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

Industrialising Software Development in Systems Integration

Compared to other disciplines, software engineering as of today is still dependent on craftsmanship of highly-skilled workers. However, with constantly increasing complexity and efforts, existing software engineering approaches appear more and more inefficient. A paradigm shift towards industrial production methods seems inevitable. Recent advances in academia and practice have lead to the availability of industrial key principles in software development as well. Specialization is represented in software product lines, standardization and systematic reuse are available with component-based development, and automation has become accessible through model-driven engineering. While each of the above is well researched in theory, only few cases of successful implementation in the industry are known. This becomes even more evident in specialized areas of software engineering such as systems integration. Today’s IT systems need to quickly adapt to new business requirements due to mergers and acquisitions and cooperations between enterprises. This certainly leads to integration efforts, i.e. joining different subsystems into a cohesive whole in order to provide new functionality. In such an environment. the application of industrial methods for software development seems even more important. Unfortunately, software development in this field is a highly complex and heterogeneous undertaking, as IT environments differ from customer to customer. In such settings, existing industrialization concepts would never break even due to one-time projects and thus insufficient economies of scale and scope. This present thesis, therefore, describes a novel approach for a more efficient implementation of prior key principles while considering the characteristics of software development for systems integration. After identifying the characteristics of the field and their affects on currently-known industrialization concepts, an organizational model for industrialized systems integration has thus been developed. It takes software product lines and adapts them in a way feasible for a systems integrator active in several business domains. The result is a three-tiered model consolidating recurring activities and reducing the efforts for individual product lines. For the implementation of component-based development, the present thesis assesses current component approaches and applies an integration metamodel to the most suitable one. This ensures a common understanding of systems integration across different product lines and thus alleviates component reuse, even across product line boundaries. The approach is furthermore aligned with the organizational model to depict in which way component-based development may be applied in industrialized systems integration. Automating software development in systems integration with model-driven engineering was found to be insufficient in its current state. The reason herefore lies in insufficient tool chains and a lack of modelling standards. As an alternative, an XML-based configuration of products within a software product line has been developed. It models a product line and its products with the help of a domain-specific language and utilizes stylesheet transformations to generate compliable artefacts. The approach has been tested for its feasibility within an exemplarily implementation following a real-world scenario. As not all aspects of industrialized systems integration could be simulated in a laboratory environment, the concept was furthermore validated during several expert interviews with industry representatives. Here, it was also possible to assess cultural and economic aspects. The thesis concludes with a detailed summary of the contributions to the field and suggests further areas of research in the context of industrialized systems integration

Dynamic Organizations: Achieving Marketplace and Organizational Agility with People

Driven by dynamic competitive conditions, an increasing number of firms are experimenting with new, and what they hope will be, more dynamic organizational forms. This development has opened up exciting theoretical and empirical venues for students of leadership, business strategy, organizational theory, and the like. One domain that has yet to catch the wave, however, is strategic human resource management (SHRM). In an effort to catch up, we here draw on the dynamic organization (DO) and human resource strategy (HRS) literatures to delineate both a process for uncovering and the key features of a carefully crafted HRS for DOs. The logic is as follows. DOs compete through marketplace agility. Marketplace agility requires that employees at all levels engage in proactive, adaptive, and generative behaviors, bolstered by a supportive mindset. Under the right conditions, the essential mindset and behaviors, although highly dynamic, are fostered by a HRS centered on a relatively small number of dialectical, yet paradoxically stable, guiding principles and anchored in a supportive organizational infrastructure. This line of reasoning, however, rests on a rather modest empirical base and, thus, is offered less as a definitive statement than as a spur for much needed additional research

Software product line testing - a systematic mapping study

Context: Software product lines (SPL) are used in industry to achieve more efficient software development. However, the testing side of SPL is underdeveloped. Objective: This study aims at surveying existing research on SPL testing in order to identify useful approaches and needs for future research. Method: A systematic mapping study is launched to find as much literature as possible, and the 64 papers found are classified with respect to focus, research type and contribution type. Results: A majority of the papers are of proposal research types (64 %). System testing is the largest group with respect to research focus (40%), followed by management (23%). Method contributions are in majority. Conclusions: More validation and evaluation research is needed to provide a better foundation for SPL testing

Feature interaction in composed systems. Proceedings. ECOOP 2001 Workshop #08 in association with the 15th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Budapest, Hungary, June 18-22, 2001

