A Meta Model for Software Architecture Conformance and Quality Assessment

Software architecture and design suffer from a lack of documented knowledge on how different architectural styles influence software quality. Existing software quality models do not allow engineers to evaluate whether a given software system adequately implements the basic principles of the chosen architectural style, and which architectural properties and best practices beyond these principles contribute to the system's quality. In this paper, I present a meta quality model for software architectures, which can be used not only as a knowledge-base to easily compare architectural styles based on their impact on software quality, but also to increase efficiency of architectural quality analysis by leveraging existing modeling concepts and tools. An experiment performing an architecture assessment using a quality model for the SOA architectural style not only showed that the approach is applicable in practice, but also indicated a reduction of manual effort compared to other architecture assessment approaches

OpenUP/MDRE: A Model-Driven Requirements Engineering Approach for Health-Care Systems

The domains and problems for which it would be desirable to introduce information systems are currently very complex and the software development process is thus of the same complexity. One of these domains is health-care. Model-Driven Development (MDD) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) are software development approaches that raise to deal with complexity, to reduce time and cost of development, augmenting flexibility and interoperability. However, many techniques and approaches that have been introduced are of little use when not provided under a formalized and well-documented methodological umbrella. A methodology gives the process a well-defined structure that helps in fast and efficient analysis and design, trouble-free implementation, and finally results in the software product improved quality. While MDD and SOA are gaining their momentum toward the adoption in the software industry, there is one critical issue yet to be addressed before its power is fully realized. It is beyond dispute that requirements engineering (RE) has become a critical task within the software development process. Errors made during this process may have negative effects on subsequent development steps, and on the quality of the resulting software. For this reason, the MDD and SOA development approaches should not only be taken into consideration during design and implementation as usually occurs, but also during the RE process. The contribution of this dissertation aims at improving the development process of health-care applications by proposing OpenUP/MDRE methodology. The main goal of this methodology is to enrich the development process of SOA-based health-care systems by focusing on the requirements engineering processes in the model-driven context. I believe that the integration of those two highly important areas of software engineering, gathered in one consistent process, will provide practitioners with many benets. It is noteworthy that the approach presented here was designed for SOA-based health-care applications, however, it also provides means to adapt it to other architectural paradigms or domains. The OpenUP/MDRE approach is an extension of the lightweight OpenUP methodology for iterative, architecture-oriented and model-driven software development. The motivation for this research comes from the experience I gained as a computer science professional working on the health-care systems. This thesis also presents a comprehensive study about: i) the requirements engineering methods and techniques that are being used in the context of the model-driven development, ii) known generic but flexible and extensible methodologies, as well as approaches for service-oriented systems development, iii) requirements engineering techniques used in the health-care industry. Finally, OpenUP/MDRE was applied to a concrete industrial health-care project in order to show the feasibility and accuracy of this methodological approach.Loniewski, G. (2010). OpenUP/MDRE: A Model-Driven Requirements Engineering Approach for Health-Care Systems. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/11652Archivo delegad

A model introducing SOAs quality attributes decomposition

International audienceRecently, service oriented architecture (SOA) has been popularized with the emergence of standards like Web services. Nevertheless, the shift to this architectural paradigm could potentially involve significant risks including projects abandonments. With this in mind, the question of evaluating SOA quality arose. The appearance of methods like ATAM or SAAM propelled software architecture evaluation to a standard stage for any paradigm. However, there still are a number of concerns that have been raised with these methods; in particular their cost in terms of time and money, essentially because of the hand-operated nature of the evaluations conducted. The model proposed in this paper for evaluating SOAs takes as a starting point the McCall model; it allows the whole architecture to be decomposed in three types of quality attributes (factor, criterion and metric

