Metamodel for Tracing Concerns across the Life Cycle

Several aspect-oriented approaches have been proposed to specify aspects at different phases in the software life cycle. Aspects can appear within a phase, be refined or mapped to other aspects in later phases, or even disappear.\ud Tracing aspects is necessary to support understandability and maintainability of software systems. Although several approaches have been introduced to address traceability of aspects, two important limitations can be observed. First, tracing is not yet tackled for the entire life cycle. Second, the traceability model that is applied usually refers to elements of specific aspect languages, thereby limiting the reusability of the adopted traceability model.We propose the concern traceability metamodel (CTM) that enables traceability of concerns throughout the life cycle, and which is independent from the aspect languages that are used. CTM can be enhanced to provide additional properties for tracing, and be instantiated to define\ud customized traceability models with respect to the required aspect languages. We have implemented CTM in the tool M-Trace, that uses XML-based representations of the models and XQuery queries to represent tracing information. CTM and M-Trace are illustrated for a Concurrent Versioning System to trace aspects from the requirements level to architecture design level and the implementation

Traceability approach for conflict dissolution in handling requirements crosscutting

Requirements crosscutting in software development and maintenance has gradually become an important issue in software engineering. There are growing needs of traceability support to achieve some possible understanding in requirements crosscutting throughout phases in software lifecycle. It is aimed to manage practical process in addressing requirements crosscutting at various phases in order to comply with industrial standard. However, due to its distinct nature, many recent works are focusing on identification, modularization, composition and conflict dissolution of requirements crosscutting which are mostly saturated at requirements level. These works fail to practically specify crosscutting properties for functional and nonfunctional requirements at requirements, analysis and design phases. Therefore, this situation leads to inability to provide sufficient support for software engineers to manage requirements crosscutting across the remaining development phases. This thesis proposes a new approach called the Identification, Modularization, Design Composition Rules and Conflict Dissolutions (IM-DeCRuD) that provides a special traceability to facilitate better understanding and reasoning for engineering tasks towards requirements crosscutting during software development and evolution. This study also promotes a simple but significant way to support pragmatic changes of crosscutting properties at requirements, analysis and design phases for medium sizes of software development and maintenance projects. A tool was developed based on the proposed approach to support four main perspectives namely requirements specification definition, requirements specification modification, requirements prioritization setting and graphics visualizing representation. Software design components are generated using Generic Modeling Environment (GME) with Java language interpreter to incorporate all these features. The proposed IM-DeCRuD was applied to an industrial strength case study of medium-scaled system called myPolicy. The tool was evaluated and the results were verified by some experts for validation and opinion. The feedbacks were then gathered and analyzed using DESMET qualitative method. The outcomes show that the IM-DeCRuD is applicable to address some tedious job of engineering process in handling crosscutting properties at requirements, analysis and design phases for system development and evolution

Preserving the Quality of Architectural Tactics in Source Code

In any complex software system, strong interdependencies exist between requirements and software architecture. Requirements drive architectural choices while also being constrained by the existing architecture and by what is economically feasible. This makes it advisable to concurrently specify the requirements, to devise and compare alternative architectural design solutions, and ultimately to make a series of design decisions in order to satisfy each of the quality concerns. Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence has shown that architectural knowledge tends to be tacit in nature, stored in the heads of people, and lost over time. Therefore, developers often lack comprehensive knowledge of underlying architectural design decisions and inadvertently degrade the quality of the architecture while performing maintenance activities. In practice, this problem can be addressed through preserving the relationships between the requirements, architectural design decisions and their implementations in the source code, and then using this information to keep developers aware of critical architectural aspects of the code. This dissertation presents a novel approach that utilizes machine learning techniques to recover and preserve the relationships between architecturally significant requirements, architectural decisions and their realizations in the implemented code. Our approach for recovering architectural decisions includes the two primary stages of training and classification. In the first stage, the classifier is trained using code snippets of different architectural decisions collected from various software systems. During this phase, the classifier learns the terms that developers typically use to implement each architectural decision. These ``indicator terms\u27\u27 represent method names, variable names, comments, or the development APIs that developers inevitably use to implement various architectural decisions. A probabilistic weight is then computed for each potential indicator term with respect to each type of architectural decision. The weight estimates how strongly an indicator term represents a specific architectural tactics/decisions. For example, a term such as \emph{pulse} is highly representative of the heartbeat tactic but occurs infrequently in the authentication. After learning the indicator terms, the classifier can compute the likelihood that any given source file implements a specific architectural decision. The classifier was evaluated through several different experiments including classical cross-validation over code snippets of 50 open source projects and on the entire source code of a large scale software system. Results showed that classifier can reliably recognize a wide range of architectural decisions. The technique introduced in this dissertation is used to develop the Archie tool suite. Archie is a plug-in for Eclipse and is designed to detect wide range of architectural design decisions in the code and to protect them from potential degradation during maintenance activities. It has several features for performing change impact analysis of architectural concerns at both the code and design level and proactively keep developers informed of underlying architectural decisions during maintenance activities. Archie is at the stage of technology transfer at the US Department of Homeland Security where it is purely used to detect and monitor security choices. Furthermore, this outcome is integrated into the Department of Homeland Security\u27s Software Assurance Market Place (SWAMP) to advance research and development of secure software systems

