A design recording framework to facilitate knowledge sharing in collaborative software engineering

This paper describes an environment that allows a development team to share knowledge about software artefacts by recording decisions and rationales as well as supporting the team in formulating and maintaining design constraints. It explores the use of multi-dimensional design spaces for capturing various issues arising during development and presenting this meta-information using a network of views. It describes a framework to underlie the collaborative environment and shows the supporting architecture and its implementation. It addresses how the artefacts and their meta-information are captured in a non-invasive way and shows how an artefact repository is embedded to store and manage the artefacts

Support for collaborative component-based software engineering

Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described. This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject. In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice. Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects. Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools). Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying, assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing. Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation, empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further advances

Kronos: a workflow assembler for genome analytics and informatics.

BackgroundThe field of next-generation sequencing informatics has matured to a point where algorithmic advances in sequence alignment and individual feature detection methods have stabilized. Practical and robust implementation of complex analytical workflows (where such tools are structured into "best practices" for automated analysis of next-generation sequencing datasets) still requires significant programming investment and expertise.ResultsWe present Kronos, a software platform for facilitating the development and execution of modular, auditable, and distributable bioinformatics workflows. Kronos obviates the need for explicit coding of workflows by compiling a text configuration file into executable Python applications. Making analysis modules would still require programming. The framework of each workflow includes a run manager to execute the encoded workflows locally (or on a cluster or cloud), parallelize tasks, and log all runtime events. The resulting workflows are highly modular and configurable by construction, facilitating flexible and extensible meta-applications that can be modified easily through configuration file editing. The workflows are fully encoded for ease of distribution and can be instantiated on external systems, a step toward reproducible research and comparative analyses. We introduce a framework for building Kronos components that function as shareable, modular nodes in Kronos workflows.ConclusionsThe Kronos platform provides a standard framework for developers to implement custom tools, reuse existing tools, and contribute to the community at large. Kronos is shipped with both Docker and Amazon Web Services Machine Images. It is free, open source, and available through the Python Package Index and at https://github.com/jtaghiyar/kronos

Software test automation : a design and tool selection approach for a heterogeneous environment

textThis report describes a design approach for implementing a software test automation solution that can accommodate existing test processes in an organization. The process of implementing a software test automation solution is a large undertaking and requires careful planning to avoid unsuccessful implementations. This report outlines a design that can integrate with existing business and development processes in an organization, and recommends automation and development frameworks for achieving the test automation goals. Considerations for a heterogeneous test environment with varying types of supported operating systems, such as Windows and Linux, and multiple test execution environments, such as Java and .NET, have been made in this design and in the tool selections for the system implementation. The report also describes some of the challenges and caveats of automation in a heterogeneous environment along with recommended solutions to these challenges.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Context-aware adaptation in DySCAS

DySCAS is a dynamically self-configuring middleware for automotive control systems. The addition of autonomic, context-aware dynamic configuration to automotive control systems brings a potential for a wide range of benefits in terms of robustness, flexibility, upgrading etc. However, the automotive systems represent a particularly challenging domain for the deployment of autonomics concepts, having a combination of real-time performance constraints, severe resource limitations, safety-critical aspects and cost pressures. For these reasons current systems are statically configured. This paper describes the dynamic run-time configuration aspects of DySCAS and focuses on the extent to which context-aware adaptation has been achieved in DySCAS, and the ways in which the various design and implementation challenges are met