(MU-CTL-01-12) Towards Model Driven Game Engineering in SimSYS: Requirements for the Agile Software Development Process Game

Software Engineering (SE) and Systems Engineering (Sys) are knowledge intensive, specialized, rapidly changing disciplines; their educational infrastructure faces significant challenges including the need to rapidly, widely, and cost effectively introduce new or revised course material; encourage the broad participation of students; address changing student motivations and attitudes; support undergraduate, graduate and lifelong learning; and incorporate the skills needed by industry. Games have a reputation for being fun and engaging; more importantly immersive, requiring deep thinking and complex problem solving. We believe educational games are essential in the next generation of e-learning tools. An extensible, freely available, engaging, problem-based game platform that provides students with an interactive simulated experience closely resembling the activities performed in a (real) industry development project would transform the SE/Sys education infrastructure. Our goal is to extend the state-of-the-art research in SE/Sys education by investigating a game development platform (GDP) from an interdisciplinary perspective (education, game research, and software/systems engineering). A meta-model has been proposed to provide a rigourous foundation that integrates the three disciplines. The GDP is intended to support the semi-automated development of collections of scripted games and their execution, where each game embodies a specific set of learning objectives. The games are scripted using a template based approach. The templates integrate three approaches: use cases; storyboards; and state machines (timed, concurrent, hierarchical state machines). The specification templates capture the structure of the game (Game, Acts, Scenes, Screens, Challenges), storyline, characters (player, non-player, external), graphics, music/sound effects, rules, and so on. The instantiated templates are (manually) transformed into XML game scripts that can be loaded into the SimSYS Game Play Engine. As a game is played, the game play events are logged; they are analyzed to automatically assess a player’s accomplishments and automatically adapt the game play script. Currently, we are manually defining a collection of games. The games are being used to ensure the GDP is flexible and reliable (i.e., the prototype can load and correctly run a variety of game scripts), the ontology is comprehensive, and the templates assist in defining well-organized, modular game scripts. In this report, we present the initial part of an Agile Software Development Process game (Act I, Scenes 1 and 2) that embodies learning objectives related to SE fundamentals (requirements, architecture, testing, process); planning with Gantt charts; working with budgets; and selecting a team for an agile development project. A student player is rewarded in the game by getting hired, scoring points, or getting promoted to lead a project. The game has a variety of settings including a classroom, job fair, and a work environment with meeting rooms, cubicles, and a water cooler station. The main non-player characters include a teacher, boss, and an evil peer. In the future, semi-automated support for creating new game scripts will be explored using a wizard interface. The templates will be formally defined, supporting automated transformation into XML game scripts that can be loaded into the SimSYS Game Engine. We also plan to explore transforming the requirements into a notation that can be imported into a commercial tool that supports Statechart simulation

Automatic generation of software applications: a platform-based MDA approach

The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) allows moving the software development from the time consuming and error-prone level of writing program code to the next higher level of modeling. In order to gain benefit from this innovative technology, it is necessary to satisfy two requirements. These are first, the creation of compact, complete and correct platform independent models (PIM) and second, the development of a flexible and extensible model transformation framework taking into account frequent changes of the target platform. In this thesis a platform-based methodology is developed to create PIM by abstracting common modeling elements into a platform independent modeling library called Design Platform Model (DPM). The DPM contains OCL-based types for modeling primitive and collection types, a platform independent GUI toolkit as well as other common modeling elements, such as those for IO-operations. Furthermore, a DPM profile containing diverse domain specific and design pattern-based stereotypes is also developed to create PIM with high-level semantics. The behavior in PIM is specified using an OCL-like action language called eXecutable OCL (XOCL), which is also developed in this thesis. For model transformation, the model compiler MOCCA is developed based on a flexible and extensible architecture. The model mapper components in the current version of MOCCA are able to map desktop applications onto JSE platform; the both business object layer and persistence layer of a three-layered enterprise applications onto JEE platform and SAP ABAP platform. The entire model transformation process is finished with complete code generation

