast amount of libraries. While using python to analyze a company's spreadsheets, some information such as the formulas and dependencies of a cell are lost. We propose a tool that creates an abstract intermediate representation (AIR) of a spreadsheet. This representation facilitates the transfe…
Spreadsheets are the most popular end-user programming software, where formulae act like programs and also have smells. One well recognized common smell of spreadsheet formulae is nest-IF expressions, which have low readability and high cognitive cost for users, and are error-prone during reuse or maintenance. However, end users usually lack essential programming language knowledge and skills to tackle or even realize the problem. The previous research work has made very initial attempts in this aspect, while no effective and automated approach is currently available. This paper firstly propos…
A computing environment is proposed, based on batch spreadsheet processing, which produces a spreadsheet display from plain text input files of commands, similar to the way documents are created using LaTeX. In this environment, besides the usual spreadsheet rows and columns of cells, variables can be defined and are stored in a separate symbol table. Cell and symbol formulas may contain cycles, and cycles which converge can be used to implement iterative algorithms. Formulas are specified using the syntax of the C programming language, and all of C's numeric operators are supported, with oper…
End-user programmers create software to solve problems, yet the problem-solving knowledge generated in the process often remains tacit within the software artifact. One approach to exposing this knowledge is to enable the end-user to annotate the artifact as they create and use it. A 3-level model of annotation is presented and guidelines are proposed for the design of end-user programming environments supporting the explicit and literate annotation levels. These guidelines are then applied to the spreadsheet end-user programming paradigm.
Practitioners often argue that range names make spreadsheets easier to understand and use, akin to the role of good variable names in traditional programming languages, yet there is no supporting scientific evidence. The authors previously published experiments that disproved this theory in relation to debugging, and now turn their focus to development. This paper presents the results of two iterations of a new experiment, which measure the effect of range names on the correctness of, and the time it takes to develop, simple summation formulas. Our findings, supported by statistically signific…
Sprego is a programming tool for novice and end-user programmers within graphical spreadsheet environments. The main idea of Sprego is to use as few general purpose functions as possible, and based on these functions we create multilevel formulas to solve real world programmable spreadsheet problems. Beyond providing the framework for the theoretic background and the tools which support Sprego, in order to demonstrate the power which lies within it, we present a converted authentic table and, based on this table, data retrieval tasks, their algorithms, and coding in full details.
Excel lacks features for modular design. Had it such features, as do most programming languages, they would save time, avoid unneeded programming, make mistakes less likely, make code-control easier, help organisations adopt a uniform house style, and open business opportunities in buying and selling spreadsheet modules. I present Excelsior, a system for bringing these benefits to Excel.
Software Cockpits, also known as Software Project Control Centers, support the management and controlling of software and system development projects and provide means for quantitative measurement-based project control. Currently, many companies are developing simple control dashboards that are mainly based on Spreadsheet applications. Alternatively, they use solutions providing a fixed set of project control functionality that cannot be sufficiently customized to their specific needs and goals. Specula is a systematic approach for defining reusable, customizable control components and instant…
Measuring software complexity plays an important role to meet the demands of complex software. The cyclomatic complexity is one of most used and renowned metric among the other three proposed and researched metrics that are namely: Line of code, Halstead measure and cyclomatic complexity. Although cyclomatic complexity is very popular but also serves some of the problems which has been identified and showed in a tabular form in this research work. It lacks the calculation of coupling between the object classes for object oriented programming and only calculates the complexity on the basis of t…
Compensation programming is typically used in the programming of web service compositions whose correct implementation is crucial due to their handling of security-critical activities such as financial transactions. While traditional exception handling depends on the state of the system at the moment of failure, compensation programming is significantly more challenging and dynamic because it is dependent on the runtime execution flow - with the history of behaviour of the system at the moment of failure affecting how to apply compensation. To address this dynamic element, we propose the use o…
Modern systems require programmers to develop code that dynamically adapts to different contexts, leading to the evolution of new context-oriented programming languages. These languages introduce new software-engineering challenges, such as: how to maintain and keep the separation of concerns of the codebase? how to model the changing behaviors? how to verify the system behavior? and more. This paper introduces Context-Oriented Behavioral Programming(COBP) - a novel paradigm for developing context-aware systems, centered on natural and incremental specification of context-dependent behaviors. …
Programming tutorials are often created to demonstrate programming tasks with code examples. However, our study of Stack Overflow questions reveals the low utilization of high-quality programming tutorials, which is caused task description mismatch and code information overload. Document search can find relevant tutorial documents, but they often cannot find specific programming actions and code solutions relevant to the developers' task needs. The recently proposed activity-centric search over knowledge graph supports direct search of programming actions, but it has limitations in action cove…
Designing the user interface (UI) of mobile applications in the enterprise is performed in many cases by the application users who represent the business needs. This is based on existing developed enterprise services that can be accessed by these applications. Design the UI of the mobile applications require programming environments that are as much as possible codeless and easy to use. In this paper, we present NitroGen which is a cloud-based platform-independent tool that provides with no installation, a consumable integrated set of capabilities to construct mobile solutions aiming at reduci…
This paper presents the modular automation for reuse in manufacturing systems (modAT4rMS) approach to support the model-driven engineering (MDE) of object oriented manufacturing automation software with regard to its usability and software modularity. With usability we refer to the aspects effectiveness, efficiency and user acceptance, as defined by ISO 9241-11. The modAT4rMS notations are based on selected features from the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and the Systems Modeling language (SysML) and iteratively further developed by a series of empirical studies with industrial practitioners …
A system, which implements persistent objects, has to provide different opportunities to change the objects in arbitrary ways during their existence. A traditional realization of OO paradigm in modern programming systems has fundamental drawbacks which complicate an implementation of persistent modifiable objects considerably. There is alternative realization that does not have these drawbacks. In the article the PROGRESS operation is offered, which modify existing object within an existing inheritance hierarchy.
