Software Engineering Timeline: major areas of interest and multidisciplinary trends

Ingeniería del software. EvolucionSociety today cannot run without software and by extension, without Software Engineering. Since this discipline emerged in 1968, practitioners have learned valuable lessons that have contributed to current practices. Some have become outdated but many are still relevant and widely used. From the personal and incomplete perspective of the authors, this paper not only reviews the major milestones and areas of interest in the Software Engineering timeline helping software engineers to appreciate the state of things, but also tries to give some insights into the trends that this complex engineering will see in the near future

A metric to represent the evolution of CAD/analysis models in collaborative design

Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) models are often used during product design. Various interactions between the different models must be managed for the designed system to be robust and in accordance with initially defined specifications. Research published to date has for example considered the link between digital mock-up and analysis models. However design/analysis integration must take into consideration the important number of models (digital mock-up and simulation) due to model evolution in time, as well as considering system engineering. To effectively manage modifications made to the system, the dependencies between the different models must be known and the nature of the modification must be characterised to estimate the impact of the modification throughout the dependent models. We propose a technique to describe the nature of a modification which may be used to determine the consequence within other models as well as a way to qualify the modified information. To achieve this, a metric is proposed that allows the qualification and evaluation of data or information, based on the maturity and validity of information and model

Universal Resource Lifecycle Management

This paper presents a model and a tool that allows Web users to define, execute, and manage lifecycles for any artifact available on the Web. In the paper we show the need for lifecycle management of Web artifacts, and we show in particular why it is important that non-programmers are also able to do this. We then discuss why current models do not allow this, and we present a model and a system implementation that achieves lifecycle management for any URI-identifiable and accessible object. The most challenging parts of the work lie in the definition of a simple but universal model and system (and in particular in allowing universality and simplicity to coexist) and in the ability to hide from the lifecycle modeler the complexity intrinsic in having to access and manage a variety of resources, which differ in nature, in the operations that are allowed on them, and in the protocols and data formats required to access them

Iterative criteria-based approach to engineering the requirements of software development methodologies

Software engineering endeavours are typically based on and governed by the requirements of the target software; requirements identification is therefore an integral part of software development methodologies. Similarly, engineering a software development methodology (SDM) involves the identification of the requirements of the target methodology. Methodology engineering approaches pay special attention to this issue; however, they make little use of existing methodologies as sources of insight into methodology requirements. The authors propose an iterative method for eliciting and specifying the requirements of a SDM using existing methodologies as supplementary resources. The method is performed as the analysis phase of a methodology engineering process aimed at the ultimate design and implementation of a target methodology. An initial set of requirements is first identified through analysing the characteristics of the development situation at hand and/or via delineating the general features desirable in the target methodology. These initial requirements are used as evaluation criteria; refined through iterative application to a select set of relevant methodologies. The finalised criteria highlight the qualities that the target methodology is expected to possess, and are therefore used as a basis for de. ning the final set of requirements. In an example, the authors demonstrate how the proposed elicitation process can be used for identifying the requirements of a general object-oriented SDM. Owing to its basis in knowledge gained from existing methodologies and practices, the proposed method can help methodology engineers produce a set of requirements that is not only more complete in span, but also more concrete and rigorous

Milestones in Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering History: A Comparative Review

We present a review of the historical evolution of software engineering, intertwining it with the history of knowledge engineering because “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This retrospective represents a further step forward to understanding the current state of both types of engineerings; history has also positive experiences; some of them we would like to remember and to repeat. Two types of engineerings had parallel and divergent evolutions but following a similar pattern. We also define a set of milestones that represent a convergence or divergence of the software development methodologies. These milestones do not appear at the same time in software engineering and knowledge engineering, so lessons learned in one discipline can help in the evolution of the other one

Evolutionäre Referenzmodelle: Anforderungen an eine methodische Unterstützung zur systematischen Wiederverwendung und Weiterentwicklung von modellhaft aufbereitetem Wissen

Konzeptuelle Modelle sind zur Gestaltung und Steuerung von Informationssystemen ein akzeptiertes und weit verbreitetes Instrument. Sie werden sowohl zur Gestaltung der Organisationsstruktur als auch zur Entwicklung der unterstützenden IT-Systeme verwendet. Für diesen Aufgabenbereich existiert eine hohe Nachfrage nach externer Unterstützung, da spezifische Fachkenntnisse und Erfahrungen notwendig sind. In diesem Zusammenhang werden seit Jahrzehnten Ansätze zur Wiederverwendung in Wissenschaft und Praxis diskutiert. Die Akzeptanz und Verbreitung von explizit zur Wiederverwendung konstruierten Modellen (Referenzmodelle) bleiben jedoch deutlich hinter den Erwartungen zurück. Die vorliegende Arbeit trägt zur Untersuchung möglicher Ursachen für den ausbleibenden Erfolg von Referenzmodellen bei. Der Forschung liegt die Vermutung zugrunde, dass die Potentiale von Referenzmodellen nicht zufriedenstellend ausgeschöpft werden können, weil die existierenden bzw. verwendeten Modellierungsmethoden die theoretischen Anforderungen an die Wiederverwendung von modellhaft dargestellten Lösungen zur Unternehmensgestaltung nicht erfüllen. Die vorliegende Arbeit fasst neun Einzelpublikationen zum Themenbereich Evolutionäre Referenzmodelle zu einer kumulativen Dissertation zusammen. Es werden in einem argumentativdeduktiven Verfahren konstruktivistische Theorien zur systematischen Weiterentwicklung und Wiederverwendung konzeptueller Unternehmensmodelle untersucht. Die auf dieseWeise resultierende Erweiterung der allgemeinen Modelltheorie wurde ihrerseits argumentativ-konzeptionell mit Hilfe von semiformalen Argumentationsmodellen aufbereitet. Im Ergebnis werden ein theoretisches Rahmenwerk zur evolutionären Referenzmodellierung präsentiert und 23 konzeptionelle Anforderungen definiert, die eine gezielte Methodenentwicklung für die evolutionäre Referenzmodellierung steuern sollen

Product to process lifecycle management in assembly automation systems

Presently, the automotive industry is facing enormous pressure due to global competition and ever changing legislative, economic and customer demands. Product and process development in the automotive manufacturing industry is a challenging task for many reasons. Current product life cycle management (PLM) systems tend to be product-focussed. Though, information about processes and resources are there but mostly linked to the product. Process is an important aspect, especially in assembly automation systems that link products to their manufacturing resources. This paper presents a process-centric approach to improve PLM systems in large-scale manufacturing companies, especially in the powertrain sector of the automotive industry. The idea is to integrate the information related to key engineering chains i.e. products, processes and resources based upon PLM philosophy and shift the trend of product-focussed lifecycle management to process-focussed lifecycle management, the outcome of which is the Product, Process and Resource Lifecycle Management not PLM only

Support for collaborative component-based software engineering

Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described. This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject. In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice. Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects. Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools). Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying, assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing. Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation, empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further advances