Implicit Context: Easing Software Evolution and Reuse
Robert J. Walker and Gail C. Murphy

In David S. Rosenblum, editor, Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT Eighth International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE-8): Foundations of Software Engineering for Twenty-First Century Applications (San Diego, California, USA; 8--10 November 2000; SIGSOFT '00), ACM Press, pp. 69--78, 2000.

Abstract

Software systems should consist of simple, conceptually clean software components interacting along narrow, well-defined paths. All too often, this is not reality: complex components end up interacting for reasons unrelated to the functionality they provide. We refer to knowledge within a component that is not conceptually required for the individual behaviour of that component as extraneous embedded knowledge (EEK). EEK creeps into a system in many forms, including dependences upon particular names and the passing of extraneous parameters. This paper proposes the use of implicit context as a means for reducing EEK in systems by combining a mechanism to reflect upon what has happened in a system, through queries on the call history, with a mechanism for altering calls to and from a component. We demonstrate the benefits of implicit context by describing its use to reduce EEK in the Java^TM Swing library.

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