A configurable framework for method and tool integration

There is an urgent need to provide a sound generic framework for method and toolintegration, where many differing notations are used, software development is distributedand management support for the software development process is provided. This paperargues that there is much to be learnt from proven practical techniques for softwareconstruction, particularly those that support distributed software integration, heterogeneityand software management. Configuration Programming is one such approach whichadvocates the use of a separate, declarative configuration language for the description ofsystem structure. It has been used in the Conic Environment for the development ofdistributable software, and is being extended for the configuration of heterogeneouscomponents programmed in different programming languages. A number of software toolsexist for the development, construction and management of Conic systems. This papershows how an analogous set of the principles, practice and tools from configurationprogramming can be combined with recent work on ViewPoints1 to provide a configurablef ramework for method and tool integration

A process model of maintenance with reuse: an investigation and an implementation abstract

Sixty to eighty per cent of the software life-cycle cost is spent on the software maintenance phase because software maintenance is usually more difficult than original development and legacy systems are generally large and complex. Software reuse has recently been considered as a best solution to enhance the productivity of a software development team and to reduce maintenance costs. In addition, Software Configuration Management (SCM) is a central part of software maintenance as it is associated with changing existing software and is a discipline for controlling these changes. Thus, both software reuse and SCM have been proposed for making a significant improvement in productivity, quality and cost. However, so far these two technologies have been investigated separately. In order for software reuse and SCM to produce effects by synergy, both approaches require to be introduced into a maintenance environment together. Since software reuse and SCM, and software reuse and software maintenance have many similarities in their activities, these disciplines can be integrated within a software maintenance environment. This research has therefore developed an integrated process model for 'Maintenance with Reuse (MwR)', that supports SCM for a reuse library which is actively maintained for use in a software maintenance environment. This thesis addresses an integrated process model called the MwR model and its prototype tool TERRA (Tool for Evolution of a Reusable and Reconfigurable Assets Library) that consist of a configuration management (CM) process, reuse process, maintenance process and administration of a reuse library. The MwR model and TERRA provide reusers and maintainers with many activities of these four processes such as classifying, storing, retrieving, evaluating, and propagating reusable components, including controlling changes to both reusable components and existing systems. The process model of an integrated approach has been developed and validated using Process Weaver. The TERRA tool has been implemented on the WWW so that the prototype can provide portability, traceability, integration with existing tools, and a distributed maintenance environment. The TERRA prototype has been tested and evaluated through a scenario based case study. Several scenarios based on real data have been created and used for the case study so that an organisation can apply the model and tool to its maintenance environment without many problems. The software maintenance community is facing serious problems with legacy systems, such as a ever increasing frequency of changes and backlogs, lack of integrated tools and methods, and lack of software maintenance support environments. The control and management of changes to the software components in a reuse repository are crucial to successful software development and maintenance. If the component is being used in multiple systems effects of uncontrolled change are more critical. However, reuse libraries and servers currently available have not been successful as they do not support further development or maintenance of the reusable components. In addition, most of them are not sophisticated since they have not been linked to a development/maintenance environment. The integrated model of MwR can overcome many problems that exist in software maintenance and reuse through introduction of SCM functionalities into a maintenance environment. Thus, the integration of these common activities will greatly contribute to enhancing the productivity and quality of software, and will additionally lead to reducing the costs and backlogs of changes within a maintenance environment

Communication Capability for a Simulation-Based Test and Evaluation Framework for Autonomous Systems

The design and testing process for collaborative autonomous systems can be extremely complex and time-consuming, so it is advantageous to begin testing early in the design. A Test & Evaluation (T&E) Framework was previously developed to enable the testing of autonomous software at various levels of mixed reality. The Framework assumes a modular approach to autonomous software development, which introduces the possibility that components are not in the same stage of development. The T&E Framework allows testing to begin early in a simulated environment, with the autonomous software methodically migrating from virtual to augmented to physical environments as component development advances. This thesis extends the previous work to include a communication layer allowing collaborative autonomous systems to communicate with each other and with a virtual environment. Traversing through the virtuality-reality spectrum results in different communication needs for collaborative autonomous systems, namely the use of different communication protocols at each level of the spectrum. For example, testing in a fully simulated environment might be on a single processor or allow wired communication if distributed to different computing platforms. Alternatively, testing in a fully physical environment imposes the need for wireless communication. However, an augmented environment may require the concurrent use of multiple protocols. This research extends the Test & Evaluation Framework by developing a heterogeneous communication layer to facilitate the implementation and testing of collaborative autonomous systems throughout various levels of the virtuality-reality spectrum. The communication layer presented in this thesis allows developers of the core autonomous software to be shielded from the configuration of communication needs, with changes to the communication environment not resulting in changes to the autonomous software

