CRISTAL: A practical study in designing systems to cope with change

Software engineers frequently face the challenge of developing systems whose requirements are likely to change in order to adapt to organizational reconfigurations or other external pressures. Evolving requirements present difficulties, especially in environments in which business agility demands shorter development times and responsive prototyping. This paper uses a study from CERN in Geneva to address these research questions by employing a 'description-driven' approach that is responsive to changes in user requirements and that facilitates dynamic system reconfiguration. The study describes how handling descriptions of objects in practice alongside their instances (making the objects self-describing) can mediate the effects of evolving user requirements on system development. This paper reports on and draws lessons from the practical use of a description-driven system over time. It also identifies lessons that can be learned from adopting such a self-describing description-driven approach in future software development. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd

Impact and Challenges of Software in 2025: Collected Papers

Today (2014), software is the key ingredient of most products and services. Software generates innovation and progress in many modern industries. Software is an indispensable element of evolution, of quality of life, and of our future. Software development is (slowly) evolving from a craft to an industrial discipline. Software – and the ability to efficiently produce and evolve high-quality software – is the single most important success factor for many highly competitive industries. Software technology, development methods and tools, and applications in more and more areas are rapidly evolving. The impact of software in 2025 in nearly all areas of life, work, relationships, culture, and society is expected to be massive. The question of the future of software is therefore important. However – like all predictions – quite difficult. Some market forces, industrial developments, social needs, and technology trends are visible today. How will they develop and influence the software we will have in 2025?:Impact of Heterogeneous Processor Architectures and Adaptation Technologies on the Software of 2025 (Kay Bierzynski) 9 Facing Future Software Engineering Challenges by Means of Software Product Lines (David Gollasch) 19 Capabilities of Digital Search and Impact on Work and Life in 2025 (Christina Korger) 27 Transparent Components for Software Systems (Paul Peschel) 37 Functionality, Threats and Influence of Ubiquitous Personal Assistants with Regard to the Society (Jonas Rausch) 47 Evolution-driven Changes of Non-Functional Requirements and Their Architecture (Hendrik Schön) 5

Incremental Latency Analysis of Heterogeneous Cyber-Physical Systems

REACTION 2014. 3rd International Workshop on Real-time and Distributed Computing in Emerging Applications. Rome, Italy. December 2nd, 2014.Cyber-Physical Systems, as used in automotive, avionics, or aerospace domains, have critical real-time require-ments. Time-related issues might have important impacts and, as these systems are becoming extremely software-reliant, validate and enforcing timing constraints is becoming difficult. Current techniques are mainly focused on validating these constraints late by using integration tests and tracing the system execution. Such methods are time-consuming and labor-intensive and, discovering timing issue late in the development process might incur significant rework efforts. In this paper, we propose an incremental model-based ap-proach to analyze and validate timing requirements of cyber-physical systems. We first capture the system functions, its related latency requirements and validate the end-to-end latency at a high level. This functional architecture is then refined into an implementation deployed on an execution platform. As system description is evolving, the latency analysis is being refined with more precise values. Such an approach provide latency analysis from a high level specification without having to implement the system, saving potential re-engineering efforts. It also helps engineers to select appropriate execution platform components or change the deployment strategy of system functions to ensure that latency requirements will be met when implementing the system.This material is based upon work funded and supported by the Department of Defense under Contract No. FA8721-05-C-0003 with Carnegie Mellon University for the operation of the Software Engineering Institute, a federally funded research and development center

A Bootstrap Theory: the SEMAT Kernel Itself as Runnable Software

The SEMAT kernel is a thoroughly thought generic framework for Software Engineering system development in practice. But one should be able to test its characteristics by means of a no less generic theory matching the SEMAT kernel. This paper claims that such a matching theory is attainable and describes its main principles. The conceptual starting point is the robustness of the Kernel alphas to variations in the nature of the software system, viz. to software automation, distribution and self-evolution. From these and from observed Kernel properties follows the proposed bootstrap principle: a software system theory should itself be a runnable software. Thus, the kernel alphas can be viewed as a top-level ontology, indeed the Essence of Software Engineering. Among the interesting consequences of this bootstrap theory, the observable system characteristics can now be formally tested. For instance, one can check the system completeness, viz. that software system modules fulfill each one of the system requirements.Comment: 8 pages; 2 figures; Preprint of paper accepted for GTSE'2014 Workshop, within ICSE'2014 Conferenc

Requirements engineering in software product line engineering

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00766-013-0189-0Many attempts have been made to increase the productivity and quality of software products based on software reuse. Software product line practice is one such approach, one that focuses on developing a family of products which have a majority of features in common. Hence, there are numerous requirements that are common across the family, but others are unique to individual products. Traditional requirements engineering methods were conceived to deal with single product requirements and are usually not flexible enough to address the needs arising from reusing requirements for a family of products. There is also the additional burden of correctly identifying and engineering both product-line-wide requirements and product-specific requirements as well as evolving them. Therefore, in this special issue, we want to highlight the importance and the role of requirements engineering for product line development as well as to provide insights into the state of the art in the field.Insfrán Pelozo, CE.; Chastek, G.; Donohoe, P.; Sampaio Do Prado Leite, JC. (2014). Requirements engineering in software product line engineering. Requirements Engineering. 19(4):331-332. doi:10.1007/s00766-013-0189-0S331332194Clements P, Northrop LM (2001) Software product lines: practices and patterns. Addison-Wesley, BostonDerakhshanmanesh M, Fox J, Ebert J (2012) Adopting feature-centric reuse of requirements assets: an industrial experience report. First international workshop on requirements engineering practices on software product line engineering, Salvador, BrazilKuloor C, Eberlein A (2002) Requirements engineering for software product lines, proceedings of the 15th international conference on software and systems engineering and their applications (ICSSEA’02), Paris, FranceNorthrop LM, Clements P (2013) A framework for software product line practice. Software engineering institute. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/tools/framework/index.cfm . Accessed 22 July 2013Yu Y, Lapouchnian A, Liaskos S, Mylopoulos J, Leite JCSP (2008) From Goals to High-Variability Software Design. Foundations of Intelligent Systems, 17th International Symposium Proceedings. ISMIS 2008. Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4994: 1–1

Developing High Performance Computing Resources for Teaching Cluster and Grid Computing courses

High-Performance Computing (HPC) and the ability to process large amounts of data are of paramount importance for UK business and economy as outlined by Rt Hon David Willetts MP at the HPC and Big Data conference in February 2014. However there is a shortage of skills and available training in HPC to prepare and expand the workforce for the HPC and Big Data research and development. Currently, HPC skills are acquired mainly by students and staff taking part in HPC-related research projects, MSc courses, and at the dedicated training centres such as Edinburgh University’s EPCC. There are few UK universities teaching the HPC, Clusters and Grid Computing courses at the undergraduate level. To address the issue of skills shortages in the HPC it is essential to provide teaching and training as part of both postgraduate and undergraduate courses. The design and development of such courses is challenging since the technologies and software in the fields of large scale distributed systems such as Cluster, Cloud and Grid computing are undergoing continuous change. The students completing the HPC courses should be proficient in these evolving technologies and equipped with practical and theoretical skills for future jobs in this fast developing area. In this paper we present our experience in developing the HPC, Cluster and Grid modules including a review of existing HPC courses offered at the UK universities. The topics covered in the modules are described, as well as the coursework projects based on practical laboratory work. We conclude with an evaluation based on our experience over the last ten years in developing and delivering the HPC modules on the undergraduate courses, with suggestions for future work

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research