Framework Tools for Software Design Education
Bob Lechner (lechner@cs.uml.edu) (781)449-1497
RJLRef: $PH/COOL-FAQ/COOLframeworkTutorial.970521

Abstract:

A project course based on a legacy of software inherited from prior
projects is often advocated as the best if not the only, way to provide
a  meaningful project experience in Software Engineering Education.
This tutorial describes the capabilities of an interrelated  set of
three generic object-oriented design tools which form a re-usable code
base for legacy projects, and the process by which they undergo
continuous evolutionary development and re-use at UMass-Lowell.  Over
50K lines of  C , C++ and Java code have been generated for re-use by
this process, which spans a decade of software development by graduate
students in Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Software
Engineering courses.

Intended Audience:

Educators in CS/E&CE who want to involve upper division or graduate
students in large-scale team-based legacy software system design
projects,  or to develop computer-based educational applications to
support lower-division courses. Attendees should have experience or
interest in teaching large-scale software design and development in the
CS or EE&CE curriculum, and be motivated to use team-based legacy
projects as a valuable learning experience for the professional
development of undergraduate and graduate students.


Outline of Topics:

	1: Overview of Course Delivery Approach 
	2: Generic Tools - Description and Use
		2.1. GEN (Persistent database code  GENerator) 
		2.2. BDE (Block Diagram Editor and semantic translators) 
		2.3.  LCP (Life-Cycle Prototype state model interpreter) 
	3: Distance Learning Approach (Voice+SharedDiagrams) 
	4: Impact of the InterNet and World-Wide-Web 
	5: A Look at Some Typical Educational Projects


Biography:
Bob Lechner is a Professor of Computer Science at UMass-Lowell, Lowell
MA 01854. He has a MS/EE from CMU and a PhD/Applied Math from
Harvard's Computation Lab, and  is a member of  ACM and IEEE Computer Society. 
He spent the first half of his career practicing embedded computer system
analysis and software design at GTE/Sylvania, Honeywell Information
Systems and CSDraper Laboratory, and the second half teaching Computer
System Analysis and Software Engineering.  He retired from UMass in 2001 
but still teaches graduate courses in object-oriented analysis and design 
and software engineering, and his current research focuses on integrated 
development environments (frameworks) for software engineering education.

Overview:

This tutorial describes a method for application design and prototype
development, using a loosely coupled set of generic CASE tools which
generate persistent database  access code and executable prototypes
from  a conceptual schema  (information model plus state-event model).
The tools have stand-alone utility, but work best as a coordinated
whole.

The tutorial focus will be on how these generic tools increase the
reusabilty of applications, and our vision of how they will evolve to
support (1) on-line collaboration among mentors and students, and (2)
distributed distance learning by geographically dispersed teams.  This
tool  set  is based on a decade of software development by graduate
students in courses taught by the author. The tools were originally
developed as legacy software projects for use in, and improvement by,
other teams in later projects.  We expect to make a public-domain
version available and I would welcome collaborators on new uses and
multi-user versions for these tools.

Although the distance learning features of the tools are far from
complete, we can demonstrate several applications using Netscape and
Java that might stimulate other faculty to think about new approaches
to on-line collaborative education, using a replicated database of
constructive graphics to support software design and other discrete
process modeling application domains. Distance learning aspects of this
research were published in 1994 and 1996.

Refs:
1. R Lechner and R Chiang: Collaborative Design Using a Distributed
   Block Diagram Editor, Proceedings, First New England Regional
   Telecommunication Conference, UMass-Lowell, October 1994.
2. R Lechner: BDB: A HTML Browser for Block Diagrams, Proceedings,
   Second New England Regional Telecommunication Conference, March
   1996.
3. Descriptions and some demos of  recent projects are on the web site
  	http://www.cs.uml.edu/~lechner.