A Rule-Based Approach to Analyzing Database Schema Objects with Datalog

Database schema elements such as tables, views, triggers and functions are typically defined with many interrelationships. In order to support database users in understanding a given schema, a rule-based approach for analyzing the respective dependencies is proposed using Datalog expressions. We show that many interesting properties of schema elements can be systematically determined this way. The expressiveness of the proposed analysis is exemplarily shown with the problem of computing induced functional dependencies for derived relations. The propagation of functional dependencies plays an important role in data integration and query optimization but represents an undecidable problem in general. And yet, our rule-based analysis covers all relational operators as well as linear recursive expressions in a systematic way showing the depth of analysis possible by our proposal. The analysis of functional dependencies is well-integrated in a uniform approach to analyzing dependencies between schema elements in general.Comment: Pre-proceedings paper presented at the 27th International Symposium on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2017), Namur, Belgium, 10-12 October 2017 (arXiv:1708.07854

Construction of a taxonomy for requirements engineering commercial-off-the-shelf components

This article presents a procedure for constructing a taxonomy of COTS products in the field of Requirements Engineering (RE). The taxonomy and the obtained information reach transcendental benefits to the selection of systems and tools that aid to RE-related actors to simplify and facilitate their work. This taxonomy is performed by means of a goal-oriented methodology inspired in GBRAM (Goal-Based Requirements Analysis Method), called GBTCM (Goal-Based Taxonomy Construction Method), that provides a guide to analyze sources of information and modeling requirements and domains, as well as gathering and organizing the knowledge in any segment of the COTS market. GBTCM claims to promote the use of standards and the reuse of requirements in order to support different processes of selection and integration of components.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Recovering Architectural Variability of a Family of Product Variants

A Software Product Line (SPL) aims at applying a pre-planned systematic reuse of large-grained software artifacts to increase the software productivity and reduce the development cost. The idea of SPL is to analyze the business domain of a family of products to identify the common and the variable parts between the products. However, it is common for companies to develop, in an ad-hoc manner (e.g. clone and own), a set of products that share common functionalities and differ in terms of others. Thus, many recent research contributions are proposed to re-engineer existing product variants to a SPL. Nevertheless, these contributions are mostly focused on managing the variability at the requirement level. Very few contributions address the variability at the architectural level despite its major importance. Starting from this observation, we propose, in this paper, an approach to reverse engineer the architecture of a set of product variants. Our goal is to identify the variability and dependencies among architectural-element variants at the architectural level. Our work relies on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to analyze the variability. To validate the proposed approach, we experimented on two families of open-source product variants; Mobile Media and Health Watcher. The results show that our approach is able to identify the architectural variability and the dependencies