Resolving Architectural Mismatches of COTS Through Architectural Reconciliation

The integration of COTS components into a system under development entails architectural mismatches. These have been tackled, so far, at the component level, through component adaptation techniques, but they also must be tackled at an architectural level of abstraction. In this paper we propose an approach for resolving architectural mismatches, with the aid of architectural reconciliation. The approach consists of designing and subsequently reconciling two architectural models, one that is forward-engineered from the requirements and another that is reverse-engineered from the COTS-based implementation. The final reconciled model is optimally adapted both to the requirements and to the actual COTS-based implementation. The contribution of this paper lies in the application of architectural reconciliation in the context of COTS-based software development. Architectural modeling is based upon the UML 2.0 standard, while the reconciliation is performed by transforming the two models, with the help of architectural design decisions.

System and software architecting harmonization practices in ultra-large-scale systems of systems:A confirmatory case study

Context: The challenges posed by the architecting of System of Systems (SoS) has motivated a significant number of research efforts in the area. However, literature is lacking when it comes to the interplay between the disciplines involved in the architecting process, a key factor in addressing these challenges.Objective: This paper aims to contribute to this line of research by confirming and extending previously characterized architecting harmonization practices from Systems and Software Engineering, adopted in an ultra-large-scale SoS. Method: We conducted a confirmatory case study on the Square-Kilometre Array (SKA) project to evaluate and extend the findings of our exploratory case on the LOFAR/LOFAR2.0 radio-telescope projects. In doing so, a pre-study was conducted to map the findings of the previous study with respect to the SKA context. A survey was then designed, through which the views of 46 SKA engineers were collected and analyzed. Results: The study confirmed in various degrees the four practices identified in the exploratory case, and provided further insights about them, namely: (1) the friction between disciplines caused by long-term system requirements, and how they can be ameliorated through intermediate, short-term requirements; (2) the way design choices with a cross-cutting impact on multiple agile teams have an indirect impact on the system architecture; (3) how these design choices are often caused by the criteria that guided early system decomposition; (4) the seemingly recurrent issue with the lack of details about the dynamic elements of the interfaces; and (5) the use of machine-readable interface specifications for aligning hardware/software development processes