Towards guidelines for building a business case and gathering evidence of software reference architectures in industry

Background: Software reference architectures are becoming widely adopted by organizations that need to support the design and maintenance of software applications of a shared domain. For organizations that plan to adopt this architecture-centric approach, it becomes fundamental to know the return on investment and to understand how software reference architectures are designed, maintained, and used. Unfortunately, there is little evidence-based support to help organizations with these challenges. Methods: We have conducted action research in an industry-academia collaboration between the GESSI research group and everis, a multinational IT consulting firm based in Spain. Results: The results from such collaboration are being packaged in order to create guidelines that could be used in similar contexts as the one of everis. The main result of this paper is the construction of empirically-grounded guidelines that support organizations to decide on the adoption of software reference architectures and to gather evidence to improve RA-related practices. Conclusions: The created guidelines could be used by other organizations outside of our industry-academia collaboration. With this goal in mind, we describe the guidelines in detail for their use.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A High Accurate and Component Based Network Emulator for the Simulation of Complex Heterogeneous Network Topology

Wired features like quick handover, radio jamming and dynamic data rates cannot be truthfully presented inside the simulator bue we concentrate on all layers above the physical layer. Previous network emulators were designed for wired networks or router related emulations. Complex network topologies can be constructed and integrated

A reuse-based economic model for software reference architectures

The growing size and complexity of software systems, together with critical time-to-market needs, demand new software engineering approaches for software development. To remain competitive, organizations are challenged to make informed and feasible value-driven design decisions in order to ensure the quality of the systems. However, there is a lack of support for evaluating the economic impact of these decisions with regard to software reference architectures. This damages the communication among architects and management, which can result in poor decisions. This paper aims at opening a path in this direction by presenting a pragmatic preliminary economic model to perform cost-benefit analysis on the adoption of software reference architectures as key asset for optimizing architectural decision-making. A preliminary validation based on a retrospective study showed the ability of the model to support a cost-benefit analysis presented to the management of an IT consulting company.Preprin

Robotics Software Engineering: A Perspective from the Service Robotics Domain

Robots that support humans by performing useful tasks (a.k.a., service robots) are booming worldwide. In contrast to industrial robots, the development of service robots comes with severe software engineering challenges, since they require high levels of robustness and autonomy to operate in highly heterogeneous environments. As a domain with critical safety implications, service robotics faces a need for sound software development practices. In this paper, we present the first large-scale empirical study to assess the state of the art and practice of robotics software engineering. We conducted 18 semi-structured interviews with industrial practitioners working in 15 companies from 9 different countries and a survey with 156 respondents (from 26 countries) from the robotics domain. Our results provide a comprehensive picture of (i) the practices applied by robotics industrial and academic practitioners, including processes, paradigms, languages, tools, frameworks, and reuse practices, (ii) the distinguishing characteristics of robotics software engineering, and (iii) recurrent challenges usually faced, together with adopted solutions. The paper concludes by discussing observations, derived hypotheses, and proposed actions for researchers and practitioners.Comment: 11 pages + 1 page for references, 3 figures, 3 tables, in proceedings of ESEC/FSE 202

A framework for software reference architecture analysis and review

Premio al mejor artículo, X Workshop Latinoamericano Ingeniería de Software Experimental, ESELAW 2013Tight time-to-market needs pushes software companies and IT consulting firms to continuously look for techniques to improve their IT services in general, and the design of software architectures in particular. The use of soft-ware reference architectures allows IT consulting firms reusing architectural knowledge and components in a systematic way. In return, IT consulting firms face the need to analyze the return on investment in software reference architectures for organizations, and to review these reference architectures in order to ensure their quality and incremental improvement. Little support exists to help IT consulting firms to face these challenges. In this paper we present an empirical framework aimed to support the analysis and review of software reference architectures and their use in IT projects by harvesting relevant evidence from the wide spectrum of involved stakeholders.Award-winningPostprint (author’s final draft

Design and implementation of the node identity internetworking architecture

The Internet Protocol (IP) has been proven very flexible, being able to accommodate all kinds of link technologies and supporting a broad range of applications. The basic principles of the original Internet architecture include end-to-end addressing, global routeability and a single namespace of IP addresses that unintentionally serves both as locators and host identifiers. The commercial success and widespread use of the Internet have lead to new requirements, which include internetworking over business boundaries, mobility and multi-homing in an untrusted environment. Our approach to satisfy these new requirements is to introduce a new internetworking layer, the node identity layer. Such a layer runs on top of the different versions of IP, but could also run directly on top of other kinds of network technologies, such as MPLS and 2G/3G PDP contexts. This approach enables connectivity across different communication technologies, supports mobility, multi-homing, and security from ground up. This paper describes the Node Identity Architecture in detail and discusses the experiences from implementing and running a prototype