A soa-based e-government data integration

Data Integration presents a core issue in the Palestinian e-Government Technical Framework. The currently used data integration model relies on the Integrated Central Database which lacks quality attributes such as: interoperability and flexibility. We purpose a SOA-based approach for data integration that achieves the above attributes. We present and analyze the current architecture and implementation of the Palestinian e-Government Integrated Central Database model. We transform the current model into a SOA framework that is realized using Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Web Services. The proposed framework offers database replication and connectivity functionalities for the Central Database. The proposed framework is evaluated using a scenario-based software architecture evaluation method and proves that it achieves the framework goals of quality attributes: interoperability and flexibility. Moreover, a prototype of the framework is implemented and validates the framework correctness. A specific usage is presented and further proves that the framework accomplishes its functionality and quality attributes

A Service Oriented Architecture Approach for Global Positioning System Quality of Service Monitoring

This research focuses on the development of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for monitoring the Global Positioning System (GPS) Standard Positioning Service (SPS) in near real time utilizing a Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) technique. A unique approach to developing the MCS SOA was developed that utilized both the Depart- ment of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) and the SOA Modeling Language (SoaML) guidance. The combination of these two frameworks resulted in generation of all the architecture products required to evaluate the SOA through the use of Model Based System Engineering (MBSE) techniques. Ultimately this research provides a feasibility analysis for utilization of mobile distributed sensors to provide situational awareness of the GPS Quality of Service (QoS). First this research provides justification for development of a new monitoring architecture and defines the scope of the SOA. Then an exploration of current SOA, MBSE, and Geospatial System Information (GIS) research was conducted. Next a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) of the MCS participant interactions was developed and simulated within AGI\u27s Systems Toolkit. The architecture performance analysis was executed using a GIS software package known as ArcMap. Finally, this research concludes with a suitability analysis of the proposed architecture for detecting sources of GPS interference within an Area of Interest (AoI)

A Framework for Simulation Models of Service-Oriented Architectures

Abstract Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) are one of the main paradigms for future software systems. Since these software systems are composed of a large number of different components it is non trivial to assure an adequate Quality of Service (QoS) of the overall system and performance analysis becomes an important issue. To consider performance issues early in the development process, a model based approach becomes necessary which has to be embedded into the development process of SOA to avoid overhead and assure consistency. In particular the specification of the software system should be used as a base for the resulting performance model. However, since common specification techniques for SOA are very high level, many details have to be added to come to an executable simulation model which is often needed for a detailed analysis of performance or dependability. This paper presents an approach which combines an extended version of process chains to describe the SOA components and some quantitative specifications at the higher levels. For the modelling of the detailed architecture and protocols the simulation tool OMNeT++ is used. Both modelling levels are combined resulting in an executable simulation model for the whole architecture

An interactive metaheuristic search framework for software serviceidentification from business process models

In recent years, the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) model of computing has become widely used and has provided efficient and agile business solutions in response to inevitable and rapid changes in business requirements. Software service identification is a crucial component in the production of a service-oriented architecture and subsequent successful software development, yet current service identification methods have limitations. For example, service identification methods are either not sufficiently comprehensive to handle the totality of service identification activities, or they lack computational support, or they pay insufficient attention to quality checks of resulting services. To address these limitations, comprehensive computationally intelligent support for software engineers when deriving software services from an organisation’s business process models shows great potential, especially when the impact of human preference on the quality of the resulting solutions can be incorporated. Accordingly, this research attempts to apply interactive metaheuristic search to effectively bridge the gap between business and SOA technology and so increase business agility.A novel, comprehensive framework is introduced that is driven by domain independent role-based business process models, and uses an interactive metaheuristic search-based service identification approach based on a genetic algorithm, while adhering to SOA principles. Termed BPMiSearch, the framework is composed of three main layers. The first layer is concerned with processing inputs from business process models into search space elements by modelling input data and presenting them at an appropriate level of granularity. The second layer focuses on identifying software services from the specified search space. The third layer refines the resulting services to map the business elements in the resulting candidate services to the corresponding service components. The proposed BPMiSearch framework has been evaluated by applying it to a healthcare domain case study, specifically, Cancer Care and Registration (CCR) business processes at the King Hussein Cancer Centre, Amman, Jordan.Experiments show that the impact of software engineer interaction on the quality of the outcomes in terms of search effectiveness, efficiency, and level of user satisfaction, is assessed. Results show that BPMiSearch has rapid search performance to positively support software engineers in the identification of services from role-based business process models while adhering to SOA principles. High-quality services are identified that might not have been arrived at manually by software engineers. Furthermore, it is found that BPMiSearch is sensitive and responsive to software engineer interaction resulting in a positive level of user trust, acceptance, and satisfaction with the candidate services

