CSER Projects >> Rapid Assisted Migration

Rapid Assisted Migration Project (RAMP)

Principal Investigators

  • Mike Godfrey
  • Ric Holt
  • Andrew Malton

RAMP Goals and Activities

This project, which is a cooperative effort between Sun Microsystems and the University of Waterloo, concentrates on the following as applied to migration to web-based environments:

  1. Rapid techniques for evaluating migration candidates and estimating effort involved.
  2. Tools to aid rapid transformation and restructuring of large software systems.
  3. Tools to aid in rapid program comprehension of large software systems to aid in migration.
  4. Software architectural models and methodologies to aid migration, keeping in mind the need for performance, time-to-market, and other non-functional requirements ("ilities") such as portability, scalability, extensibility, reusability, and interoperability.

A key aspect to this work is the need for rapid deployment. Our work emphasizes the necessity to valuate, understand and migrate software under the intense market conditions which demand rapid response, while maintaining software quality. To advance the state of the art in this area, we have access to the Sun's industrial expertise in this area and we will have access (some of it restricted to second hand access due to propriety considerations) to a large corpus of software that is undergoing the process of industrial migration. Sun's ongoing work has produced automatic techniques to assist in evaluating the difficulty to migrate particular software.

Selected Publications

  • "Source transformation in software engineering using the TXL transformation system", J.R. Cordy, T.R. Dean, A.J. Malton and K.A. Schneider, Journal of Information and Software Technology, Special Issue on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation, February 2002.
  • "Architecture Recovery of Web Applications", Ahmed E. Hassan and Richard C. Holt, Proceedings of ICSE 2002: International Conference on Software Engineering, Orlando, Florida, 19-25 May 2002.
  • "Tracking Structural Evolution using Origin Analysis" (position paper), Michael Godfrey and Qiang Tu, Proc. of 2002 Intl. Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution (IWPSE-02), Orlando, Florida, May 2002.
  • "Introduction to the Grok Programming Language", Technical Report, Ric Holt, May 2002
  • "Architecture Recovery of Dynamically Linked Applications: A Case Study", Igor Ivkovic and Michael Godfrey, Proc. of 2002 Intl. Workshop on Program Comprehension (IWPC-02), Paris, June 2002.
  • "An Integrated Approach for Studying Software Architectural Evolution", Qiang Tu and Michael Godfrey, Proc. of 2002 Intl. Workshop on Program Comprehension (IWPC-02), Paris, June 2002.
  • "Software Architecture as a Shared Mental Model", International Workshop on Program Comprehension, Ric Holt, Paris, June 2002.
  • "Using Graph Patterns to Extract Scenarios", Jingwei Wu, Ahmed E. Hassan and Richard C. Holt, Proceeding of IWPC 2002: Using Graph Patterns to Extract Scenarios, La Sorbonne, Paris, France, June 26-29, 2002.
  • "On Using a Benchmark to Evaluate C++ Extractors", Susan Elliott Sim, Steve Easterbrook and Richard C. Holt, International Workshop on Program Comprehension, Paris, June 2002.
  • "Towards a Common Query Language for Reverse Engineering", Richard C. Holt, Andreas Winter, and Jingwei Wu, Technical Report, Institute for Computer Science, Universitat, Koblenz-Landau, August 2002.
  • "Grammar programming in TXL", T. R. Dean, J. R. Cordy, A. J. Malton, K. A. Schneider, Proceedings of Second IEEE International Workshop on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation. Montreal, October 2002.
  • "Semantic Grep: regular expressions + relational abstraction", R. I. Bull, A. Trevors, A. Malton, and M. W. Godfrey, Proceedings of 9th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering. Richmond, November 2002.
  • "Architectural Reconstruction in the Dark", Andrew Trevors and Michael W. Godfrey, Workshop on Software Architecture Reconstruction held in conjunction with WCRE-02, Richmond VA, November 1, 2002.
  • "The build / comprehend pipelines", R. C. Holt, M. W. Godfrey, A. J. Malton, Proceedings of the Second ASERC Workshop on Software Architecture. Banff, February 2003.
  • "A Visual Architectural Approach to Maintaining Web Applications", Ahmed E. Hassan and Richard C. Holt, Annals of Software Engineering - Volume 16 - Special Volume on Software Visualization, 2003.
  • "Using Benchmarking to Advance Research: A Challenge to Software Engineering", Susan Elliott Sim, Steve Easterbrook, and Richard C. Holt, Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth International Conference on Software Engineering, Portland, Oregon, 3-10 May 2003.
  • "Completeness of a Fact Extractor", Yuan Lin, Richard C. Holt, Andrew Malton, Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, November 13-16, 2003, Victoria BC Canada.
  • "Formalizing Fact Extraction", Yuan Lin & Richard Holt, ATEM 2003: First International Workshop on Meta-Models and Schemas for Reverse Engineering, Victoria, BC, November 13, 2003
  • "Stability and Volatility in the Linux Kernel", J. Champaign, A. J. Malton, and X. Dong. To appear in Proceedings of the International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution (IWPSE 2003).