For the right application, the use of programming paradigms such as functional or logic programming can enormously increase productivity in software development. But these powerful paradigms are tied to exotic programming languages, while the management of software development dictates standardization on a single language. This dilemma can be resolved by using object-oriented programming in a new way. It is conventional to analyze an application by object-oriented modeling. In the new approach, the analysis identifies the paradigm that is ideal for the application; development starts with obje…
The main goal of concept-oriented programming (COP) is describing how objects are represented and accessed. It makes references (object locations) first-class elements of the program responsible for many important functions which are difficult to model via objects. COP rethinks and generalizes such primary notions of object-orientation as class and inheritance by introducing a novel construct, concept, and a new relation, inclusion. An advantage is that using only a few basic notions we are able to describe many general patterns of thoughts currently belonging to different programming paradigm…
Code generation from models is a core activity in model-driven development (MDD). For complex systems it is usually impossible to generate the entire software system from models alone. Thus, MDD requires mechanisms for integrating generated and handwritten code. Applying such mechanisms without considering their effects can cause issues in projects with many model and code artifacts, where a sound integration for generated and handwritten code is necessary. We provide an overview of mechanisms for integrating generated and handwritten code for object-oriented languages. In addition to that, we…
Internet of Things (IoT) has become the buzzword for the development of Smart City and its applications. In this context, development of supporting software forms the core part of the IoT infrastructure. A Middleware sits in between the IoT devices and interacts between them to exchange data among the components of the automated architecture. The Middleware services include hand shaking, data transfer and security among its core set of functionalities. It also includes cross-cutting functional services such as authentication, logging and caching. A software that can run these Middleware servic…
The development of concurrent applications is challenging because of the complexity of concurrent designs and the hazards of concurrent programming. Architectural modeling using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) can support the development process, but the problem of mapping the model to a concurrent implementation remains. This paper addresses this problem by defining a scheme to map concurrent UML designs to a concurrent object-oriented program. Using the COMET method for the architectural design of concurrent object-oriented systems, each component and connector is annotated with a stereo…
Well structured and readable source code is a pre-requisite for maintainable software and successful collaboration among developers. Static analysis enables the automated extraction of code complexity and readability metrics which can be leveraged to highlight potential improvements in code to both attain software of high quality and reinforce good practices for developers as an educational tool. This assumes reliable readability metrics which are not trivial to obtain since code readability is somewhat subjective. Recent research has resulted in increasingly sophisticated models for predictin…
Context-oriented programming (COP) is a new technique for programming that allows changing the context in which commands execute as a program executes. Compared to object-oriented programming (aspect-oriented programming), COP is more flexible (modular and structured). This paper presents a precise syntax-directed operational semantics for context-oriented programming with layers, as realized by COP languages like ContextJ* and ContextL. Our language model is built on Java enriched with layer concepts and activation and deactivation of layer scopes. The paper also presents a static type system…
Object-oriented programming laws have been proposed in the context of languages that are not combined with a behavioral interface specification language (BISL). The strong dependence between source-code and interface specifications may cause a number of difficulties when transforming programs. In this paper we introduce a set of programming laws for object-oriented languages like Java combined with the Java Modeling Language (JML). The set of laws deals with object-oriented features taking into account their specifications. Some laws deal only with features of the specification language. These…
Siemens AG Österreich（奥地利西门子股份公司）；Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt（克拉根福阿尔卑斯-亚德里亚大学）
Most of contemporary software systems are implemented using an object-oriented approach. Modeling phases -- during which software engineers analyze requirements to the future system using some modeling language -- are an important part of the development process, since modeling errors are often hard to recognize and correct. In this paper we present a framework which allows the integration of Answer Set Programming into the object-oriented software development process. OOASP supports reasoning about object-oriented software models and their instantiations. Preliminary results of the OOASP appl…
Design by Contract (DbC) and runtime enforcement of program assertions enables the construction of more robust software. It also enables the assignment of blame in error reporting. Unfortunately, there is no support for runtime contract enforcement and blame assignment for Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP). Extending DbC to also cover aspects brings forward a plethora of issues related to the correct order of assertion validation. We show that there is no generally correct execution sequence of object assertions and aspect assertions. A further classification of aspects as agnostic, obedient, …
