Round-Trip Engineering [was: Thoughts from an outsider]

Klaus D. Witzel klaus.witzel at cobss.com
Thu Aug 31 08:19:58 UTC 2006


Hi Hans-Martin,

I am very interested in having code as (integrated) part of a document.  
The following describes minimally what I want from a document+with+code, a  
"... two-phased approach that continuously synchronizes between a data  
modeling view and a view on an object-oriented implementation". There we  
see

- a domain analysis view, represented by a data modeling diagram
- implementation objects, related to OO programs at code-time
- population objects, derived from the former, containing actual data for  
running

Found at
- http://prog.vub.ac.be/progsite/Person.php?rdid=25070

I wouldn't care if this where called literate programming or so, as long  
as round-trip engineering allowed me to put comments anywhere I want :)

/Klaus

On Thu, 31 Aug 2006 07:41:16 +0200, Hans-Martin Mosner <hmm at heeg.de> wrote:
> A long time ago, when I re-implemented a big chunk of TeX in VisualWorks
> to create a WYSIWYG TeX editor (WysiTeX), we tried to do something like
> literate programming in Smalltalk. My idea was that a Smalltalk literate
> program could not possibly have the form of a linear book, since
> Smalltalk programs are essentially not linear, so we tried to create a
> hyperlinked documentation (using a collaborative hypertext editor also
> written in VisualWorks). I was not really satisfied with the result - it
> did not have the close linkage to the code, and I don't think that an
> outsider would have been able to grok our code with the help of this doc
> bettern than without it.
>
> That said, I still feel that something like that would be needed. Since
> working with Objectory a number of years ago, I became enamoured with
> the idea of traceability - having explicit links between analysis,
> design and code. Objectory was a little too waterfallish, an agile tool
> would probably have to look a bit different, but still I think that a
> really good development environment should be able to keep all this
> information in one place, allowing me to create and follow links, to
> store document files, drawings, diagrams as well as runtime, building
> and test code in one place, with version history all over the place, too.
>
> I know that such a system would not help me much in writing better
> method comments (that's still a matter of discipline which I'm a bit
> lacking) but it would probably allow me to create overview documents
> which allow others to get into the code much more easily.
>
> Cheers,
> Hans-Martin
>
>





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