by Romain Robbes romain.robbes@lu.unisi.ch
Presentation: [pdf]
Abstract: To this day, software development and tools remain firmly grounded in the present:
Tools deal with states of a program, usually the current one. The history of a program is rarely taken into consideration when the need comes to evolve it. Even in Smalltalk, where recent versions of a method can be retrieved, a lot of information about a program remains unexploited. To exploit this information to its full extent, an explicit model of the change process is needed.
This talk presents an approach to gather and exploit this information by modelling program evolution using first-class change operations. We will talk about the high-level concepts behind our approach as well as concrete implementation schemes present in SpyWare, our prototype tool. Examples of tools exploiting this information will be presented, in the attempt to convince you to install it and change your perception of software development.
Bio: Romain Robbes is a Ph.D. student in informatics at the university of Lugano, working in the area of software engineering and software evolution. He has been involved in the smalltalk community for several years already. He has done a few contributions to the squeak community, with a focus on development tools improvement.