A mapping study on documentation in Continuous Software Development

Context: With an increase in Agile, Lean, and DevOps software methodologies over the last years (collectively referred to as Continuous Software Development (CSD)), we have observed that documentation is often poor. Objective: This work aims at collecting studies on documentation challenges, documentation practices, and tools that can support documentation in CSD. Method: A systematic mapping study was conducted to identify and analyze research on documentation in CSD, covering publications between 2001 and 2019. Results: A total of 63 studies were selected. We found 40 studies related to documentation practices and challenges, and 23 studies related to tools used in CSD. The challenges include: informal documentation is hard to understand, documentation is considered as waste, productivity is measured by working software only, documentation is out-of-sync with the software and there is a short-term focus. The practices include: non-written and informal communication, the usage of development artifacts for documentation, and the use of architecture frameworks. We also made an inventory of numerous tools that can be used for documentation purposes in CSD. Overall, we recommend the usage of executable documentation, modern tools and technologies to retrieve information and transform it into documentation, and the practice of minimal documentation upfront combined with detailed design for knowledge transfer afterwards. Conclusion: It is of paramount importance to increase the quantity and quality of documentation in CSD. While this remains challenging, practitioners will benefit from applying the identified practices and tools in order to mitigate the stated challenges

ExTrA: Explaining architectural design tradeoff spaces via dimensionality reduction

In software design, guaranteeing the correctness of run-time system behavior while achieving an acceptable balance among multiple quality attributes remains a challenging problem. Moreover, providing guarantees about the satisfaction of those requirements when systems are subject to uncertain environments is even more challenging. While recent developments in architectural analysis techniques can assist architects in exploring the satisfaction of quantitative guarantees across the design space, existing approaches are still limited because they do not explicitly link design decisions to satisfaction of quality requirements. Furthermore, the amount of information they yield can be overwhelming to a human designer, making it difficult to see the forest for the trees. In this paper we present ExTrA (Explaining Tradeoffs of software Architecture design spaces), an approach to analyzing architectural design spaces that addresses these limitations and provides a basis for explaining design tradeoffs. Our approach employs dimensionality reduction techniques employed in machine learning pipelines like Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Decision Tree Learning (DTL) to enable architects to understand how design decisions contribute to the satisfaction of extra-functional properties across the design space. Our results show feasibility of the approach in two case studies and evidence that combining complementary techniques like PCA and DTL is a viable approach to facilitate comprehension of tradeoffs in poorly-understood design spaces

Agents and Robots for Reliable Engineered Autonomy:A Perspective from the Organisers of AREA 2020

From MDPI via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: accepted 2021-05-13, pub-electronic 2021-05-14Publication status: PublishedFunder: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; Grant(s): EP/R026092, EP/R026173, EP/R026084, 694277Multi-agent systems, robotics and software engineering are large and active research areas with many applications in academia and industry. The First Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy (AREA), organised the first time in 2020, aims at encouraging cross-disciplinary collaborations and exchange of ideas among researchers working in these research areas. This paper presents a perspective of the organisers that aims at highlighting the latest research trends, future directions, challenges, and open problems. It also includes feedback from the discussions held during the AREA workshop. The goal of this perspective is to provide a high-level view of current research trends for researchers that aim at working in the intersection of these research areas

An Automatically Verified Prototype of the Tokeneer ID Station Specification

The Tokeneer project was an initiative set forth by the National Security Agency (NSA, USA) to be used as a demonstration that developing highly secure systems can be made by applying rigorous methods in a cost effective manner. Altran Praxis (UK) was selected by NSA to carry out the development of the Tokeneer ID Station. The company wrote a Z specification later implemented in the SPARK Ada programming language, which was verified using the SPARK Examiner toolset. In this paper, we show that the Z specification can be easily and naturally encoded in the {log} set constraint language, thus generating a functional prototype. Furthermore, we show that {log}'s automated proving capabilities can discharge all the proof obligations concerning state invariants as well as important security properties. As a consequence, the prototype can be regarded as correct with respect to the verified properties. This provides empirical evidence that Z users can use {log} to generate correct prototypes from their Z specifications. In turn, these prototypes enable or simplify some verificatio activities discussed in the paper

Model-based resource analysis and synthesis of service-oriented automotive software architectures

Context Automotive software architectures describe distributed functionality by an interaction of software components. One drawback of today\u27s architectures is their strong integration into the onboard communication network based on predefined dependencies at design time. The idea is to reduce this rigid integration and technological dependencies. To this end, service-oriented architecture offers a suitable methodology since network communication is dynamically established at run-time. Aim We target to provide a methodology for analysing hardware resources and synthesising automotive service-oriented architectures based on platform-independent service models. Subsequently, we focus on transforming these models into a platform-specific architecture realisation process following AUTOSAR Adaptive. Approach For the platform-independent part, we apply the concepts of design space exploration and simulation to analyse and synthesise deployment configurations, i. e., mapping services to hardware resources at an early development stage. We refine these configurations to AUTOSAR Adaptive software architecture models representing the necessary input for a subsequent implementation process for the platform-specific part. Result We present deployment configurations that are optimal for the usage of a given set of computing resources currently under consideration for our next generation of E/E architecture. We also provide simulation results that demonstrate the ability of these configurations to meet the run time requirements. Both results helped us to decide whether a particular configuration can be implemented. As a possible software toolchain for this purpose, we finally provide a prototype. Conclusion The use of models and their analysis are proper means to get there, but the quality and speed of development must also be considered

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, FASE 2020, which took place in Dublin, Ireland, in April 2020, and was held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2020. The 23 full papers, 1 tool paper and 6 testing competition papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. The papers cover topics such as requirements engineering, software architectures, specification, software quality, validation, verification of functional and non-functional properties, model-driven development and model transformation, software processes, security and software evolution

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, FASE 2022, which was held during April 4-5, 2022, in Munich, Germany, as part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2022. The 17 regular papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. The proceedings also contain 3 contributions from the Test-Comp Competition. The papers deal with the foundations on which software engineering is built, including topics like software engineering as an engineering discipline, requirements engineering, software architectures, software quality, model-driven development, software processes, software evolution, AI-based software engineering, and the specification, design, and implementation of particular classes of systems, such as (self-)adaptive, collaborative, AI, embedded, distributed, mobile, pervasive, cyber-physical, or service-oriented applications

Agents and Robots for Reliable Engineered Autonomy

This book contains the contributions of the Special Issue entitled "Agents and Robots for Reliable Engineered Autonomy". The Special Issue was based on the successful first edition of the "Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy" (AREA 2020), co-located with the 24th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2020). The aim was to bring together researchers from autonomous agents, as well as software engineering and robotics communities, as combining knowledge from these three research areas may lead to innovative approaches that solve complex problems related to the verification and validation of autonomous robotic systems