Design patterns are distilled from many real systems to catalog common programming practice. However, some object-oriented design patterns are distorted or overly complicated because of the lack of supporting programming language constructs or mechanisms. For this paper, we have analyzed several published design patterns looking for idiomatic ways of working around constraints of the implementation language. From this analysis, we lay a groundwork of general-purpose language constructs and mechanisms that, if provided by a statically typed, object-oriented language, would better support the im…
Largely known for attack scenarios, code reuse techniques at a closer look reveal properties that are appealing also for program obfuscation. We explore the popular return-oriented programming paradigm under this light, transforming program functions into ROP chains that coexist seamlessly with the surrounding software stack. We show how to build chains that can withstand popular static and dynamic deobfuscation approaches, evaluating the robustness and overheads of the design over common programs. The results suggest a significant amount of computational resources would be required to carry a…
Spreadsheets are widely used for table manipulation and presentation. Stylistic formatting of these tables is an important property for both presentation and analysis. As a result, popular spreadsheet software, such as Excel, supports automatically formatting tables based on rules. Unfortunately, writing such formatting rules can be challenging for users as it requires knowledge of the underlying rule language and data logic. We present CORNET, a system that tackles the novel problem of automatically learning such formatting rules from user examples in the form of formatted cells. CORNET takes…
There is a gap between our ability to reuse high-level concepts in software design and our ability to reuse the code implementing them. Language Oriented Programming (LOP) is a software development paradigm that aims to close this gap, through extensive use of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). With LOP, the high-level reusable concepts become reusable DSL constructs, and their translation into code level concepts is done in the DSL implementation. Particular products are implemented using DSL code, thus reusing only high-level concepts. In this paper we provide a comparison between two impleme…
This paper reviews some programming techniques in R that have proved useful, particularly for substantial projects. These include several versions of object-oriented programming, used in a large number of R packages. The review tries to clarify the origins and ideas behind the various versions, each of which is valuable in the appropriate context. R has also been strongly influenced by the ideas of functional programming and, in particular, by the desire to combine functional with object oriented programming. To clarify how this particular mix of ideas has turned out in the current R language …
The Logic Programming through Prolog has been widely used for supply persistence in many systems that need store knowledge. Some implementations of Prolog Programming Language used for supply persistence have bidirectional interfaces with other programming languages over all with Object Oriented Programing Languages. In present days is missing tools and frameworks for the systems development that use logic predicate persistence in easy and agile form. More specifically an object oriented and logic persistence provider is need in present days that allow the object manipulation in main memory an…
Many variability management techniques rely on sophisticated language extension or tools to support it. While this can provide dedicated syntax and operational mechanism but it struggling practical adaptation for the cost of adapting new technology as part of development process. We present Self-composable Programming, a language-driven, composition-based variability implementation which takes an object-oriented approach to modeling and composing behaviors in software. Self-composable Programming introduces hierarchical relationship of behavior by providing concepts of abstract function, which…
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is widely used in the software industry and university introductory courses today. Following the structure of most textbooks, such courses frequently are organised starting with the concepts of imperative and structured programming and only later introducing OOP. An alternative approach is to begin directly with OOP following the Outside-In teaching method as proposed by Meyer. Empirical results for the effects of Outside-In teaching on students and lecturers are sparse, however. We describe the conceptual design and empirical evaluation of two OOP introductor…
This paper presents the formal definition of a domain-specific language, named Pantagruel, following the methodology proposed by David Schmidt for language development. This language is dedicated to programming applications that orchestrate networked entities. It targets developers that are professionals in such domains as building management and assisted living, and want to leverage networked entities to support daily tasks. Pantagruel has a number of features that address the requirements of the domain of entity orchestration. Furthermore, Pantagruel provides high-level constructs that make …
A multitude of agent-oriented software engineering frameworks exist, most of which are developed by the academic multi-agent systems community. However, these frameworks often impose programming paradigms on their users that are challenging to learn for engineers who are used to modern high-level programming languages such as JavaScript and Python. To show how the adoption of agent-oriented programming by the software engineering mainstream can be facilitated, we provide a lean JavaScript library prototype for implementing reasoning-loop agents. The library focuses on core agent programming co…
