Synthesis: A Design Handbook for Integrating Software Components [my Ph.D. dissertation]

Contents
Overview

Dissertation
Publications

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   Overview


Component-based software development places an emphasis on identifying and managing interdependencies among preexisting pieces of software in order to integrate them into new systems. Traditional software development methodologies, on the other hand, place an emphasis on representing components, leaving the description and management of component interdependencies implicit, or distributed among the components. To support component-based software development, we need new methodologies and tools which elevate the representation and management of software component interdependencies to a distinct design problem, orthogonal to the specification and implementation of the core functional pieces of an application. A core element of such methodologies will be a "design handbook" of software component interconnection, which catalogues common software interconnection dependencies and sets of alternative protocols for managing them. SYNTHESIS, a component-based software development environment based on this perspective, has been developed and successfully used to minimize the manual effort required to integrate independently developed components into new applications.

 


   Ph.D. Dissertation
[ZIP] A Coordination Perspective on Software Architecture: Towards a Design Handbook for Integrating Software Components. MIT Center for Coordination Science Working Paper 193 (Ph.D. Thesis), February 1996

   Selected Publications
[PDF] Towards A Design Handbook for Integrating Software Components. In Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Assessment of Software Tools (SAST'97), Pittsburgh, PA, June 2-5, 1997, pages 3-13.
[PDF] A Coordination Perspective on Software System Design. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE'97), Madrid, Spain, June 17-20, 1997, pages 569-578.
[PDF] The SYNTHESIS Environment for Component-Based Software Development. In Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Software Technology and Engineering Practice (STEP'97), London, UK, July 14-18, 1997.