DIME: A Direct Manipulation Environment for Evolutionary Development of Software

This paper presents an overview of the DIME environment (DIrect Manipulation Environment) being developed by the author. The paper presents the DIME vision, its catalogue of evolutionary transformations—program transformations used by programmers during software maintenance—and scenarios of how they may be used by a programmer during software maintenance. The DIME system will provide for programmers what programmers provide for other computer users: a simple, intuitive, yet powerful way to transform data with the click of a mouse. It will place at the programmer’s finger-tips—figuratively speaking—rigorous, formal transformations for creating, composing, analyzing, and modifying the architecture of a software system. Using DIME a programmer will radically overhaul the architecture of a software system just by pointand-click and drag-and-drop with the guarantee that the external behavior of the system is unchanged.