DIME: a direct manipulation environment for evolutionary development of software
Arun Lakhotia · 2002
This paper presents an overview of the DIME environment (DIrect Manipulation Environment) being developed by the author. The paper presents the DIME vision, its catalogue of evolutionary transformations-program transformations used by programmers during software maintenance-and scenarios of how they may be used by a programmer during software maintenance. The DIME system will provide for programmers what programmers provide for other computer users: a simple, intuitive, yet powerful way to transform data with the click of a mouse. It will place at the programmer's finger-tips-figuratively speaking-rigorous, formal transformations for creating, composing, analyzing, and modifying the architecture of a software system. Using DIME a programmer will radically overhaul the architecture of a software system just by point-and-click and drag-and-drop with the guarantee that the external behavior of the system is unchanged.