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.