Interim research assessment 2003-2005 - Computer Science

This report primarily serves as a source of information for the 2007 Interim Research Assessment Committee for Computer Science at the three technical universities in the Netherlands. The report also provides information for others interested in our research activities

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

Comprehensive Aspectual UML Approach to Support AspectJ

Unified Modeling Language is the most popular and widely used Object-Oriented modelling language in the IT industry. This study focuses on investigating the ability to expand UML to some extent to model crosscutting concerns (Aspects) to support AspectJ. Through a comprehensive literature review, we identify and extensively examine all the available Aspect-Oriented UML modelling approaches and find that the existing Aspect-Oriented Design Modelling approaches using UML cannot be considered to provide a framework for a comprehensive Aspectual UML modelling approach and also that there is a lack of adequate Aspect-Oriented tool support. This study also proposes a set of Aspectual UML semantic rules and attempts to generate AspectJ pseudocode from UML diagrams. The proposed Aspectual UML modelling approach is formally evaluated using a focus group to test six hypotheses regarding performance; a “good design” criteria-based evaluation to assess the quality of the design; and an AspectJ-based evaluation as a reference measurement-based evaluation. The results of the focus group evaluation confirm all the hypotheses put forward regarding the proposed approach. The proposed approach provides a comprehensive set of Aspectual UML structural and behavioral diagrams, which are designed and implemented based on a comprehensive and detailed set of AspectJ programming constructs

Model-Driven Development of Aspect-Oriented Software Architectures

The work presented in this thesis of master is an approach that takes advantage of the Model-Driven Development approach for developing aspect-oriented software architectures. A complete MDD support for the PRISMA approach is defined by providing code generation, verification and reusability properties.Pérez Benedí, J. (2007). Model-Driven Development of Aspect-Oriented Software Architectures. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/12451Archivo delegad

AMBIENT-PRISMA: Distribution and Mobility in Aspect-Oriented Software Architectures

This thesis presents a framework called Ambient-PRISMA for describing and developing distributed and mobile software systems in an abstract way. Ambient-PRISMA enriches an aspect-oriented software architecture approach called PRISMA with concepts of Ambient Calculus (AC). Ambient Calculus (AC) is a formalism that provides primitives to describe distribution and mobility characteristics in an abstract way. It introduces a concept called ambient which is a bounded place where computation happens. This enrichment is performed by extending the PRISMA metamodel, and Aspect-Oriented Architecture Description Language (AOADL). A case study of an electronic Auction System with mobile agents is used throughout the thesis in order to illustrate the work.Ali Irshaid, N. (2007). AMBIENT-PRISMA: Distribution and Mobility in Aspect-Oriented Software Architectures. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/12900Archivo delegad

FOAL 2004 Proceedings: Foundations of Aspect-Oriented Languages Workshop at AOSD 2004

Aspect-oriented programming is a paradigm in software engineering and FOAL logos courtesy of Luca Cardelli programming languages that promises better support for separation of concerns. The third Foundations of Aspect-Oriented Languages (FOAL) workshop was held at the Third International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development in Lancaster, UK, on March 23, 2004. This workshop was designed to be a forum for research in formal foundations of aspect-oriented programming languages. The call for papers announced the areas of interest for FOAL as including, but not limited to: semantics of aspect-oriented languages, specification and verification for such languages, type systems, static analysis, theory of testing, theory of aspect composition, and theory of aspect translation (compilation) and rewriting. The call for papers welcomed all theoretical and foundational studies of foundations of aspect-oriented languages. The goals of this FOAL workshop were to: � Make progress on the foundations of aspect-oriented programming languages. � Exchange ideas about semantics and formal methods for aspect-oriented programming languages. � Foster interest within the programming language theory and types communities in aspect-oriented programming languages. � Foster interest within the formal methods community in aspect-oriented programming and the problems of reasoning about aspect-oriented programs. The papers at the workshop, which are included in the proceedings, were selected frompapers submitted by researchers worldwide. Due to time limitations at the workshop, not all of the submitted papers were selected for presentation. FOAL also welcomed an invited talk by James Riely (DePaul University), the abstract of which is included below. The workshop was organized by Gary T. Leavens (Iowa State University), Ralf L?ammel (CWI and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam), and Curtis Clifton (Iowa State University). The program committee was chaired by L?ammel and included L?ammel, Leavens, Clifton, Lodewijk Bergmans (University of Twente), John Tang Boyland (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee), William R. Cook (University of Texas at Austin), Tzilla Elrad (Illinois Institute of Technology), Kathleen Fisher (AT&T Labs�Research), Radha Jagadeesan (DePaul University), Shmuel Katz (Technion�Israel Institute of Technology), Shriram Krishnamurthi (Brown University), Mira Mezini (Darmstadt University of Technology), Todd Millstein (University of California, Los Angeles), Benjamin C. Pierce (University of Pennsylvania), Henny Sipma (Stanford University), Mario S?udholt ( ?Ecole des Mines de Nantes), and David Walker (Princeton University). We thank the organizers of AOSD 2004 for hosting the workshop

Formal and quantitative approach to non-functional requirements modeling and assessment in software engineering

In the software market place, in which functionally equivalent products compete for the same customer, Non Functional Requirements (NFRs) become more important in distinguishing between the competing products. However, in practice, NFRs receive little attention relative to Functional Requirements (FRs). This is mainly because of the nature of these requirements which poses a challenge when taking the choice of treating them earlier in the software development. NFRs are subjective, relative and they become scattered among multiple modules when they are mapped from the requirements domain to the solution space. Furthermore, NFRs can often interact, in the sense that attempts to achieve one NFR can help or hinder the achievement of other NFRs at particular software functionality. Such an interaction creates an extensive network of interdependencies and tradeoffs among NFRs which is not easy to trace or estimate. This thesis contributes towards achieving the goal of managing the attainable scope and the changes of NFRs. The thesis proposes and empirically evaluates a formal and quantitative approach to modeling and assessing NFRs. Central to such an approach is the implementation of the proposed NFRs Ontology for capturing and structuring the knowledge on the software requirements (FRs and NFRs), their refinements, and their interdependencies. In this thesis, we also propose a change management mechanism for tracing the impact of NFRs on the other constructs in the ontology and vice-versa. We provide a traceability mechanism using Datalog expressions to implement queries on the relational model-based representation for the ontology. An alternative implementation view using XML and XQuery is provided as well. In addition, we propose a novel approach for the early requirements-based effort estimation, based on NFRs Ontology. The effort estimation approach complementarily uses one standard functional size measurement model, namely COSMIC, and a linear regression techniqu