Architecture is not enough

The research covered quite a bit of territory with the simple objective - to 'break free' of the 'risk' of continuing architectural patterns in practice through and beyond mid career. On reflection I identified four stages within the history of my practice covering three disciplines; art, architecture and the political economies relation with urban geography. I was hoping to tie these together in a more coherent way and write reflectively to deepen those relations. I declined practicing architecture (late 2003-2006), inflamed an old love affair with 'fine art' and curated sound-art events, designed art-theatre-performance works and installations, continued free-prose writings and visited specific Australian and aboriginal (continent) places and adjacent world destinations. I consolidated the 'art studio' within and returned to architectural practice by 2007. The dissertation about this 'episode of behavior' galvanised many insights into time and the illusive and expansive nature of deep-space. And engaged understanding death in an unusual and liberating way, which ran an exponential affirmation through and beyond life as we know it. Though abstract, these thoughts (and journeys) began to mould ideas for projects within an understood 'complexity'. This assisted my desire for 'the simplicity of elegance' - in everything, and specifically fortified arguments for a multivalent kind of architecture

Mining Architectural Information: A Systematic Mapping Study

Context: Mining Software Repositories (MSR) has become an essential activity in software development. Mining architectural information to support architecting activities, such as architecture understanding and recovery, has received a significant attention in recent years. However, there is an absence of a comprehensive understanding of the state of research on mining architectural information. Objective: This work aims to identify, analyze, and synthesize the literature on mining architectural information in software repositories in terms of architectural information and sources mined, architecting activities supported, approaches and tools used, and challenges faced. Method: A Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) has been conducted on the literature published between January 2006 and November 2021. Results: Of the 79 primary studies finally selected, 8 categories of architectural information have been mined, among which architectural description is the most mined architectural information; 12 architecting activities can be supported by the mined architectural information, among which architecture understanding is the most supported activity; 81 approaches and 52 tools were proposed and employed in mining architectural information; and 4 types of challenges in mining architectural information were identified. Conclusions: This SMS provides researchers with promising future directions and help practitioners be aware of what approaches and tools can be used to mine what architectural information from what sources to support various architecting activities.Comment: 68 pages, 5 images, 15 tables, Manuscript submitted to a Journal (2022

A pattern-oriented and model-driven architecture for interactive systems

Day-to-day experiences suggest that it is not enough to approach a complex design equipped with design tips, guidelines, and hints. Developers must also be able to use proven solutions emerging from the best design practices to solve new design challenges. Without these, the designer is unable to properly apply guidelines or take full advantage of the power of technology, resulting therefore in poor performance, poor scalability, and poor usability. Furthermore, the designer might "reinvent the wheel" when attempting to implement a design solution. A number of design problems continue to arise, such as: (1) decoupling the various aspects of interactive systems (for example, business logic, the UI, navigation, and information architecture) and (2) isolating platform specifics from the concerns common to all interactive systems. In the context of a proposal for a Pattern-Oriented and Model-driven Architecture (POMA) for interactive systems, this thesis identifies an extensive list of pattern categories and types of models aimed at providing a pool of proven solutions to these problems. The models of patterns span several levels of abstraction, such as domain, task, dialog, presentation and layout. The proposed POMA architecture illustrates how several individual models can be combined at different levels of abstraction into heterogeneous structures which can then be used as building blocks in the development of interactive systems. This document is divided into six chapters: the first chapter presents a background and related work on "Patterns" in general and on various architectures for interactive systems development such as "N-tiers architectures", "Pattern-Oriented Design" (POD), "Pattern- Supported Approach" (PSA), and "Model-Driven Architecture" (MDA). The second chapter introduces the research topic with its objectives, its limits, the research methodology, and research steps. The third chapter describes primarily the most important parts of the research which is the development of a new architecture called Pattern-Oriented and Model-Driven Architecture, facilitating the development of interactive systems including fundamentals and key concepts, an overview, justifications versus N-tiers, POD, PSA, and MDA architectures and specifications. The fourth chapter describes architectural levels and categories of patterns used in POMA. The fifth chapter describes the categories of models used in POMA. The sixth chapter presents an exploratory case study applied to the architecture proposed in this research. The last chapter presents a conclusion on this research work and its expected evolution in the future

Graph-based Pattern Matching and Discovery for Process-centric Service Architecture Design and Integration

Process automation and applications integration initiatives are often complex and involve significant resources in large organisations. The increasing adoption of service-based architectures to solve integration problems and the widely accepted practice of utilising patterns as a medium to reuse design knowledge motivated the definition of this work. In this work a pattern-based framework and techniques providing automation and structure to address the process and application integration problem are proposed. The framework is a layered architecture providing modelling and traceability support to different abstraction layers of the integration problem. To define new services - building blocks of the integration solution - the framework includes techniques to identify process patterns in concrete process models. Graphs and graph morphisms provide a formal basis to represent patterns and their relation to models. A family of graph-based algorithms support automation during matching and discovery of patterns in layered process service models. The framework and techniques are demonstrated in a case study. The algorithms implementing the pattern matching and discovery techniques are investigated through a set of experiments from an empirical evaluation. Observations from conducted interviews to practitioners provide suggestions to enhance the proposed techniques and direct future work regarding analysis tasks in process integration initiatives