Ansätze der Forschung zur Unterstützung der Entwicklung von Softwarekomponenten

Das vorliegende Arbeitspapier entstand aus einem Vortrag, welcher im Rahmen einer Veranstaltung der Wirtschaftsinitiative "Baden-Württemberg: Connected" (bwcon) aus der Reihe "Forum Unternehmenssoftware" gehalten wurde. Das übergeordnete Ziel dieser Veranstaltung war, die zukünftigen Perspektiven – Chancen und Herausforderungen – komponentenbasierter Software für Softwarefirmen und -anwender aufzuzeigen und zu diskutieren. Der Beitrag der Universität Mannheim bestand darin, die aktuellen Ansätze der Forschung zur Unterstützung der komponentenbasierten Softwareentwicklung im Überblick darzustellen, insbesondere eigene Ansätze und Projekte zu diesem Thema vorzustellen und einen Ausblick auf zukünftige Entwicklungen zu geben. Die wichtigsten Punkte des Vortrags sowie die Ergebnisse der anschließenden Diskussionsrunde mit Anwendern von Unternehmenssoftware, Softwareherstellern sowie weiteren Wissenschaftlern auf diesem Gebiet werden in diesem Papier zusammengefasst

A Brief Survey on Product Derivation Methods in Software Product Line

Product Derivation represents one of the main challenges that a Software Product Line (SPL) faces. Deriving individual products from shared software assets is a time-consuming and an expensive activity. Until now, only few works addressed, in a limited context, a partial evaluation of a reduced number of proposed derivation approaches. The main objective of such studies was the comparison of a proposed approach regarding two or three approaches. The purpose of the study reported in this paper is to set up a framework oriented to evaluate and compare existing SPL derivation approaches. The proposed framework uses a number of criteria which help understanding the capabilities and highlight the strength and the weakness of each SPL derivation approach

Strengthening MDA by Drawing from the Living Systems Theory

OMGs Model Driven Architecture initiative comes at a time where information system builders and integrators have realized that application design and thus application interoperability is not primarily a technology issue but is about understanding different types of systems, involving different professional and scientific disciplines. Understanding requires thinking and thinking is modeling. Hence, MDA provides a framework for modeling systems, especially those systems that are relevant in the context of IT-system integration within and across company boundaries. However, model correspondence, i.e., relations and transformations among models and views in a consistent way, presents a challenging problem for MDA. Bridging of disciplines was also a key motivation for the systems science communities, and in particular for the life sciences. A widely accepted theory about all living systems was developed by J. G. Miller the Living Systems Theory. His theory is striking because the basic concepts and principles are applicable at all levels, i.e., for all types of livings systems, from a cell to a supranational organization. The Living Systems Theory thus provides a good basis for consistently relating different systems and different views. In this paper, we will show how the living systems theory can be used to go about the problem of model correspondences. In particular, we suggest that MDA explicitly use the notions of a model reality with organizational levels based on a modeling ontology that is derived from the living systems theory

A Case Study of Using Domain Analysis for the Conflation Algorithms Domain

This paper documents the domain engineering process for much of the conflation algorithms domain. Empirical data on the process and products of domain engineering were collected. Six conflation algorithms of four different types: three affix removal, one successor variety, one table lookup, and one n-gram were analyzed. Products of the analysis include a generic architecture, reusable components, a little language and an application generator that extends the scope of the domain analysis beyond previous generators. The application generator produces source code for not only affix removal type but also successor variety, table lookup, and n-gram stemmers. The performance of the stemmers generated automatically was compared with the stemmers developed manually in terms of stem similarity, source and executable sizes, and development and execution times. All five stemmers generated by the application generator produced more than 99.9% identical stems with the manually developed stemmers. Some of the generated stemmers were as efficient as their manual equivalents and some were not

Towards an Enterprise Software Component Ontology

The paper describes an ontology of enterprise software components (ESCO). Its purpose is to reduce the conceptual gap between component specifications and their corresponding business descriptions, i.e., business processes and business entities. To this end, the different types of enterprise components and their semantic relationships are analyzed. The ontology axioms are formally expressed in description logics. ESCO contributes to a shared understanding of key concepts in application system development

A Reference Framework for Variability Management of Software Product Lines

Variability management (VM) in software product line engineering (SPLE) is introduced as an abstraction that enables the reuse and customization of assets. VM is a complex task involving the identification, representation, and instantiation of variability for specific products, as well as the evolution of variability itself. This work presents a comparison and contrast between existing VM approaches using qualitative meta-synthesis to determine the underlying perspectives, metaphors, and concepts of existing methods. A common frame of reference for the VM was proposed as the result of this analysis. Putting metaphors in the context of the dimensions in which variability occurs and identifying its key concepts provides a better understanding of its management and enables several analyses and evaluation opportunities. Finally, the proposed framework was evaluated using a qualitative study approach. The results of the evaluation phase suggest that the organizations in practice only focus on one dimension. The presented frame of reference will help the organization to cover this gap in practice.Comment: 24 page

On Business Services Representation – The 3 x 3 x 3 Approach

The increasing popularity and influence of service-oriented computing give rise to the need of representational and methodological supports for the development and management of business services. From an IT perspective, there is a proliferation of methods and languages for representing Web services. Unfortunately, there has not been much work in modeling high-level services from a business perspective. Modeling business services should arguably capture their inherent features, along with many other representational artifacts. We propose a novel approach for business services representation featuring a three-dimensional representational space of which dimensions stand for the service consumer, service provider and service context. We also discuss how the proposed representation approach provides methodological supports to the area of service orientation. Finally, we present in-progress work on the application of our approach

Application Frameworks Technology in Theory and Practice

Application frameworks is a technology concerning with building and implementing reusable software artefacts. Most current application frameworks are object-oriented and often domain specific. Advocates of application frameworks claim that the technology is one of the most promising technologies supporting large-scale reuse, increasing the productivity and quality, and reducing the cost of software development. Many of them project that the next decade would be the major challenge for the development and deployment of the technology. The objective of this study is to investigate the theory and practice of application frameworks and to determine if it has made a difference in systems development. The study indicates that the technology is still immature and not yet to be another silver bullet but potential is imminent

ModeL4CEP: Graphical domain-specific modeling languages for CEP domains and event patterns

Complex event processing (CEP) is a cutting-edge technology that allows the analysis and correlation of large volumes of data with the aim of detecting complex and meaningful events through the use of event patterns, as well as permitting the inference of valuable knowledge for end users. Despite the great advantages that CEP can bring to expert or intelligent business systems, it poses a substantial challenge to their users, who are business experts but do not have the necessary knowledge and experience using this technology. The main problem these users have to face is precisely hand-writing the code for event pattern definition, which requires them to implement the conditions to be met to detect relevant situations for the domain in question by using a particular event processing language (EPL). In order to respond to this need, in this paper we propose both a graphical domain-specific modeling language (DSML) for facilitating CEP domain definitions by domain experts, and a graphical DSML for event pattern definition by non-technological users. The proposed languages provide high expressiveness and flexibility and are independent of event patterns and actions’ implementation code. This way, domain experts can define the relevant event types and patterns within their business domain, without having to be experts on EPL programming, nor on other complicated computer science technological issues, beyond an understandable and intuitive graphical definition. Furthermore, with these DSMLs, users will also be able to define the actions to be automatically taken once a pattern is detected in the system. Further benefits of these DSMLs are evaluated and discussed in depth in this paper