Using High-Rising Cities to Visualize Performance in Real-Time

For developers concerned with a performance drop or improvement in their software, a profiler allows a developer to quickly search and identify bottlenecks and leaks that consume much execution time. Non real-time profilers analyze the history of already executed stack traces, while a real-time profiler outputs the results concurrently with the execution of software, so users can know the results instantaneously. However, a real-time profiler risks providing overly large and complex outputs, which is difficult for developers to quickly analyze. In this paper, we visualize the performance data from a real-time profiler. We visualize program execution as a three-dimensional (3D) city, representing the structure of the program as artifacts in a city (i.e., classes and packages expressed as buildings and districts) and their program executions expressed as the fluctuating height of artifacts. Through two case studies and using a prototype of our proposed visualization, we demonstrate how our visualization can easily identify performance issues such as a memory leak and compare performance changes between versions of a program. A demonstration of the interactive features of our prototype is available at https://youtu.be/eleVo19Hp4k.Comment: 10 pages, VISSOFT 2017, Artifact: https://github.com/sefield/high-rising-city-artifac

Exploiting UML dynamic object modeling for the visualization of C++ programs

In this paper we present an approach to modeling and visualizing the dynamic interactions among objects in a C++ application. We exploit UML diagrams to expressively visualize both the static and dynamic properties of the application. We make use of a class diagram and call graph of the application to select the parts of the application to be modeled, thereby reducing the number of objects and methods under consideration with a concomitant reduction in the cognitive burden on the user of our system. We use aspects to insert probes into the application to enable profiling of the interactions of objects and methods and we visualize these interactions by providing sequence and communication diagrams for the parts of the program under consideration. We complement our static selectors with dynamic selectors that enable the user to further filter objects and methods from the sequence and communication diagrams, further enhancing the cognitive economy of our system. A key feature of our approach is the provision for dynamic interaction with both the profiler and the application. Interaction with the profiler enables filtering of methods and objects. Interaction with the application enables the user to supply input to the application to provide direction and enhance comprehension or debugging

Model-driven generative programming for BIS mobile applications

The burst on the availability of smart phones based on the Android platform calls for cost-effective techniques to generate mobile apps for general purpose, distributed business information systems (BIS). To mitigate this problem our research aims at applying model-driven techniques to automatically generate usable prototypes with a sound, maintainable, architecture. Following three base principles: model-based generation, separation of concerns, paradigm seamlessness, we try to answer the main guiding question – how to reduce development time and cost by transforming a given domain model into an Android application? To answer this question we propose to develop an application that follows a generative approach for mobile BIS apps that will mitigate the identified problems. Its input is a platform independent model (PIM), with business rules specified in OCL (Object Constraint Language). We adopted the Design Science Research methodology, that helps gaining problem understanding, identifying systemically appropriate solutions, and in effectively evaluating new and innovative solutions. To better evaluate our solution, besides resorting to third party tools to test specific components integration, we demonstrated its usage and evaluated how well it mitigates a subset of the identified problems in an observational study (we presented our generated apps to an outside audience in a controlled environment to study our model-based centered and, general apps understandability) and communicated its effectiveness to researchers and practitioners.O grande surto de disponibilidade de dispositivos móveis para a plataforma Android requer, técnicas generativas de desenvolvimento de aplicações para sistemas comuns e/ou distribuídos de informação empresariais/negócio, que otimizem a relação custo-benefício. Para mitigar este problema, esta investigação visa aplicar técnicas orientadas a modelos para, automaticamente, gerar protótipos funcionais de aplicações com uma arquitetura robusta e fácil de manter. Seguindo para tal três princípios base: geração baseada no modelo, separação de aspetos, desenvolvimento sem soturas (sem mudança de paradigma), tentamos dar resposta à pergunta orientadora – como reduzir o tempo e custo de desenvolvimento de uma aplicação Android por transformação de um dado modelo de domínio? De modo a responder a esta questão nós propomos desenvolver uma aplicação que segue uma abordagem generativa para aplicações de informação empresariais/negócio móveis de modo a mitigar os problemas identificados. Esta recebe modelos independentes de plataforma (PIM), com regras de negócio especificadas em OCL (Object Constraint Language). Seguimos a metodologia Design Science Research que ajuda a identificar e perceber o problema, a identificar sistematicamente soluções apropriadas aos problemas e a avaliar mais eficientemente soluções novas e inovadoras. Para melhor avaliar a nossa solução, apesar de recorrermos a ferramentas de terceiros para testar a integração de componentes específicos, também demonstramos a sua utilização, através de estudos experimentais (em um ambiente controlado, apresentamos as nossas aplicações geradas a uma audiência externa que nos permitiu estudar a compreensibilidade baseada e centrada em modelos e, de um modo geral, das aplicações) avaliamos o quanto esta mitiga um subconjunto de problemas identificados e comunicamos a sua eficácia para investigadores e profissionais