IntensiVE, a toolsuite for documenting and checking structural source-code regularities

Abstract

As size and complexity of software systems increase, preserving the design and specification of their implementation structure gains importance in order to maintain the evolvability of the system. However, due to constant changes, the implementation structure and its documentation tend to dilute over time. To address this problem, we developed IntensiVE: a toolsuite for documenting and checking structural source-code regularities. Building on the underlying models of intensional views and relations, the toolsuite helps a developer in documenting structural source-code regularities, verifying them and offering fine-grained feedback when the source-code does not satisfy those regularities. By illustrating our tools on a Smalltalk application, we show that violations of the source code against the structural regularities can be detected easily and that our toolsuite provides useful feedback for a developer to refine the regularities or to fix the code so that it does satisfy the regularities