Exploring Maintainability Assurance Research for Service- and Microservice-Based Systems: Directions and Differences

To ensure sustainable software maintenance and evolution, a diverse set of activities and concepts like metrics, change impact analysis, or antipattern detection can be used. Special maintainability assurance techniques have been proposed for service- and microservice-based systems, but it is difficult to get a comprehensive overview of this publication landscape. We therefore conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to collect and categorize maintainability assurance approaches for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices. Our search strategy led to the selection of 223 primary studies from 2007 to 2018 which we categorized with a threefold taxonomy: a) architectural (SOA, microservices, both), b) methodical (method or contribution of the study), and c) thematic (maintainability assurance subfield). We discuss the distribution among these categories and present different research directions as well as exemplary studies per thematic category. The primary finding of our SLR is that, while very few approaches have been suggested for microservices so far (24 of 223, ?11%), we identified several thematic categories where existing SOA techniques could be adapted for the maintainability assurance of microservices

Bad smells in design and design patterns

International audienceTo give a consistent and more valuable property on models, model-driven processes should be able to reuse the expert knowledge generally expressed in terms of patterns. We focus our work on the design stage and on the systematically use of design patterns. Choose a good design pattern and ensure the correct integration of the chosen pattern are non trivial for a designer who wants to use them. To help designers, we propose design inspection in order to detect “bad smells in design” and models reworking through use of design patterns. The automatic detection and the explanation of the misconceptions are performed thanks to spoiled patterns. A “spoiled pattern” is a pattern which allows to instantiate inadequate solutions for a given problem: requirements are respected, but architecture is improvable

Improving software quality using an ontology-based approach

Ensuring quality in software development is a challenging process. The concepts of anti-pattern and bad code smells utilize the knowledge of reoccurring problems to improve the quality of current and future software development. Anti-patterns describe recurring bad design solutions while bad code smells describe source code that is error-free but difficult to understand and maintain. Code refactoring aims to remove bad code smells without changing a program’s functionality while improving program quality. There are metrics-based tools to detect a few bad code smells from source code; however, the knowledge and understanding of these indicators of low quality software are still insufficient to resolve many of the problems they represent. Minimal research addresses the relationships between or among bad code smells, anti-patterns and refactoring. In this research, we present a new ontology, Ontology for Anti-patterns, Bad Code Smells and Refactoring (OABR), to define the concepts and their relation properties. Such an ontological infrastructure encourages a common understanding of these concepts among the software community and provides more concise definitions that help to avoid overlapping and inconsistent description. It utilizes reasoning capabilities associated with ontology to analyze the software development domain and offer new insights into the domain. Software quality issues such as understandability and maintainability can be improved by identifying and resolving anti-patterns associated with code smells as well as preventing bad code smells before coding begins

Utilizing static and dynamic software analysis to aid cost estimation, software visualization, and test quality management

The main results presented in the thesis are related to the semi- or fully-automated analysis of the software and its development processes. My overall research goal is to provide meaningful insights, methods, and practical tools to help the work of stakeholders during various phases of software development. The thesis statements have been grouped into three major thesis points, namely "Measuring, predicting, and comparing the productivity of developer teams"; "Providing immersive methods for software and unit test visualization"; and "Spotting the structures in the package hierarchy that required attention using test coverage data"

Analysing Anti-patterns Static Relationships with Design Patterns

Anti-patterns are motifs that are usually thought to be good solutions tosome design or implementation problems, but back-fires badly when applied. Previousstudies have reported that anti-patterns make object oriented systems hard tomaintain. Anti-patterns motifs usually have dependencies with other classes in thesystem. In this paper, we propose to analyse these dependencies (with in particulardesign patterns) in order to understand how developers can maintain programscontaining anti-patterns. To the best of our knowledge, no substantial investigationof anti-pattern dependencies with design patterns has been done before. This paperpresents the results of a study that we performed on three different systems, ArgoUML,JFreeChart, and XercesJ, written in Java, and of size ranges from 1,191to 3,325 classes, to analyse the static relationships between anti-patterns and designpatterns. We found that these relationships (1) exist, but (2) are temporaryand (3) classes participating in such relationships are more change-prone but lessfault-prone than other anti-pattern classes

1 Sharing Bad Practices in Design to Improve the Use of Patterns

To ensure the use of good analysis and design practices and an easier maintenance of software, analysts and designers may use patterns. To help them, we propose models inspection in order to detect instantiations of “spoiled pattern ” and models reworking through the use of the design patterns. As a design pattern allows the instantiation of the best known solution for a given problem, a “spoiled pattern ” allows the instantiation of alternative solutions for the same problem: requirements are respected, but architecture is improvable. We have collected a set of alternative solutions and deduced the corresponding spoiled patterns. We have defined a first catalog of these improvable practices from several experiments with students. To overcome the limits imposed by this method (restricted public, limited problems and tiresome validation process), we would like to open this problematic to the expert community. Therefore, we propose a collaborative website sharing bad practices in object oriented design to improve the use of patterns

International conference on software engineering and knowledge engineering: Session chair

The Thirtieth International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE 2018) will be held at the Hotel Pullman, San Francisco Bay, USA, from July 1 to July 3, 2018. SEKE2018 will also be dedicated in memory of Professor Lofti Zadeh, a great scholar, pioneer and leader in fuzzy sets theory and soft computing. The conference aims at bringing together experts in software engineering and knowledge engineering to discuss on relevant results in either software engineering or knowledge engineering or both. Special emphasis will be put on the transference of methods between both domains. The theme this year is soft computing in software engineering & knowledge engineering. Submission of papers and demos are both welcome

Unpacking Knowing Integration: A Practice-based Study in Haute Cuisine

Nous proposons d'analyser l'intégration des connaissances à la source d'un avantage concurrentiel avec une approche pratique des organisations. Alors que la littérature s'est focalisée sur le transfert de connaissances et les relations entre communautés par le biais des objets frontière, nous considérons les relations intra-communauté et la façon dont les acteurs mobilisent, restructurent et créent des connaissances pour l'action. Dans une perspective pratique, la dynamique des connaissances est un phénomène situé dans un contexte social donné. Nous nous appuyons sur une phase empirique qualitative, par l'analyse de l'intégration des connaissances lors de la création de nouveaux plats au sein des équipes de cuisiniers de restaurants tri-étoilés.Apprentissage ; Avantage concurrentiel ; Connaissance ; Créativité ; Gastronomie ; Integration ; Transfert

Unpacking Knowing Integration: A Practice-based Study in Haute Cuisine

Within a practice-based approach of organizations, we explore the knowing integration phenomena at the roots of competitive advantage. While former knowing integration studies have pointed to the importance of boundary objects across occupational communities, knowing integration inside a community to ground competitive advantage remains to be explored. How do individuals integrate their knowing in practice, in complex and important situations in order to contribute to competitive advantage for the firm? We ground our analysis on the ethnographic study of performed tasks in new dishes creation in two gourmet restaurants. We trace individual knowing in this creation to highlight how a new dish emerges from knowing integration, based on our understanding of knowing as processual, social, and situated. We propose a model of knowing integration as a combination of three phenomena: comprehending, interpreting and explicitating. We show that integration leads to the development of new dishes while knowing remains largely individual. We therefore suggest that there exists a clear distinction between knowing integration and knowledge sharing or transfer. We also contribute to a clearer delineation between integration and explicitation, the latter being only one and secondary means to achieve the former. Our study advances practice-based studies of organizations by highlighting the central role of integration in knowing dynamics and by bridging micro and macro perspectives on practice.Combination; Competitive Advantage; Integration; Knowledge; Learning; Restaurants; Transfer