Model driven product line engineering : core asset and process implications

Reuse is at the heart of major improvements in productivity and quality in Software Engineering. Both Model Driven Engineering (MDE) and Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) are software development paradigms that promote reuse. Specifically, they promote systematic reuse and a departure from craftsmanship towards an industrialization of the software development process. MDE and SPLE have established their benefits separately. Their combination, here called Model Driven Product Line Engineering (MDPLE), gathers together the advantages of both. Nevertheless, this blending requires MDE to be recasted in SPLE terms. This has implications on both the core assets and the software development process. The challenges are twofold: (i) models become central core assets from which products are obtained and (ii) the software development process needs to cater for the changes that SPLE and MDE introduce. This dissertation proposes a solution to the first challenge following a feature oriented approach, with an emphasis on reuse and early detection of inconsistencies. The second part is dedicated to assembly processes, a clear example of the complexity MDPLE introduces in software development processes. This work advocates for a new discipline inside the general software development process, i.e., the Assembly Plan Management, which raises the abstraction level and increases reuse in such processes. Different case studies illustrate the presented ideas.This work was hosted by the University of the Basque Country (Faculty of Computer Sciences). The author enjoyed a doctoral grant from the Basque Goverment under the “Researchers Training Program” during the years 2005 to 2009. The work was was co-supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education, and the European Social Fund under contracts WAPO (TIN2005-05610) and MODELINE (TIN2008-06507-C02-01)

A Scalable Design Framework for Variability Management in Large-Scale Software Product Lines

Variability management is one of the major challenges in software product line adoption, since it needs to be efficiently managed at various levels of the software product line development process (e.g., requirement analysis, design, implementation, etc.). One of the main challenges within variability management is the handling and effective visualization of large-scale (industry-size) models, which in many projects, can reach the order of thousands, along with the dependency relationships that exist among them. These have raised many concerns regarding the scalability of current variability management tools and techniques and their lack of industrial adoption. To address the scalability issues, this work employed a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods to identify the reasons behind the limited scalability of existing variability management tools and techniques. In addition to producing a comprehensive catalogue of existing tools, the outcome form this stage helped understand the major limitations of existing tools. Based on the findings, a novel approach was created for managing variability that employed two main principles for supporting scalability. First, the separation-of-concerns principle was employed by creating multiple views of variability models to alleviate information overload. Second, hyperbolic trees were used to visualise models (compared to Euclidian space trees traditionally used). The result was an approach that can represent models encompassing hundreds of variability points and complex relationships. These concepts were demonstrated by implementing them in an existing variability management tool and using it to model a real-life product line with over a thousand variability points. Finally, in order to assess the work, an evaluation framework was designed based on various established usability assessment best practices and standards. The framework was then used with several case studies to benchmark the performance of this work against other existing tools

Building a Systematic Legacy System Modernization Approach

A systematic legacy system modernizing approach represents a new approach for modernizing legacy systems. Systematic legacy system modernization has software reuse as an integral part of modernization. We have developed a modernization approach which uses software architecture reconstruction to find reusable components within the legacy system. The practice of software development and modernization continues to shift towards the reuse of components from legacy systems to handle the complexities of software development. Modernization of a legacy system requires reuse of software artefacts from legacy system to conserve the business rules and improve the system’s quality attributes. Software reuse is an integral part of our systematic legacy modernization approach. Software should be considered as an asset and reuse of these assets is essential to increase the return on the development costs. Software reuse ranges from reuse of ideas to algorithms to any documents that are created during the software development life cycle. Software reuse has many potential benefits which include increased software quality, and decreased software development cost and time. Demands for lower software production and maintenance costs, faster delivery of systems and increased quality can only be met by widespread and systematic software reuse. In spite of all these benefits software reuse adoption is not widespread in the software development communities. Software reuse cannot possibly become an engineering discipline so long as issues and concerns have not been clearly understood and dealt with. We have conducted two surveys to understand the issues and concerns of software reuse in the Conventional Software Engineering (CSE) Community and the Software Product Line (SPL) Community where reuse is an integral part of the product development. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of our surveys identified the critical factors which affect and inhibit software engineers and developers adopting software reuse. Software reuse has been talked about in generic terms in software product lines. Though software reuse is a core concept in SPL it has however failed to become a standardized practice. The survey conducted on the SPL Community investigates how software reuse is adopted in SPL so as to provide the necessary degree of support for engineering software product line applications and to identify some of the issues and concerns in software reuse. The identified issues and concerns have helped us to understand the difference between software reuse in the CSE and SPL Communities. It has also given us an indication of how both communities can learn good software reuse practices from each other in order to develop a common software reuse process. Based on the outcome of our surveys we have developed a systematic software reuse process, called the Knowledge Based Software Reuse (KBSR) Process, which incorporates a Repository of reusable software assets to build a systematic legacy system modernization approach. Being able to reuse software artefacts, be it software requirement specification, design, or code, would greatly enhance software productivity and reliability. All of these software artefacts can go in the Knowledge Based Software Reuse Repository and be candidates for reuse

An Investigation Into the Generality of a Graphical Representation of Program Code for Source to Source Translation

This thesis addresses the problem of defining a source-to-source translation system for reusable software components. It describes the development of an interoperable language for writing software components, and presents a system to translate components written in the interoperable language to a set of compatible target languages. The common features in a set of popular programming languages are analyzed to inform the design of the interoperable language. An evaluation is performed by using the source-to-source translator to convert two well-known open source Java libraries to C++ and Python, and the accuracy and performance of the resulting translations are assessed

Forschungsbericht Universität Mannheim 2008 / 2009

Die Universität Mannheim hat seit ihrer Entstehung ein spezifisches Forschungsprofil, welches sich in ihrer Entwicklung und derz eitigen Struktur deutlich widerspiegelt. Es ist geprägt von national und international sehr anerkannten Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften und deren Vernetzung mit leistungsstarken Geisteswissenschaften, Rechtswissenschaft sowie Mathematik und Informatik. Die Universität Mannheim wird auch in Zukunft einerseits die Forschungsschwerpunkte in den Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften fördern und andererseits eine interdisziplinäre Kultur im Zusammenspiel aller Fächer der Universität anstreben

Actes des Cinquièmes journées nationales du Groupement De Recherche CNRS du Génie de la Programmation et du Logiciel

National audienceCe document contient les actes des Cinquièmes journées nationales du Groupement De Recherche CNRS du Gé}nie de la Programmation et du Logiciel (GDR GPL) s'étant déroulées à Nancy du 3 au 5 avril 2013. Les contributions présentées dans ce document ont été sélectionnées par les différents groupes de travail du GDR. Il s'agit de résumés, de nouvelles versions, de posters et de démonstrations qui correspondent à des travaux qui ont déjà été validés par les comités de programmes d'autres conférences et revues et dont les droits appartiennent exclusivement à leurs auteurs

Foundations of Trusted Autonomy

Trusted Autonomy; Automation Technology; Autonomous Systems; Self-Governance; Trusted Autonomous Systems; Design of Algorithms and Methodologie