149,265 research outputs found
A Longitudinal Study of Identifying and Paying Down Architectural Debt
Architectural debt is a form of technical debt that derives from the gap
between the architectural design of the system as it "should be" compared to
"as it is". We measured architecture debt in two ways: 1) in terms of
system-wide coupling measures, and 2) in terms of the number and severity of
architectural flaws. In recent work it was shown that the amount of
architectural debt has a huge impact on software maintainability and evolution.
Consequently, detecting and reducing the debt is expected to make software more
amenable to change. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of a healthcare
communications product created by Brightsquid Secure Communications Corp. This
start-up company is facing the typical trade-off problem of desiring
responsiveness to change requests, but wanting to avoid the ever-increasing
effort that the accumulation of quick-and-dirty changes eventually incurs. In
the first stage of the study, we analyzed the status of the "before" system,
which indicated the impacts of change requests. This initial study motivated a
more in-depth analysis of architectural debt. The results of this analysis were
used to motivate a comprehensive refactoring of the software system. The third
phase of the study was a follow-on architectural debt analysis which quantified
the improvements made. Using this quantitative evidence, augmented by
qualitative evidence gathered from in-depth interviews with Brightsquid's
architects, we present lessons learned about the costs and benefits of paying
down architecture debt in practice.Comment: Submitted to ICSE-SEIP 201
Traceability-based change management in operational mappings
This paper describes an approach for the analysis of changes in model transformations in the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). Models should be amenable to changes in user requirements and technological platforms. Impact analysis of changes can be based on traceability of model elements. We propose a model for generating trace links between model elements and study scenarios for changes in source models and how to identify the impacted elements in the target model
Change Impact Analysis for SysML Requirements Models based on Semantics of Trace Relations
Change impact analysis is one of the applications of requirements traceability in software engineering community. In this paper, we focus on requirements and requirements relations from traceability perspective. We provide formal definitions of the requirements relations in SysML for change impact analysis. Our approach aims at keeping the model synchronized with what stakeholders want to be modeled, and possibly implemented as well, which we called as the domain. The differences between the domain and model are defined as external inconsistencies. The inconsistencies are propagated for the whole model by using the formalization of relations, and mapped to proposed model changes. We provide tool support which is a plug-in of the commercial visual software modeler BluePrint
Accessible user interface support for multi-device ubiquitous applications: architectural modifiability considerations
The market for personal computing devices is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. When developing software targeting such ubiquitous devices, the balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue. With the rise of Web technology and the Internet of things, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nonetheless, the diversity of presentation and interaction modalities still drastically limit the number of targetable devices and the accessibility toward end users. This paper presents webinos, a multi-device application middleware platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto, the platform's architectural modifiability considerations are described and evaluated as a generic enabler for supporting applications, which are executed in ubiquitous computing environments
Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design
This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications
Robustness-Driven Resilience Evaluation of Self-Adaptive Software Systems
An increasingly important requirement for certain classes of software-intensive systems is the ability to self-adapt their structure and behavior at run-time when reacting to changes that may occur to the system, its environment, or its goals. A major challenge related to self-adaptive software systems is the ability to provide assurances of their resilience when facing changes. Since in these systems, the components that act as controllers of a target system incorporate highly complex software, there is the need to analyze the impact that controller failures might have on the services delivered by the system. In this paper, we present a novel approach for evaluating the resilience of self-adaptive software systems by applying robustness testing techniques to the controller to uncover failures that can affect system resilience. The approach for evaluating resilience, which is based on probabilistic model checking, quantifies the probability of satisfaction of system properties when the target system is subject to controller failures. The feasibility of the proposed approach is evaluated in the context of an industrial middleware system used to monitor and manage highly populated networks of devices, which was implemented using the Rainbow framework for architecture-based self-adaptation
- …