A Construction of Service-Oriented Architecture Adoption Maturity Levels using Adoption of Innovation Concept and CMMI

The existing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) maturity models constructed their maturity level focuses on the level after the implementation of SOA in the organization. However, less work has been carried out regarding the SOA maturity level that focused on the whole process of SOA adoption including the pre-adoption level. Furthermore, this study also found that less work on constructing the maturity levels for measuring the SOA adoption existed. Therefore, this study aims to construct the Service-Oriented Architecture adoption maturity level by combining the adoption of innovation concept with Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). This study constructs the lower level of the proposed SOA adoption maturity level based on the adoption of innovation concept and the upper level based on CMMI and the existing SOA maturity models. This study has successfully shown that the adoption of innovation concept can be combined with CMMI in order to construct a holistic maturity level for evaluating the SOA adoption. This level covers the whole SOA adoption processes ranging from the pre-adoption level up to the optimized level. This study also aims at evaluating the SOA adoption toward sustainable development. Sustainable development means that the teams work at consistence and continuous speed to produce a quality result. Thus, the proposed maturity level may benefit the SOA practitioner and software quality assurance in software engineering domain

A construction of service-oriented architecture adoption maturity levels using adoption of innovation concept and CMMI

The existing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) maturity models constructed their maturity level focuses on the level after the implementation of SOA in the organization. However, less work has been carried out regarding the SOA maturity level that focused on the whole process of SOA adoption including the pre-adoption level. Furthermore, this study also found that less work on constructing the maturity levels for measuring the SOA adoption existed. Therefore, this study aims to construct the Service-Oriented Architecture adoption maturity level by combining the adoption of innovation concept with Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). This study constructs the lower level of the proposed SOA adoption maturity level based on the adoption of innovation concept and the upper level based on CMMI and the existing SOA maturity models. This study has successfully shown that the adoption of innovation concept can be combined with CMMI in order to construct a holistic maturity level for evaluating the SOA adoption. This level covers the whole SOA adoption processes ranging from the pre-adoption level up to the optimized level. This study also aims at evaluating the SOA adoption toward sustainable development. Sustainable development means that the teams work at consistence and continuous speed to produce a quality result. Thus, the proposed maturity level may benefit the SOA practitioner and software quality assurance in software engineering domain

Bulgarian Health Information System Based on the Common Platform for Automated Programming

Challenges to the national health system related to medical activities financing and quality of care are described. Bulgarian Health Information System design is presented based on the activity-based funding model, international health informatics standards and the common platform for automated programming. Platforms realised by eHealth and IT technology leaders (Ireland, Finland, Oracle USA) are presented. The technical requirements to the National Health Information System (NHIS) are prepared with a focus on domain independent common platform, specialised health components, high scalability, flexibility and reusability. The synergetic use of widely used international health standards for semantic interoperability is presented (ContSys, HISA, EHRCom, and CDR). NHIS common structure is proposed based on cloud computing, SOA and knowledge based automated software engineering (KBASE) complemented with customised components, including kernel, internal healthcare components and external interfaces. Keywords: SOA, Cloud computing, Knowledge based automated software engineering, common platform for automated programming, eHealth, activity-based funding, health informatics standards, ISO 13940 ContSys, ISO 12967 HISA, ISO 13606 EHRCom, ISO/TS 29585 CDR