4 research outputs found
Productivity Evaluation of Self-Adaptive Software Model Driven Architecture
Anticipating context changes using a model-based approach requires a formal procedure for analysing and modelling context-dependent functionality and stable description of the architecture which supports dynamic decision-making and architecture evolution. This article demonstrates the capabilities of the context-oriented component-based application-model-driven architecture (COCA-MDA) to support the development of self- adaptive applications; the authors describe a state-of-the-art case study and evaluate the development effort involved in adopting the COCA-MDA in constructing the application. An intensive analysis of the applica- tion requirements simplified the process of modelling the application’s behavioural model; therefore, instead of modelling several variation models, the developers modelled an extra-functionality model. COCA-MDA reduces the development effort because it maintains a clear separation of concerns and employs a decom- position mechanism to produce a context-oriented component model which decouples the applications’ core functionality from the context-dependent functionality. Estimating the MDA approach’s productivity can help the software developers select the best MDA-based methodology from the available solutions. Thus, counting the source line of code is not adequate for evaluating the development effort of the MDA-based methodology. Quantifying the maintenance adjustment factor of the new, adapted, and reused code is a better estimate of the development effort of the MDA approaches
Context Oriented Software Middleware
Our middleware approach, Context-Oriented Software Middleware (COSM),
supports context-dependent software with self-adaptability and dependability in
a mobile computing environment. The COSM-middleware is a generic and
platform-independent adaptation engine, which performs a runtime composition of
the software's context-dependent behaviours based on the execution contexts.
Our middleware distinguishes between the context-dependent and
context-independent functionality of software systems. This enables the
COSM-middleware to adapt the application behaviour by composing a set of
context-oriented components, that implement the context-dependent functionality
of the software. Accordingly, the software dependability is achieved by
considering the functionality of the COSM-middleware and the adaptation
impact/costs. The COSM-middleware uses a dynamic policy-based engine to
evaluate the adaptation outputs and verify the fitness of the adaptation output
with the application's objectives, goals and the architecture quality
attributes. These capabilities are demonstrated through an empirical evaluation
of a case study implementation