以視覺化及再用為基礎的軟體建構思維模式

Abstract

Software reuse has been considered an effective approach to improve software productivity and software quality. Reusable Software Components (RSC) are the basic building blocks for software construction based on the software reuse practice. Object-oriented mechanisms-data abstraction, information hiding, inheritance and dynamic binding-are the base for the design and implementation of software reusable components. With the aid of a visual programming model, one can treat each reusable component as an icon. The programming paradigm can therefore be moved from programming-in-the-small to programming-in-the-very- large by visually manipulating these available icons (reusable components). To accomplish this objective, a visual programming paradigm and an icon interconnection language must be defined and implemented.Multimedia technology has played an important role in today's application software due to its friendly user interaction as well as its naturally fitting on real world modeling. We, therefore, extended reusable software components to incorporate with multimedia. In other words, the reusable software components include not only code and documents, but also voice narration, animation sequences and message mechanisms. We called such software components as Multimedia Reusable Components (MRCs). Based on these developed MRCs, an innovative software requirement representation paradigm is introduced. With this innovative representation paradigm for requirement specification, one can view the software requirement representation as sequences of animation instead of reading voluminous software requirements. Such an innovative software requirement representation paradigm will provide users a visual effect and to have an earlier feedback from users. Also, it will provide an easy and natural form of the communication between designers and users.Thus, in this dissertation research, we focus our study on the following issues:1) Discuss reusable software components and propose the multimedia reusable components.2) Propose a visual software construction paradigm based on multimedia reusable components.3) Propose a new software requirement representation paradigm and implement a supporting tool.4) Evaluate the requirements representation tool.5) Propose a visual programming paradigm and discuss the feasibility of a visual programming model.These five issues are related to one another and, together, they form a visual programming system for programmers to conduct their programming practice at the programming-in-the-very-large level. Based on these research results, software construction can then be reached at the level of programming-in-the-super-large. These research results will contribute to the improvement of software productivity and quality.