Framework for software architecture visualization assessment.

In order to assess software architecture visualisation strategies, we qualitatively characterize then construct an assessment framework with 7 key areas and 31 features. The framework is used for evaluation and comparison of various strategies from multiple stakeholder perspectives. Six existing software architecture visualisation tools and a seventh research tool were evaluated. All tools exhibited shortcomings when evaluated in the framework

A Framework for Evaluating Model-Driven Self-adaptive Software Systems

In the last few years, Model Driven Development (MDD), Component-based Software Development (CBSD), and context-oriented software have become interesting alternatives for the design and construction of self-adaptive software systems. In general, the ultimate goal of these technologies is to be able to reduce development costs and effort, while improving the modularity, flexibility, adaptability, and reliability of software systems. An analysis of these technologies shows them all to include the principle of the separation of concerns, and their further integration is a key factor to obtaining high-quality and self-adaptable software systems. Each technology identifies different concerns and deals with them separately in order to specify the design of the self-adaptive applications, and, at the same time, support software with adaptability and context-awareness. This research studies the development methodologies that employ the principles of model-driven development in building self-adaptive software systems. To this aim, this article proposes an evaluation framework for analysing and evaluating the features of model-driven approaches and their ability to support software with self-adaptability and dependability in highly dynamic contextual environment. Such evaluation framework can facilitate the software developers on selecting a development methodology that suits their software requirements and reduces the development effort of building self-adaptive software systems. This study highlights the major drawbacks of the propped model-driven approaches in the related works, and emphasise on considering the volatile aspects of self-adaptive software in the analysis, design and implementation phases of the development methodologies. In addition, we argue that the development methodologies should leave the selection of modelling languages and modelling tools to the software developers.Comment: model-driven architecture, COP, AOP, component composition, self-adaptive application, context oriented software developmen

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

A comparative evaluation of dynamic visualisation tools

Despite their potential applications in software comprehension, it appears that dynamic visualisation tools are seldom used outside the research laboratory. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of five dynamic visualisation tools - AVID, Jinsight, jRMTool, Together ControlCenter diagrams and Together ControlCenter debugger. The tools were evaluated on a number of general software comprehension and specific reverse engineering tasks using the HotDraw objectoriented framework. The tasks considered typical comprehension issues, including identification of software structure and behaviour, design pattern extraction, extensibility potential, maintenance issues, functionality location, and runtime load. The results revealed that the level of abstraction employed by a tool affects its success in different tasks, and that tools were more successful in addressing specific reverse engineering tasks than general software comprehension activities. It was found that no one tool performs well in all tasks, and some tasks were beyond the capabilities of all five tools. This paper concludes with suggestions for improving the efficacy of such tools

Modeling of Distributed Ledger Deployment View

The Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a peer-to-peer model of sharing data among collaborating parties in a decentralized manner. An example of DLT is a blockchain where data form blocks in an append-only chain. Software architecture description usually comprises multiple views. The paper concentrates on the Deployment view of the DLT solution within the 1+5 architectural views model. The authors have proposed Unified Modeling Language (UML) extensibility mechanisms to describe the needed additional semantic notation to model deployment details. The paper covers both the network and node levels. The proposed stereotypes and tagged values have enriched the UML Deployment diagram. We have gathered those modeling elements in dedicated UML Profile for Distributed Ledger Deployment. We have applied the profile to model the Deployment view of a renewable energy management system that uses the R3Cordaframework. The system records information about inbound and outbound energy to/from a renewable energy grid

A conceptual service oriented architecture framework for integrated flood management

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a platform and language-independent that guide different services to work together in order to perform business process.The benefits of using SOA such as interoperability, discoverability, loose coupling, flexibility and reliability have led previous researchers to use it as their fundamental basis in designing their software architecture framework.Previous researchers also have exploit SOA and implement it into flood management domain to manage the complex systems that are distributed across the network.However, previous works do not provide the detail process of emergency management into their flood management framework.Therefore, this study aims to propose a conceptual SOA framework for an integrated flood management (IFM) in order to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of managing flood.Furthermore the feasibility of using SOA and the required process of flood management in order to construct the conceptual framework are being investigated by means of a comparative study.In addition, this study also suggests the Service oriented architecture Modeling Language (SoaML) as a technique to model the services for anIFM

Mapping the UML to the Zachman Framework

This article offers an overview of the Zachman Enterprise Architecture Framework (ZEAF) and examines how the Unified Modeling Language (UML) can be used in describing enterprise architecture. The ZEAF is a classification scheme that organizes descriptive representations into a matrix of six distinct stakeholder perspectives and six unique concerns or aspects yielding a normalized approach in which, as a rule, particular cell content cannot be found in more than one cell. This paper presents a comparative review of four approaches for mapping UML onto ZEAF, which despite the above rule, use the same diagram types differently. At first, this appeared to be a problem, but our analysis discovered that it is result of UML’s rich and divers notation. This paper also attempts to answer several questions related to these different mappings recognizing an opportunity to extend ZEAF into a multidimensional representation