Safety-Critical Systems and Agile Development: A Mapping Study

In the last decades, agile methods had a huge impact on how software is developed. In many cases, this has led to significant benefits, such as quality and speed of software deliveries to customers. However, safety-critical systems have widely been dismissed from benefiting from agile methods. Products that include safety critical aspects are therefore faced with a situation in which the development of safety-critical parts can significantly limit the potential speed-up through agile methods, for the full product, but also in the non-safety critical parts. For such products, the ability to develop safety-critical software in an agile way will generate a competitive advantage. In order to enable future research in this important area, we present in this paper a mapping of the current state of practice based on {a mixed method approach}. Starting from a workshop with experts from six large Swedish product development companies we develop a lens for our analysis. We then present a systematic mapping study on safety-critical systems and agile development through this lens in order to map potential benefits, challenges, and solution candidates for guiding future research.Comment: Accepted at Euromicro Conf. on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications 2018, Prague, Czech Republi

An ontology of agile aspect oriented software development

Both agile methods and aspect oriented programming (AOP) have emerged in recent years as new paradigms in software development. Both promise to free the process of building software systems from some of the constraints of more traditional approaches. As a software engineering approach on the one hand, and a software development tool on the other, there is the potential for them to be used in conjunction. However, thus far, there has been little interplay between the two. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that there may be untapped synergies that may be exploited, if the appropriate approach is taken to integrating AOP with agile methods. This paper takes an ontological approach to supporting this integration, proposing ontology enabled development based on an analysis of existing ontologies of aspect oriented programming, a proposed ontology of agile methods, and a derived ontology of agile aspect oriented development

A lingualization strategy for knowledge sharing in large-scale DevOps

DevOps has become a generally accepted practice for software projects in the last decade and approaches certain shortcomings of the agile software development and the steadily gaining popularity of cloud infrastructure. While it shifts more and more responsibilities towards software engineering teams, the prevailing opinion is to keep DevOps teams small to reduce the complexity of inter-team communication. In circumstances where products outgrow the performance capability of a single team, microservice architecture enables multiple DevOps teams to contribute to the same application and meet the increased requirements. Since DevOps teams operate typically self-sufficiently and more or less independently inside an organization, such large-scale DevOps environments are prone to knowledge-sharing barriers. Textual Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are one of the cornerstones of DevOps and enable key features like automation and infrastructure provisioning. Nonetheless, most commonly accepted DSLs in the context of DevOps are cumbersome and have a steep learning curve. Thus, they fall short of their potential to truly enable cross-functional collaboration and knowledge sharing, not only between development and operation, but to the whole organization. DevOps teams require tools and DSLs, that treat knowledge sharing and reuse as a first-class citizen, in order to operate sufficiently on a large scale. However, developing DSLs is still presumed as an expensive task which can easily offset the resulting benefits. This dissertation presents a lingualization strategy for addressing the challenge of knowledge sharing in large-scale DevOps. The basic idea is to provide custom-tailored Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs) that target single phases of the DevOps lifecycle and ease the DevOps adoption for newly formed teams. The paradigm of Language-Driven Engineering (LDE) bridges the semantic gap between stakeholders by custom-tailored DSMLs and thus is a natural fit for knowledge sharing. Key to a successful practice of LDE is as a new class of stakeholders. In the context of large-scale DevOps, language development can be realized by so-called Meta DevOps teams. Those teams, which themselves practice DevOps internally, manage a centralized repository of small DSMLs and offer them as a service. DevOps teams act as the customers of the Meta DevOps teams and can request new features or complete new DSMLs and provide feedback to already existing DSMLs. The presented Rig modeling environment serves as an exemplary DSML that targets the purpose of Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD), one of the most important building blocks of DevOps. Rig comes with an associated code generator to fully-generate CI/CD workflows from graphical models. Those graphical models provide an executable documentation and assist knowledge-sharing between stakeholders. The fundamental modeling concepts of the lingualization strategy are evaluated against previously published requirements by Bordeleau et al. on a DevOps modeling framework in an industrial context. In addition to that, Rig is evaluated based on results of a workshop during the 6th International School on Tool-Based Rigorous Engineering of Software Systems. Both evaluations yield encouraging results and demonstrate the potential of the lingualization strategy to break down knowledge-sharing barriers in large-scale DevOps environments

Arguing satisfaction of security requirements

This chapter presents a process for security requirements elicitation and analysis, based around the construction of a satisfaction argument for the security of a system. The process starts with the enumeration of security goals based on assets in the system, then uses these goals to derive security requirements in the form of constraints. Next, a satisfaction argument for the system is constructed, using a problem-centered representation, a formal proof to analyze properties that can be demonstrated, and structured informal argumentation of the assumptions exposed during construction of the argument. Constructing the satisfaction argument can expose missing and inconsistent assumptions about system context and behavior that effect security, and a completed argument provides assurances that a system can respect its security requirements

An evolutionary complex systems decision-support tool for the management of operations

Purpose - The purpose of this is to add both to the development of complex systems thinking in the subject area of operations and production management and to the limited number of applications of computational models and simulations from the science of complex systems. The latter potentially offer helpful decision-support tools for operations and production managers. Design/methodology/approach - A mechanical engineering firm was used as a case study where a combined qualitative and quantitative methodological approach was employed to extract the required data from four senior managers. Company performance measures as well as firm technologies, practices and policies, and their relation and interaction with one another, were elicited. The data were subjected to an evolutionary complex systems (ECS) model resulting in a series of simulations. Findings - The findings highlighted the effects of the diversity in management decision making on the firm's evolutionary trajectory. The CEO appeared to have the most balanced view of the firm, closely followed by the marketing and research and development managers. The manufacturing manager's responses led to the most extreme evolutionary trajectory where the integrity of the entire firm came into question particularly when considering how employees were utilised. Research limitations/implications - By drawing directly from the opinions and views of managers, rather than from logical "if-then" rules and averaged mathematical representations of agents that characterise agent-based and other self-organisational models, this work builds on previous applications by capturing a micro-level description of diversity that has been problematical both in theory and application. Practical implications - This approach can be used as a decision-support tool for operations and other managers providing a forum with which to explore: the strengths, weaknesses and consequences of different decision-making capacities within the firm; the introduction of new manufacturing technologies, practices and policies; and the different evolutionary trajectories that a firm can take. Originality/value - With the inclusion of "micro-diversity", ECS modelling moves beyond the self-organisational models that populate the literature but has not as yet produced a great many practical simulation results. This work is a step in that direction