Dynamic Evolution of Software Processes to Evolve Software Systems During Their Development

A software system, once deployed into its target environment, might need to be modified for various reasons. The reasons might be specific to that software system, such as failures, or, more general, such as changes in the environment in which the software system is embedded. Depending on the reason, a modification might obviously not only be restricted to a particular software system. It might also concern other existing software systems and particularly also software systems under development. The modification of a software system under development is merely a problem of modifying its development process, also called software process. Such modifications generally cannot be automatically carried out by autonomous process support systems due to the complexity inherent in software processes and in the necessary modifications. It usually needs to be guided by a human process manager. A process support system can, however, offer the human process manager certain services to assist in modifying a software process. One of these services is that of decision support

Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures

We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems, where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity). Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa

A Process Framework for Semantics-aware Tourism Information Systems

The growing sophistication of user requirements in tourism due to the advent of new technologies such as the Semantic Web and mobile computing has imposed new possibilities for improved intelligence in Tourism Information Systems (TIS). Traditional software engineering and web engineering approaches cannot suffice, hence the need to find new product development approaches that would sufficiently enable the next generation of TIS. The next generation of TIS are expected among other things to: enable semantics-based information processing, exhibit natural language capabilities, facilitate inter-organization exchange of information in a seamless way, and evolve proactively in tandem with dynamic user requirements. In this paper, a product development approach called Product Line for Ontology-based Semantics-Aware Tourism Information Systems (PLOSATIS) which is a novel hybridization of software product line engineering, and Semantic Web engineering concepts is proposed. PLOSATIS is presented as potentially effective, predictable and amenable to software process improvement initiatives

Network geography: relations, interactions, scaling and spatial processes in GIS

This chapter argues that the representational basis of GIS largely avoidseven the most rudimentary distortions of Euclidean space as reflected, forexample, in the notion of the network. Processes acting on networks whichinvolve both short and longer term dynamics are often absent from GIscience. However a sea change is taking place in the way we view thegeography of natural and man-made systems. This is emphasising theirdynamics and the way they evolve from the bottom up, with networks anessential constituent of this decentralized paradigm. Here we will sketchthese developments, showing how ideas about graphs in terms of the waythey evolve as connected, self-organised structures reflected in theirscaling, are generating new and important views of geographical space.We argue that GI science must respond to such developments and needs tofind new forms of representation which enable both theory andapplications through software to be extended to embrace this new scienceof networks

Evolution Oriented Monitoring oriented to Security Properties for Cloud Applications

Internet is changing from an information space to a dynamic computing space. Data distribution and remotely accessible software services, dynamism, and autonomy are prime attributes. Cloud technology offers a powerful and fast growing approach to the provision of infrastructure (platform and software services) avoiding the high costs of owning, operating, and maintaining the computational infrastructures required for this purpose. Nevertheless, cloud technology still raises concerns regarding security, privacy, governance, and compliance of data and software services offered through it. Concerns are due to the difficulty to verify security properties of the different types of applications and services available through cloud technology, the uncertainty of their owners and users about the security of their services, and the applications based on them, once they are deployed and offered through a cloud. This work presents an innovative and novel evolution-oriented, cloud-specific monitoring model (including an architecture and a language) that aim at helping cloud application developers to design and monitor the behavior and functionality of their applications in a cloud environment.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Designing Traceability into Big Data Systems

Providing an appropriate level of accessibility and traceability to data or process elements (so-called Items) in large volumes of data, often Cloud-resident, is an essential requirement in the Big Data era. Enterprise-wide data systems need to be designed from the outset to support usage of such Items across the spectrum of business use rather than from any specific application view. The design philosophy advocated in this paper is to drive the design process using a so-called description-driven approach which enriches models with meta-data and description and focuses the design process on Item re-use, thereby promoting traceability. Details are given of the description-driven design of big data systems at CERN, in health informatics and in business process management. Evidence is presented that the approach leads to design simplicity and consequent ease of management thanks to loose typing and the adoption of a unified approach to Item management and usage.Comment: 10 pages; 6 figures in Proceedings of the 5th Annual International Conference on ICT: Big Data, Cloud and Security (ICT-BDCS 2015), Singapore July 2015. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1402.5764, arXiv:1402.575

Biology of Applied Digital Ecosystems

A primary motivation for our research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex, dynamic problems. However, the biological processes that contribute to these properties have not been made explicit in Digital Ecosystems research. Here, we discuss how biological properties contribute to the self-organising features of biological ecosystems, including population dynamics, evolution, a complex dynamic environment, and spatial distributions for generating local interactions. The potential for exploiting these properties in artificial systems is then considered. We suggest that several key features of biological ecosystems have not been fully explored in existing digital ecosystems, and discuss how mimicking these features may assist in developing robust, scalable self-organising architectures. An example architecture, the Digital Ecosystem, is considered in detail. The Digital Ecosystem is then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures originating from theoretical ecology, to confirm its likeness to a biological ecosystem. Including the responsiveness to requests for applications from the user base, as a measure of the 'ecological succession' (development).Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure, conferenc

A Framework for Agile Development of Component-Based Applications

Agile development processes and component-based software architectures are two software engineering approaches that contribute to enable the rapid building and evolution of applications. Nevertheless, few approaches have proposed a framework to combine agile and component-based development, allowing an application to be tested throughout the entire development cycle. To address this problematic, we have built CALICO, a model-based framework that allows applications to be safely developed in an iterative and incremental manner. The CALICO approach relies on the synchronization of a model view, which specifies the application properties, and a runtime view, which contains the application in its execution context. Tests on the application specifications that require values only known at runtime, are automatically integrated by CALICO into the running application, and the captured needed values are reified at execution time to resume the tests and inform the architect of potential problems. Any modification at the model level that does not introduce new errors is automatically propagated to the running system, allowing the safe evolution of the application. In this paper, we illustrate the CALICO development process with a concrete example and provide information on the current implementation of our framework

Verifying service continuity in a satellite reconfiguration procedure: application to a satellite

The paper discusses the use of the TURTLE UML profile to model and verify service continuity during dynamic reconfiguration of embedded software, and space-based telecommunication software in particular. TURTLE extends UML class diagrams with composition operators, and activity diagrams with temporal operators. Translating TURTLE to the formal description technique RT-LOTOS gives the profile a formal semantics and makes it possible to reuse verification techniques implemented by the RTL, the RT-LOTOS toolkit developed at LAAS-CNRS. The paper proposes a modeling and formal validation methodology based on TURTLE and RTL, and discusses its application to a payload software application in charge of an embedded packet switch. The paper demonstrates the benefits of using TURTLE to prove service continuity for dynamic reconfiguration of embedded software