Checking sequences for distributed test architectures

Controllability and observability problems may manifest themselves during the application of a checking sequence in a test architecture where there are multiple remote testers. These problems often require the use of external coordination message exchanges among testers during testing. However, the use of coordination messages requires the existence of an external network that can increase the cost of testing and can be difficult to implement. In addition, the use of coordination messages introduces delays and this can cause problems where there are timing constraints. Thus, sometimes it is desired to construct a checking sequence from the specification of the system under test that will be free from controllability and observability problems without requiring the use of external coordination message exchanges. This paper gives conditions under which it is possible to produce such a checking sequence, using multiple distinguishing sequences, and an algorithm that achieves this

A Process-Oriented Software Architecture Reconstruction Taxonomy

International audienceTo maintain and understand large applications, it is cru- cial to know their architecture. The first problem is that architectures are not explicitly represented in the code as classes and packages are. The second problem is that suc- cessful applications evolve over time so their architecture inevitably drifts. Reconstructing and checking whether the architecture is still valid is thus an important aid. While there is a plethora of approaches and techniques supporting architecture reconstruction, there is no comprehensive state of the art and it is often difficult to compare the ap- proaches. This article presents a first state of the art in soft- ware architecture reconstruction, with the desire to support the understanding of the field

Conformance Analysis of Organizational Models in a new Enterprise Modeling Framework using Algebraic Graph Transformation - Extended Version

Organizational models play a key role in today's enterprise modeling. These models often show up as partial models produced by people with different conceptual understandings in a usually decentralized organization, where they are modeled in a distributed and non-synchronized fashion. For this reason, there is a first major need to organize partial organizational models within a suitable modeling framework, and there is a second major need to check their mutual conformance. This builds the basis to integrate the partial organizational models later on into one holistic model of the organization. Moreover, the partial models can be used for model checking certain security, risk, and compliance constraints. In order to satisfy the two major needs, this paper presents two mutually aligned contributions. The first one is a new enterprise modeling framework the EM-Cube. The second contribution is a new approach for checking conformance of models that are developed based on the suggested formal modeling technique associated with the proposed framework. In addition to that, we evaluate our potential solution against concrete requirements derived from a real-world scenario coming out of the finance industry

Heuristics for Discovering Architectural Violations

International audienceSoftware architecture conformance is a key software quality control activity that aims to reveal the progressive gap normally observed between concrete and planned software architectures. In this paper, we present ArchLint, a lightweight approach for architecture conformance based on a combination of static and historical source code analysis. For this purpose, ArchLint relies on four heuristics for detecting both absences and divergences in source code based architectures. We applied ArchLint in an industrial-strength system and as a result we detected 119 architectural violations, with an overall precision of 46.7% and a recall of 96.2%, for divergences. We also evaluated ArchLint with four open-source systems, used in an independent study on reflexion models. In this second study, ArchLint achieved precision results ranging from 57.1% to 89.4%

Debugging Techniques for Locating Defects in Software Architectures

The explicit design of the architecture for a software product is a well established part of development projects. As the software architecture descriptions are becoming larger and more complex, there is more likelihood of defects being present in the software architecture. Studies have shown that a defect in the software architecture that has propagated to the development phase is very expensive to fix. To prevent such propagation of defects, this research proposes to provide debugging support for software architecture design. Debugging is commonly used in programming languages to effectively find the cause of a failure and locate the error to provide a fix. The same should be accomplished in software architectures to debug architecture failures. Without debugging support, the software architect is unable to quickly locate and determine the source of an error. In our work, we define a process for debugging software architecture and provide analysis techniques to locate defects in a software architecture that fails to meet functional and non-functional requirements. We have implemented the techniques and provide an evaluation of the techniques based on examples using an industry standard architecture definition language, Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL)

First Steps Towards Process Mining in Distributed Health Information Systems

Business Intelligence approaches such as process mining can be applied to the healthcare domain in order to gain insight into the complex processes taking place. Disclosing as-is processes helps identify room for improvement and answers questions from medical professionals. Existing approaches are based on proprietary log data as input for mining algorithms. Integrating  the  Healthcare  Enterprise (IHE) defines in its Audit  Trail  and  Node Authentication (ATNA) profile how real-world events must be recorded. Since IHE is used by many healthcare providers throughout the world, an extensive amount of log data is produced. In our research we investigate if audit trails, generated from an IHE test system, carry enough content to successfully apply process mining techniques. Furthermore we assess the quality of the recorded events in accordance with the maturity level scoring system. A simplified simulation of the organizational workflow in a radiological practice is presented. Based on this simulation a process miing task is conducted

Dynamic Validation of Software Architectural Connectors

In this work we present an approach to dynamically validate the usage of software connectors in the context of software architectures. By employing aspect oriented techniques the system’s execution is monitored in order to obtain an architectural view describing how processes communicate and interact with each other. This output can later be compared to the connectors specified in the architecture document to validate the consistency between the architecture specification and the implementation of the system. A case study is presented showing the potential of the approach. We believe the results are promising enough to consider future extensions including other architectural elements beyond connectors.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO