7 research outputs found
Un formalisme pour la traçabilité des transformations
Dans le développement logiciel en industrie, les documents de
spécification jouent un rôle important pour la communication entre les analystes
et les développeurs. Cependant, avec le temps, les changements de personel et
les échéances toujours plus courtes, ces documents sont souvent obsolètes ou
incohérents avec l'état effectif du système, i.e., son code
source. Pourtant, il est nécessaire que les composants du système logiciel
soient conservés à jour et cohérents avec leurs documents de spécifications pour
faciliter leur développement et maintenance et, ainsi, pour en réduire les
coûts. Maintenir la cohérence entre spécification et code source nécessite de
pouvoir représenter les changements sur les uns et les autres et de pouvoir
appliquer ces changements de manière cohérente et automatique.
Nous proposons une solution permettant de décrire une représentation d'un
logiciel ainsi qu'un formalisme mathématique permettant de décrire et de
manipuler l'évolution des composants de ces représentations. Le formalisme est
basé sur les triplets de Hoare pour représenter les transformations et sur la
théorie des groupes et des homomorphismes de groupes pour manipuler ces
transformations et permettrent leur application sur les différentes
représentations du système.
Nous illustrons notre formalisme sur deux représentations d'un système logiciel
: PADL, une représentation architecturale de haut niveau (semblable à UML), et
JCT, un arbre de syntaxe abstrait basé sur Java. Nous définissons également des
transformations représentant l'évolution de ces représentations et la
transposition permettant de reporter les transformations d'une représentation
sur l'autre. Enfin, nous avons développé et décrivons brièvement une
implémentation de notre illustration, un plugiciel pour l'IDE Eclipse détectant
les transformations effectuées sur le code par les développeurs et un générateur
de code pour l'intégration de nouvelles représentations dans l'implémentation.When developing software system in industry, system specifications are heavily
used in communication among analysts and developers. However, system evolution,
employee turn-over and shorter deadlines lead those documents either not to be
up-to-date or not to be consistent with the actual system source code. Yet,
having up-to-date documents would greatly help analysts and developers and
reduce development and maintenance costs. Therefore, we need to keep those
documents up-to-date and consistent.
We propose a novel mathematical formalism to describe and manipulate the
evolution of these documents. The mathematical formalism is based on Hoare
triple to represent the transformations and group theory and groups
homomorphisms to manipulate these transformations and apply them on different
representations.
We illustrate our formalism using two representation of a same system: PADL,
that is an abstract design specification (similar to UML), and JCT, that is an
Abstract Syntax Tree for Java. We also define transformations describing their
evolutions, and transformations transposition from one representation to
another. Finally, we provide an implementation of our illustration, a plugin for
the Eclipse IDE detecting source code transformations made by a developer and a
source code generator for integrating new representations in the implementation
Software Service Innovation: An Action Research into Release Cycle Management
Fierce competition in the market is driving software vendors to rely on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) strategies and to continuously match new software versions with customers’ needs and competitors’ moves. Although release management as a recurrent activity related to SaaS arguably shapes how a vendor services its customers, the literature is surprisingly limited on how software releases are managed to support SaaS strategies. Against this backdrop, we present a collaborative action-research study with Software Inc., a large multi-national software provider, focused on improving the release cycle management process for a complex security software service. The study is part of a comprehensive intervention into Software Inc. that combines a perspective rooted in software process improvement and engineering practices with one rooted in service delivery and customer interactions. The part that is reported in this dissertation draws on the service-dominant logic framework to analyze how the release cycle management process was organized to improve Software Inc.’s ongoing value co-creation with its customers. As a result, the study contributed to improving release cycle management at Software Inc. and it expands industry knowledge about the challenges and opportunities for software vendors to manage releases and improve the value delivered to and co-created with their customers. This added knowledge is of interest to both practitioners and researchers as SaaS strategies increasingly shape the industry with important implications for how software is released
Improving Recurrent Software Development: A Contextualist Inquiry Into Release Cycle Management
Software development is increasingly conducted in a recurrent fashion, where the same product or service is continuously being developed for the marketplace. Still, we lack detailed studies about this particular context of software development. Against this backdrop, this dissertation presents an action research study into Software Inc., a large multi-national software provider. The research addressed the challenges the company faced in managing releases and organizing software process improvement (SPI) to help recurrently develop and deliver a specific product, Secure-on-Request, to its customers and the wider marketplace. The initial problem situation was characterized by recent acquisition of additional software, complexity of service delivery, new engineering and product management teams, and low software development process maturity. Asking how release management can be organized and improved in the context of recurrent development of software, we draw on Pettigrew’s contextualist inquiry to focus on the ongoing interaction between the contents, context and process to organize and improve release cycle practices and outcomes. As a result, the dissertation offers two contributions. Practically, it contributes to the resolution of the problem situation at Software Inc. Theoretically, it introduces a new software engineering discipline, release cycle management (RCM), focused on recurrent delivery of software, including SPI as an integral part, and grounded in the specific experiences at Software Inc