Automatic portal generation based on XML workflow description

This dissertation investigates the automatic generation of computing portals based on XML workflow descriptions. To this end, a software system is designed, implemented and evaluated that allows end-users to build their own customized portal for managing and executing distributed scientific and engineering computations in a service-oriented environment. The whole process of the computation is represented as a data-driven workflow. The portal technique provides a user-friendly problem-solving environment that addresses job assignment, job submission and job feedback. An advantage of this approach is that the complexity of the workflow execution in the distributed environment is hidden from the user. However, the manual development and configuration of the application portal requires considerable expertise in web portal techniques, which most scientific end-users do not have. This dissertation address this problem by describing a tool chain consisting of three tools to achieve automatic portal generation and configuration. In addition, this dissertation presents a mapping of each element of WSDL to the UDDI data model, the conversion from the data-flow workflow to control-flow workflow by using XSLT, an implementation of a drag-and-drop visual programming environment for the generation of a workflow skeleton, and a methodology for the automatic layout of portlets in a portal framework.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

An anti-malware product test orchestration solution for multiple pluggable environments

The term automation gets thrown around a lot these days in the software industry. However, the recent change in test automation in the software engineering process is driven by multiple factors such as environmental factors, both external and internal as well as industry-driven factors. Simply, what we all understand about automation is - the use of some technologies to operate a task. The choice of the right tools, be it in-house or any third-party software, can increase effectiveness, efficiency and coverage of the security product testing. Often, test environments are maintained at various stages in the testing process. Developer’s test, dedicated test, integration test and pre-production or business readiness test are some common phrases in software testing. On the other hand, abstraction is often included between different architectural layers, ever-changing providers of virtualization platforms such as VMWare, OpenStack, AWS as test execution environments and many others with a different state of maintainability. As there is an obvious mismatch in configuration between development, testing and production environment; software testing process is often slow and tedious for many organizations due to the lack of collaboration between IT Operations and Software Development teams. Because of this, identifying and addressing test environmentrelated compatibility becomes a major concern for QA teams. In this context, this thesis presents a DevOps approach and implementation method of an automated test execution solution named OneTA that can interact with multiple test environments including isolated malware test environments. The study was performed to identify a common way of preparing test environments in in-house and publicly available virtualization platforms where distributed tests can run on a regular basis. The current solution allows security product testing in multiple pluggable environments in a single setup utilizing the modern DevOps practice to result minimum efforts. This thesis project was carried out in collaboration with F-Secure, a leading cyber security company in Finland. The project deals with the company’s internal environments for test execution. It explores the available infrastructures so that software development team can use this solution as a test execution tool

Automatic portal generation based on XML workflow description

This dissertation investigates the automatic generation of computing portals based on XML workflow descriptions. To this end, a software system is designed, implemented and evaluated that allows end-users to build their own customized portal for managing and executing distributed scientific and engineering computations in a service-oriented environment. The whole process of the computation is represented as a data-driven workflow. The portal technique provides a user-friendly problem-solving environment that addresses job assignment, job submission and job feedback. An advantage of this approach is that the complexity of the workflow execution in the distributed environment is hidden from the user. However, the manual development and configuration of the application portal requires considerable expertise in web portal techniques, which most scientific end-users do not have. This dissertation address this problem by describing a tool chain consisting of three tools to achieve automatic portal generation and configuration. In addition, this dissertation presents a mapping of each element of WSDL to the UDDI data model, the conversion from the data-flow workflow to control-flow workflow by using XSLT, an implementation of a drag-and-drop visual programming environment for the generation of a workflow skeleton, and a methodology for the automatic layout of portlets in a portal framework

Dynamic Model-based Management of Service-Oriented Infrastructure.

Models are an effective tool for systems and software design. They allow software architects to abstract from the non-relevant details. Those qualities are also useful for the technical management of networks, systems and software, such as those that compose service oriented architectures. Models can provide a set of well-defined abstractions over the distributed heterogeneous service infrastructure that enable its automated management. We propose to use the managed system as a source of dynamically generated runtime models, and decompose management processes into a composition of model transformations. We have created an autonomic service deployment and configuration architecture that obtains, analyzes, and transforms system models to apply the required actions, while being oblivious to the low-level details. An instrumentation layer automatically builds these models and interprets the planned management actions to the system. We illustrate these concepts with a distributed service update operation

A MANAGED APPROACH OF INTERACTION BETWEEN AGILE SCRUM AND SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

In current age the agile software development is one of the most popular software development methodology but due the mismanagement and lack of efficient handling of agile scrum and software configuration management system our software industry is facing a high rate of failed product, keeping this as my motivation, I have designed a efficient checklist which will help the industry to organized the interaction between agile scrum process and software configuration management system in a efficient and managed way and definitely that will increase the successful project in the software industry. Index-term : Agile Scrums, Software development, Software configuration management system, Checklist, Successful project