headingimage

About Lero Research

Lero is the Irish software research centre.It brings together leading software research teams from Universities and Institutes of Technology in a coordinated centre of research excellence with a strong industry focus. Lero has raised the level and profile of Irish software research with such effect that it is now one of the best known and highly regarded software-related research centres in the world.  The centre has the proven capacity to attract and retain global research leaders and to make a substantial contribution both to software-related research and to the Irish economy. The Lero Centre is supported by a Research Centre grant from SFI, by other state grants, by industry contributions and by external funding (particularly the EU’s research programmes). Lero interfaces with a wide range of industry, state agencies, educational bodies and international collaborators to deliver on its twin goals of research excellence and social and economic relevance.

JITTAC Architectural Awareness for Developers

Architectural Awareness for Developers

If a developer wishes to make changes to the system by altering old code or adding new code auto complete will appear. The suggestions offered by autocomplete are re-ranked and color coded. Methods or fields that are accessible and are consistent with the architects model are placed first and colored green, methods and fields that are in software elements and are yet unmapped to the architectural model appear next and are colored amber and finally the methods and entities that can only be accessed in violation of the architects express model are presented last and in red. This gives the developer architectural awareness as he codes i.e. just in time.

If for e.g. a programmer wishes to save work which he know is in violation of the architects design he will be prompted with warnings in the left hand panel reflecting all of inconsistencies introduced. By right clicking on any of the lines of code in question he or she can go back to the architectural view and see the dependency highlighted in the architectural model giving them valuable contextual information on the violation he/she has introduced. They can then click on that edge and through the architectural relations view go back to the code making the navigation full round trip.

At this stage, after checking the context the developer may still be convinced that the dependencies required may be desirable, If so, he has the option of sending an email to the architect by again right clicking on the inconsistent line of code and selecting the option to email the architect. This bring up and email client with a message addressed to the architect, with all the information required to uniquely identify the line of code. Space is also left for the developers rational.

On seeing the email the architect is free to go into JITTAC and explore the consequences of the developers actions and can accept the inconsistency as a valuable addition to the architecture.