Uma proposta para rastreabilidade no desenvolvimento de software

Orientador: Mario JinoTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: Rastreabilidade tem sido um tópico de pesquisa no desenvolvimento de software por pelo menos 40 anos, sendo adicionada a muitos padrões, como o DOD-STD-2167A e o IEEE 830-1998. Este último, por exemplo, afirma que uma boa especificação de requisitos de software deve ser rastreável. A rastreabilidade fornece muitos benefícios para projetos de software, tais como: identificação das razões para decisões de design, prevenção de problemas de dependência, identificação de responsabilidades em um projeto, estimação de impacto e de custo de modificações, e medição do progresso de desenvolvimento. Sucintamente, a rastreabilidade permite a geração de um produto de melhor qualidade. Dois principais focos surgiram na literatura nos últimos anos: desenvolvimento baseado em modelo e geração automática de rastros. O primeiro trata da modelagem de rastreabilidade, definindo relações e elementos de um projeto; o segundo trata da descoberta automática de relações entre elementos. Vários conceitos foram definidos até agora, como rastreabilidade bidirecional, rastreabilidade de especificações pré e pós-requisitos, rastreabilidade horizontal e vertical, e rastreabilidade explícita e implícita. Embora haja um consenso geral sobre a maioria dos conceitos relacionados a rastreabilidade, há uma falta de consenso sobre como, e o quê, deve ser rastreado; não há consenso sobre: quais relações são relevantes para os projetos de desenvolvimento de software, quais elementos devem ser rastreados, como as mudanças nos elementos de um projeto afetam as relações existentes, ou como atualizar as relações dadas certas mudanças. Os modelos de rastreabilidade visam responder a essas questões fornecendo um padrão para ser usado como uma guia em projetos de desenvolvimento de software; entretanto, não há consenso sobre o que um modelo deve conter. Existe uma variedade de modelos, cada um considerando diferentes tipos de relações, elementos, e possuindo diferentes focos. Além disso, a maioria dos modelos possui problemas que tornam o seu uso difícil, ou até mesmo impossível; por exemplo, existem modelos que não descrevem - suficientemente ou em nada - as ligações de rastreabilidade que propõem. Este trabalho visa a ajudar nesta questão, fornecendo uma contribuição dupla: um modelo de referência para criar e avaliar modelos de rastreabilidade, e um metamodelo abrangente, construído em cima do modelo de referência, para adicionar rastreabilidade a projetos de desenvolvimento de software. Nosso Modelo de Referência para rastreabilidade define os elementos básicos em um modelo de rastreabilidade e define conjuntos básicos de: ações, tipos de ligações, tipos de artefatos, e processos. Propriedades necessárias para o conjunto de tipos de ligações e o conjunto de tipos de artefatos também são fornecidas. Nosso Metamodelo para rastreabilidade é composto por: um modelo conceitual descrevendo e organizando os elementos de rastreabilidade; um conjunto de tipos de artefatos representando as atividades definidas no Modelo de Referência, além de um conjunto de tipos de artefatos criados para registrar decisões de design; um conjunto de tipos de ligações que modelam diferentes relações de rastreabilidade; e um conjunto de processos para garantir a consistência de projetosAbstract: Traceability has been a topic of research in software development for at least 40 years, being added to many standards, such as the DOD-STD-2167A and the IEEE 830-1998. The latter, for instance, states that a good software requirements specification should be traceable. Traceability provides many benefits to software projects, such as: identification of the reasons for design decisions, avoidance of dependency issues, identification of accountability in a project, estimation of impact and cost of modifications, and measurement of development progress. Succintly, traceability allows the generation of a better quality product. Two main focuses have emerged in the literature in recent years: model-based development and automated trace generation. The former concerns modeling traceability by defining relations and elements in a project; the latter concerns automatic discovery of relations between elements in a project. Several concepts have been defined so far, such as bidirectional traceability, pre and post-requirements specification traceability, horizontal and vertical traceability, and explicit and implicit traceability. While there is general consensus on most concepts related to traceability, there is a lack of consensus on how, and what, should be traced; there is no consensus on which relations are relevant for software development projects, which elements should be traced, how changes in elements of a project affects existing relations, or how to update relations given certain changes. Traceability models aim to answer these questions by providing a standard to be used as a guide in software development projects; however, there is no consensus on what a model should contain. There is a variety of models, each considering different types of relations, elements, and having distinct focuses. Also, the majority of models have issues which makes them difficult or even impossible to use; for instance, there are models which do not describe - sufficiently or at all - traceability links which they propose. This work aims to help in this issue by providing a twofold contribution: a reference model for creating and evaluating traceability models, and a comprehensive metamodel, built on top of the reference model, to add traceability to software development projects. Our Reference Model for traceability defines the basic elements in a traceability model and defines basic sets of: actions, link types, artifact types, and processes. Necessary properties for the sets of link types and artifact types are also provided. Our Metamodel for traceability is composed of: a conceptual model describing and organizing the elements of traceability; a set of artifact types representing the activities of the Reference Model, plus a set of artifact types created to record design decisions; a set of link types modeling different traceability relations; and a set of processes to ensure project consistencyDoutoradoEngenharia de ComputaçãoDoutor em Engenharia Elétrica1142618CAPE

A Modelling Approach to Multi-Domain Traceability

Traceability is an important concern in projects that span different engineering domains. Traceability can also be mandated, exploited and man- aged across the engineering lifecycle, and may involve defining connections between heterogeneous models. As a result, traceability can be considered to be multi-domain. This thesis introduces the concept and challenges of multi-domain trace- ability and explains how it can be used to support typical traceability scenarios. It proposes a model-based approach to develop a traceability solution which effectively operates across multiple engineering domains. The approach introduced a collection of tasks and structures which address the identified challenges for a traceability solution in multi-domain projects. The proposed approach demonstrates that modelling principles and MDE techniques can help to address current challenges and consequently improve the effectiveness of a multi-domain traceability solution. A prototype of the required tooling to support the approach is implemented with EMF and atop Epsilon; it consists of an implementation of the proposed structures (models) and model management operations to sup- port traceability. Moreover, the approach is illustrated in the context of two safety-critical projects where multi-domain traceability is required to underpin certification arguments