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The following abstracts describe Non-Proprietary Technical Reports 
available  from MCC's Software Technology Program. Please send requests
to the person in the sign off banner. 

This list is an update to the posting dated April 6, 1987.

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			SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY PROGRAM
			   TECHNICAL REPORTS
			   (Non-Proprietary)

			 (Updated May 29, 1987)

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TR NUMBER:  STP-003-87

DATE:  April 2, 1987

TR TITLE:  DELI:  A Support Environment for Software Engineering
Research at MCC

AUTHOR(S):	 Peter Marks and Zvi Weiss

ABSTRACT:  DELI is a programming environment to support the research
of MCC's Software Technology Program (MCC-STP) into the upstream
of large-scale system development.  DELI has three principal motivations:
 to encourage rapid prototyping of the research concepts of the
STP staff, by providing needed support in specific areas; to enable
researchers to easily build upon each other's prototypes, by providing
a common computational environment; to facilitate transfer of
MCC-STP developed technology to its shareholders, by building
on a defined programmatic interface to an underlying virtual machine.
 This paper describes (the as yet uncompleted) DELI.

CLASSIFICATION: Non Proprietary/Unrestricted

REVISIONS:  None

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TR NUMBER:  STP-108-87

DATE:  April 16, 1987

TR TITLE:  Domain Connection Discovery

AUTHOR(S):	 Ira D. Baxter

ABSTRACT:  Transformational systems for the (automated) implementation
of software from specifications usually depend on the semantics
of the implemented software to give meaning to the specification.
 We argue that such semantics are ambiguous in the presence of
multiple transforms, and thus limit the effective use of such
a system.  We propose that this limitation can be overcome by
defining the semantics of the to-be-transformed structures.  Having
many islands of semantic definition then lead to the possibility
of discovering the transformations that bridge the gaps between
the islands automatically.  We call this process Domain Connection
Discovery. The paper outlines some initial thoughts on how such
a discovery process might occur.

CLASSIFICATION: Non Proprietary/Unrestricted

REVISIONS:  None

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TR NUMBER:  STP-124-87

DATE:  April 27, 1987

TR TITLE:  Experimental Evaluation of Software Documentation Formats

AUTHOR(S):	 Bill Curtis, MCC-STP; Sylvia Sheppard, CTA, Inc.;
Elizabeth Kruesi-Bailey, Software Metrics, Inc.; John Bailey,
Software Metrics, Inc.; Deborah Boehm-Davis, George Mason University

ABSTRACT:  This paper describes research performed for the Office
of Naval Research while the authors were at General Electric Company,
and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Systems
and Software.  Four controlled experiments investigated the effectiveness
of different documentation formats for presenting information
about computer programs.  Nine different documentation formats
were created by varying three different forms of symbology (natural
language, constrained language, and ideograms) and three different
spatial arrangements (sequential, branching, and hierarchical).
 Professional programmers used these formats as aids to comprehend
(Exp. 1), code (Exp. 2), debug (Exp. 3), and modify (Exp. 4) modular-sized
programs.  Natural language was found to be less effective in
assisting most of the tasks studied than a constrained language
or ideograms.  A smaller effect was observed for the spatial arrangement
in situations where control flow information aided the task. 
The largest effect in the experiments, individual differences
among the participants, accounted for between a third and one
half of the variation in performance.

CLASSIFICATION: Non Proprietary/Unrestricted

REVISIONS:  None

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TR NUMBER:  STP-138-87

DATE:  May 4, 1987

TR TITLE:  Software Design Capture

AUTHOR(S):	 Don Petersen

ABSTRACT:  The capture of the design decisions made during the
construction of a large, complex software system, and the subsequent
retrieval of the information, is a very difficult problem that
has not been adequately addressed by existing software development
environments.  Central to LEONARDO, the software design environment
being developed by the Software Technology Program (STP) of MCC,
is an Information Base which contains the design decisions evaluated.
 This paper describes an activity within the STP that is dedicated
to empirically constructing a useful prototype Information Base.
 Issues of identifying the constituent parts and their effective
organization, and the ready capture of the artifacts of the upstream
activities of a software development project are addressed.

CLASSIFICATION: Non Proprietary/Unrestricted

REVISIONS:  None

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TR NUMBER:  STP-133-87 (A CHARGE OF $35 LEVIED FOR EACH COPY TO NON-MCC
			SHAREHOLDERS)
DATE:  May 8, 1987

TR TITLE:  Highlights of the MCC Software Program:  A Video Tape

AUTHOR(S):	 Ted J. Biggerstaff

ABSTRACT:  This presentation provides an overview of the Software
Technology Program at MCC and focuses on a few specific projects
within that program.  The specific projects that will be described
are:  the PlaneText/PlaneFig hypertext system developed at MCC,
which is being used in several internal projects; the ROSE Reuse
project, which is a system for reusing architectural abstractions
and; the Raddle Distributed Systems Design project, which includes
a visual interface (called Verdi) for developing and simulating
Raddle designs.  The talk will include short videotape clips that
show demonstrations of the computer systems being developed in
these projects.

CLASSIFICATION: Non Proprietary/Unrestricted

REVISIONS:  None

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