CWI Lectures - Understanding Software
Speaker
Title
Software Visualization Applied
Abstract
Understanding software is a difficult task. This is caused not only by the enormous size of real software systems, but also by the intrinsic details of the smallest units. We are lacking "radiography" for software - the tools to examine and learn about software to get real insight, like X-rays can be used to examine and learn about the bone structure of the human body.
Software visualization is a field concerned with producing such "x-rays" images of software. The construction of such visualizations
is often underestimated. To explain this, I will show several visualizations we have build over the years. They range from analyses
of individual units to summarizing extremely large systems. We also talk about visualizing the evolution of software systems and their
relation to external data-sources such as bug trackers. Some of these visualizations are in use by http://www.synectique.eu, our new
company.
Bio
Stef leads the RMoD (http://rmod.lille.inria.fr) team of INRIA Lille Nord Europe. He is expert in two domains: object-oriented language design and reengineering. He worked on traits, composable groups of methods, and this work got some impact. Traits have been introduced in AmbiantTalk, and Squeak/Pharo, Perl, PHP and under a variant into Scala, Fortress of SUN Microsystems. He is one of the developer of Pharo http://www.pharo.project.org/ a new dynamic language used in industry and academia. He is also expert on software quality, program understanding, program visualizations, reengineering and metamodeling. He is one of the developers of Moose, an open-source software analysis platform http://www.moosetechnology.org/. He is working with http://www.synectique.eu a company building dedicated tools for advanced software analysis.
