A New Approach for Quality Management in Pervasive Computing Environments

This paper provides an extension of MDA called Context-aware Quality Model Driven Architecture (CQ-MDA) which can be used for quality control in pervasive computing environments. The proposed CQ-MDA approach based on ContextualArchRQMM (Contextual ARCHitecture Quality Requirement MetaModel), being an extension to the MDA, allows for considering quality and resources-awareness while conducting the design process. The contributions of this paper are a meta-model for architecture quality control of context-aware applications and a model driven approach to separate architecture concerns from context and quality concerns and to configure reconfigurable software architectures of distributed systems. To demonstrate the utility of our approach, we use a videoconference system.Comment: 10 pages, 10 Figures, Oral Presentation in ECSA 201

Are we there yet? Analyzing architecture description languages for formal analysis, usability, and realizability

Research on Software Architectures has been active since the early nineties, leading to a number of different architecture description languages (ADL). Given their importance in facilitating the communication of crucial system properties to different stakeholders and their analysis early on in the development of a system this is understandable. After all these years one would have hoped that we could point to a handful of ADLs as the clear winners as the languages of choice of practitioners for specifying software system architectures. However it seems that ADLs have still not entered the mainstream. We believe this is so because practitioners find the current offering either too difficult to use or not supporting automated analysis commensurate to the level of effort they require for specifying a system, especially so for complex systems. In this paper we present a comparative analysis of a number of ADLs, both of first generation and more recent ones, against a small set of language properties that we believe are crucial for an ADL that would be easy for practitioners to adopt in their design and development practices. These properties are: formal semantics, usability, and realizability

Rapid Prototyping of Domain-Specific Architecture Languages

International audienceSoftware architecture has become a sensitive discipline, which consists in concretizing the user requirements into a set of artifacts that can be used to model and reason about the software to be developed. However, the architect often relies on its own knowledge to map domain-specific requirements onto generic software abstractions. Most of the time, this leads to the definition of repetitive tasks and architecture fragments, which can be particularly error prone. We therefore believe that architects need a more flexible approach to cope with the definition of domain-specific architectures by leveraging general purpose architecture description languages. This paper introduces the FraSCAla framework as an architectural framework that can be used to rapidly prototype and experiment domain-specific ADLs in order to catalyze the definition and to improve the reliability of software architectures. We demonstrate the merits of this approach on two case studies that illustrate component-based architectures exhibiting various categories of architectural patterns