User support for software development technologies

Abstract

The adoption of software development technologies is very closely related to the topic of user support. This is especially true in early phases, when the users are not familiar with the modification or the build processes of the software that has to be developed nor with the technology used for software development. This work introduces an approach to improve the usability of software development technologies represented by the Combinatory Logic Synthesizer (CL)S Framework. (CL)S is based on a type inhabitation algorithm for the combinatory logic with intersection types and aims to automatically create software components from a domain-specified repository. The framework yields a complete enumeration of all inhabitants. The inhabitation results are computed in the form of tree grammars. Unfortunately, the underlying type system allows limited application of domain-specific knowledge. To compensate for this limit, this work provides a framework for debugging intersection type specifications and filtering inhabitation results using domain-specific constraints as main aspects. The aim of the debugger is to make potentially incomplete or erroneous input specifications and decisions of the inhabitation algorithm understandable for those who are not experts in the field of type theory. The combination of tree grammars and graph theory forms the foundation of a clear representation of the computed results that informs users about the search process of the algorithm. The graphical representations are based on hypergraphs that illustrate the inhabitation in a step-wise fashion. Within the scope of this work, three filtering algorithms were implemented and investigated. The filtering algorithm integrated into the framework for user support and used for the restriction of inhabitation results is practically feasible and represents a clear improvement compared to existing approaches. It is based on modifying the tree grammars resulting from the (CL)S Framework. Additionally, the usability of the (CL)S Framework is supported by eight perspectives included in a web-based integrated development environment (IDE) that provides detailed graphical and textual information about the synthesis.