Publications

Details

Oscar Nierstrasz and Tudor Gîrba. Lessons in Software Evolution Learned by Listening to Smalltalk. In J. Leeuwen et al. (Ed.), SOFSEM 2010, LNCS 5901 p. 77—95, Springer-Verlag, 2010. DOI PDF →
Abstract
The biggest challenge facing software developers today is how to gracefully evolve complex software systems in the face of changing requirements. We clearly need software systems to be more dynamic, compositional and model-centric, but instead we continue to build systems that are static, baroque and inflexible. How can we better build change-enabled systems in the future? To answer this question, we propose to look back to one of the most successful systems to support change, namely Smalltalk. We briefly introduce Smalltalk with a few simple examples, and draw some lessons for software evolution. Smalltalk's simplicity, its reflective design, and its highly dynamic nature all go a long way towards enabling change in Smalltalk applications. We then illustrate how these lessons work in practice by reviewing a number of research projects that support software evolution by exploiting Smalltalk's design. We conclude by summarizing open issues and challenges for change-enabled systems of the future.

You are here:

Most of my early papers are related to my PhD thesis and deal with evolution analysis.

The essence of my PhD can be found in a journal article published in JSME.

Since 2005 I got involved in various projects and I co-authored publications on topics mostly in the reengineering area.

We reported on the Story of the Moose and the role of Smalltalk and meta-modeling in its development.

Other works relate to semantic analysis or dynamic analysis. A particular topic that continues to capture my attention is identifying how teams work. Thus, I worked on correlating authorship information with code duplication or feature development

I also got involved in dynamic analysis. I worked on identifying features and their evolution, and I participated in the development of object-flow analysis, a novel dynamic analysis that led to a publication that received the distinguished paper award at ECOOP 2008.

Visualization and interaction are crosscutting concerns in my research. The experience resulted in the development of Mondrian, and of Glamour.