COPE: Vision for a change-oriented programming environment

Software engineering involves a lot of change as code artifacts are not only created once but maintained over time. In the last 25 years, major paradigms of program development have arisen - agile development with refactorings, software product lines, moving sequential code to multicore or cloud, etc. Each is centered on particular kinds of change; their conceptual foundations rely on transformations that (semi-) automate these changes. We are exploring how transformations can be placed at the center of software development in future IDEs, and when such a view can provide benefits over the traditional view. COPE, a Change-Oriented Programming Environment, looks at 5 activities: (1) analyze what changes programmers typically make and how they perceive, recall, and communicate changes, (2) automate transformations to make it easier to apply and script changes, (3) develop tools that compose and manipulate transformations to make it easier to reuse them, (4) integrate transformations with version control to provide better ways for archiving and understanding changes, and (5) develop tools that infer higher-level transformations from lower-level changes. Characterizing software development in terms of transformations is an essential step to take software engineering from manual development to (semi-) automated development of software.