Generating Wizards for Initializing Software Components

A software component often requires programmers to set appropriate initial values in many of its attributes. The work involved in the initialization can be alleviated by attaching a wizard interface to the target component itself and setting the initial values visually from the wizard; however, there are large development costs associated with devising suitable initial value candidates and producing a new wizard to use these initial values for each individual component. In this paper, we propose a system whereby application programs that use a target component are subjected to dynamic analysis to discover which attributes and initial values are set most often during the running of the component. The proposed system generates and attaches a wizard, which supports application programmers to initialize the component visually by using these initial values, to the component. Experiments have shown that the attributes and their initial values chosen for initialization by generated wizards closely resemble the expectations of the component´s original developers.