Feature interaction is nothing new and not limited to computer science. The problem of undesirable feature interaction (feature interaction problem) has already been investigated in the telecommunication domain. Our goal is the investigation of feature interaction in componet-based systems beyond telecommunication. This Technical Report embraces all position papers accepted at the ECOOP 2001 workshop no. 08 on "Feature Interaction in Composed Systems". The workshop was held on June 18, 2001 at Budapest, Hungary

WARP : speeding up the software development process

Estágio realizado na Qimonda Portugal, S. ATese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informátca e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Generative aspect-oriented component adaptation

Due to the availability of components and the diversity of target applications, mismatches between pre-qualified existing components and the particular reuse context in applications are often inevitable and have been a major hurdle of component reusability and successful composition. Although component adaptation has acted as a key solution for eliminating these mismatches, existing practices are either only capable for adaptation at the interface level, or require too much intervention from software engineers. Another weakness of existing approaches is the lack of reuse of component adaptation knowledge. Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is a new methodology that provides separation of crosscutting concerns by introducing a new unit of modularization - an Aspect that crosscuts other modules. In this way, all the associated complexity of the crosscutting concerns is isolated into the Aspects, hence the final system becomes easier to design, implement and maintain. The nature of AOP makes it particularly suitable for addressing non-functional mismatches with component-based systems. However, current AOP techniques are not powerful enough for efficient component adaptation due to the weaknesses they have, including the limited reusability of Aspects, platform specific Aspects, and naive weaving processes. Therefore, existing AOP technology needs to be expanded before it can be used for efficient component adaptation. This thesis presents a highly automated approach to component adaptation through product line based Generative Aspect Oriented Component adaptation. In the approach, the adaptation knowledge is captured in Aspects and aims to be reusable in various adaptation circumstances. Automatic generation of adaptation Aspects is developed as a key technology to improve the level of automation of the approach and the reusability of adaptation knowledge. This generation is realised by developing a two dimensional Aspect model, which incorporates the technologies of software product line and generative programming. The adaptability and automation of the approach is achieved in an Aspect oriented component adaptation framework by generating and then applying the adaptation Aspects under a designed weaving process according to specific adaptation requirements. To expand the adaptation power of AOP, advanced Aspect weaving processes have been developed with the support of an enhanced aspect weaver. To promote the reusability of adaptation Aspects, an expandable repository of reusable adaptation Aspects has been developed based on the proposed two-dimensional Aspect model. A prototype tool is built as a leverage of the approach and automates the adaptation process. Case studies have been done to illustrate and evaluate the approach, in terms of its capability of building highly reusable Aspects across various AOP platforms and providing advanced weaving process. In summary, the proposed approach applies Generative Aspect Oriented Adaptation to targeted components to correct the mismatch problem so that the components can be integrated into a target application easily. The automation of the adaptation process, the deep level of the adaptation, and the reusability of adaptation knowledge are the advantages of the approach.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Whitepaper: The Value of Improving the Separation of Concerns

Microsoft's enterprise customers are demanding better ways to modularize their software systems. They look to the Java community, where these needs are being met with language enhancements, improved developer tools and middleware, and better runtime support. We present a business case for why Microsoft should give priority to supporting better modularization techniques, also known as advanced separation of concerns (ASOC), for the .NET platform, and we provide a roadmap for how to do so

Model Transformation Technologies in the Context of Modelling Software Systems

Programming technologies have improved continuously during the last decades, but from an Information Systems perspective, some well-known problems associated to the design and implementation of an Information Systems persists. Object-Oriented Methods, Formal Specification Languages, Component-Based Software Production... This is just a very short list of technologies proposed to solve a very old and, at the same time, very well-known problem: how to produce software of quality. Programming has been the key task during the last 40 years, and the results have not been successful yet. This work will explore the need of facing a sound software production process from a different perspective: the non-programming perspective, where by non-programming we mainly mean modeling. Instead of talking about Extreme Programming, we will introduce a Extreme Non-Programming (Extreme Modeling-Oriented) approach. We will base our ideas on the intensive work done during the last years, oriented to the objective of generating code from a higher-level system specification, normally represented as a Conceptual Schema. Nowadays, though, the hip around MDA has given a new push to these strategies. New methods propose sound model transformations which cover all the different steps of a sound software production process from an Information Systems Engineering point of view. This must include Organizational Modeling, Requirements Engineering, Conceptual Modeling and Model-Based Code Generation techniques. In this context, it seems that the time of Model Transformation Technologies is finally here..