In computer programming and software design, code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing computer code—changing the factoring—without changing its external behavior. Refactoring is intended to improve the design, structure, and/or implementation of the software, while preserving its functionality. Potential advantages of refactoring may include improved code readability and reduced complexity; these can improve the source code's maintainability and create a simpler, cleaner, or more expressive internal architecture or object model to improve extensibility. Another potential goal for refactoring is improved performance; software engineers face an ongoing challenge to write programs that perform faster or use less memory.
Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development.
Software architecture refers to the fundamental structures of a software system and the discipline of creating such structures and systems. Each structure comprises software elements, relations among them, and properties of both elements and relations.
In product development and process optimization, a requirement is a singular documented physical or functional need that a particular design, product or process aims to satisfy. It is commonly used in a formal sense in engineering design, including for example in systems engineering, software engineering, or enterprise engineering. It is a broad concept that could speak to any necessary function, attribute, capability, characteristic, or quality of a system for it to have value and utility to a customer, organization, internal user, or other stakeholder. Requirements can come with different levels of specificity; for example, a requirement specification or requirement "spec" refers to an explicit, highly objective/clear requirement to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service.
James Reginald Cordy is a Canadian computer scientist and educator who is Professor Emeritus in the School of Computing at Queen's University. As a researcher he is most recently active in the fields of source code analysis and manipulation, software reverse and re-engineering, and pattern analysis and machine intelligence. He has a long record of previous work in programming languages, compiler technology, and software architecture.
In computer science, an abstract semantic graph (ASG) or term graph is a form of abstract syntax in which an expression of a formal or programming language is represented by a graph whose vertices are the expression's subterms. An ASG is at a higher level of abstraction than an abstract syntax tree, which is used to express the syntactic structure of an expression or program.
Software visualization or software visualisation refers to the visualization of information of and related to software systems—either the architecture of its source code or metrics of their runtime behavior—and their development process by means of static, interactive or animated 2-D or 3-D visual representations of their structure, execution, behavior, and evolution.
A system architecture is the conceptual model that defines the structure, behavior, and more views of a system. An architecture description is a formal description and representation of a system, organized in a way that supports reasoning about the structures and behaviors of the system.
IEEE 1471 is a superseded IEEE standard for describing the architecture of a "software-intensive system", also known as software architecture.
Thread Level Speculation (TLS), also known as Speculative Multithreading, or Speculative Parallelization, is a technique to speculatively execute a section of computer code that is anticipated to be executed later in parallel with the normal execution on a separate independent thread. Such a speculative thread may need to make assumptions about the values of input variables. If these prove to be invalid, then the portions of the speculative thread that rely on these input variables will need to be discarded and squashed. If the assumptions are correct the program can complete in a shorter time provided the thread was able to be scheduled efficiently.
Legacy modernization, also known as software modernization or platform modernization, refers to the conversion, rewriting or porting of a legacy system to modern computer programming languages, architectures, software libraries, protocols or hardware platforms. Legacy transformation aims to retain and extend the value of the legacy investment through migration to new platforms to benefit from the advantage of the new technologies.
Search-based software engineering (SBSE) applies metaheuristic search techniques such as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing and tabu search to software engineering problems. Many activities in software engineering can be stated as optimization problems. Optimization techniques of operations research such as linear programming or dynamic programming are often impractical for large scale software engineering problems because of their computational complexity or their assumptions on the problem structure. Researchers and practitioners use metaheuristic search techniques, which impose little assumptions on the problem structure, to find near-optimal or "good-enough" solutions.
ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010Systems and software engineering — Architecture description is an international standard for architecture descriptions of systems and software.
Reverse engineering is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accomplishes a task with very little insight into exactly how it does so. It is essentially the process of opening up or dissecting a system to see how it works, in order to duplicate or enhance it. Depending on the system under consideration and the technologies employed, the knowledge gained during reverse engineering can help with repurposing obsolete objects, doing security analysis, or learning how something works.
Cloud testing is a form of software testing in which web applications use cloud computing environments to simulate real-world user traffic.
Carlo Ghezzi is a professor and chair of software engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy and an adjunct professor at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Switzerland. At the Politecnico, he is the Rector's Delegate for research; he has been department chair, head of the PhD program, member of the academic senate and of the board of governors of Politecnico.
Within software engineering, the mining software repositories (MSR) field analyzes the rich data available in software repositories, such as version control repositories, mailing list archives, bug tracking systems, issue tracking systems, etc. to uncover interesting and actionable information about software systems, projects and software engineering.
The Continuous Quality Assessment Toolkit (ConQAT) is a configurable software quality analysis engine. ConQAT is based on a pipes and filters architecture that enables flexible complex analysis configurations using a graphical configuration language. This architecture differs from other analysis tools that usually have a fixed data model and hard-wired analysis logics.
A microservice architecture – a variant of the SOA structural style – is an architectural pattern that arranges an application as a collection of loosely-coupled, fine-grained services, communicating through lightweight protocols. One of its goals is that teams can develop and deploy their services independently of others. This is achieved by the reduction of several dependencies in the code base, allowing for developers to evolve their services with limited restrictions from users, and for users to be hidden from additional complexity. As a consequence, organizations are able to develop software with fast growth and size, as well as use off-the-shelf services more easily. Communication requirements are reduced. These benefits come at a cost to maintaining the decoupling. Interfaces need to be designed carefully and treated as a public API. One technique that is used is having multiple interfaces on the same service, or multiple versions of the same service, so as to not disrupt existing users of the code.
Philip H. Newcomb is an American software engineer and CEO of The Software Revolution, Inc., known for his work in the field of formal methods of software engineering.
