A Context-Aware Style of Software Design

Contemporary large software systems rely on complex software ecosystems for managing infrastructural tasks. While these ecosystems facilitate software development, the software architect must put care in not relying on assumptions on behaviors and policies of the ecosystem that may change with platform evolution. Based on our experience with developing analyses within MARPLE, a framework for software comprehension and architecture reconstruction, we propose an abstract, context-aware style for specifying software. In the spirit of decoupling computation from coordination, this style decouples the specification of the computations to be performed from the specification of the contexts where they must take place. Software described in this way exposes its primitives at a level of abstraction closer to that of the framework, enabling better reasoning on the features of the design, easing correct implementation, and fostering a better interaction between the software and the framework it relies on.