David Coppit Receives AFOSR Grant
David Coppit has received a 3-year $328,784 grant from
the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research to support his
research on software plans. In traditional software development, programmers
use language abstractions to structure the system into modules to help
maintain intellectual control. Unfortunately, within modules software remains
complex due to fine-grained tangling of concerns. Software plans seek to
address this problem by providing the programmer with a new mechanism for
separating concerns that is orthogonal to traditional language abstractions.
Using a plan-aware editor, a programmer can implement a module in terms of
multiple semi-independent plans, each of which encapsulates a concern or
feature of interest. Once the concerns of the system have been implemented in
separate plans, they can then be integrated to produce the traditional tangled
version expected by compilers and other development tools. By using software
plans, programmers can more easily reason about the implementation and
integration of separately developed features, even when they occur in the same
module.
