Design Criteria to Architect Continuous Experimentation for Self-Driving Vehicles

The software powering today's vehicles surpasses mechatronics as the dominating engineering challenge due to its fast evolving and innovative nature. In addition, the software and system architecture for upcoming vehicles with automated driving functionality is already processing ~750MB/s - corresponding to over 180 simultaneous 4K-video streams from popular video-on-demand services. Hence, self-driving cars will run so much software to resemble "small data centers on wheels" rather than just transportation vehicles. Continuous Integration, Deployment, and Experimentation have been successfully adopted for software-only products as enabling methodology for feedback-based software development. For example, a popular search engine conducts ~250 experiments each day to improve the software based on its users' behavior. This work investigates design criteria for the software architecture and the corresponding software development and deployment process for complex cyber-physical systems, with the goal of enabling Continuous Experimentation as a way to achieve continuous software evolution. Our research involved reviewing related literature on the topic to extract relevant design requirements. The study is concluded by describing the software development and deployment process and software architecture adopted by our self-driving vehicle laboratory, both based on the extracted criteria.Comment: Copyright 2017 IEEE. Paper submitted and accepted at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture. 8 pages, 2 figures. Published in IEEE Xplore Digital Library, URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7930218

Evolution of product line architectures

Product-line architectures, i.e. a software architecture and component set shared by a family of products, represents a promising approach to achieving reuse of software. Several companies are initiating or have recently adopted a product-line architecture. However, little experience is available with respect to the evolution of the products, the software components and the software architecture. Due to the higher level of interdependency between the various software assets, software evolution is a more complex process. We identified characterization of software product lines based on dimensions of primary assets, views on the organization and on assets life cycle stages and after that introduced categorizations of the evolution of the requirements, the software architecture and the software components. Our work is focused on analyzing different ways of managing modifications during architecture evolution.Eje: Bases de datosRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

ArchOptions: A Real Options-Based Model for Predicting the Stability of Software Architectures

Architectural stability refers to the extent an architecture is flexible to endure evolutionary changes in stakeholders\' requirements and the environment. We assume that the primary goal of software architecture is to guide the system\'s evolution. We contribute to a novel model that exploits options theory to predict architectural stability. The model is predictive: it provides \"insights\" on the evolution of the software system based on valuing the extent an architecture can endure a set of likely evolutionary changes. The model builds on Black and Scholes financial options theory (Noble Prize wining) to value such extent. We show how we have derived the model: the analogy and assumptions made to reach the model, its formulation, and possible interpretations. We refer to this model as ArchOptions

Evolution of product line architectures

Product-line architectures, i.e. a software architecture and component set shared by a family of products, represents a promising approach to achieving reuse of software. Several companies are initiating or have recently adopted a product-line architecture. However, little experience is available with respect to the evolution of the products, the software components and the software architecture. Due to the higher level of interdependency between the various software assets, software evolution is a more complex process. We identified characterization of software product lines based on dimensions of primary assets, views on the organization and on assets life cycle stages and after that introduced categorizations of the evolution of the requirements, the software architecture and the software components. Our work is focused on analyzing different ways of managing modifications during architecture evolution.Eje: Bases de datosRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Migrations to Microservices-Based Architectures - a Tale of Technical and Organizational Change

As software systems evolve and scale faster than the foundations on which they are structured on, software architecture migrations to modern, cutting edge paradigms of development are becoming common. An example of such a paradigm is Microservices-based Architectures (MSAs). With MSAs, organizations can manage the complexity of their software and deploy individual pieces autonomously and independently.\ua0However, migrating towards microservices entails a lot of complexity. The evolution of the structures that a migration predisposes is multifaceted, with a socio-technical nature.Therefore, this thesis aims to first of all understand the process in which decisions are made by engineers to migrate their software architecture towards microservices. In addition, this thesis targets to aggregate the migration journey of organizations that change their software architecture to microservices. Finally, it is demonstrated how an organization\u27s operations implement different processes for software architecture migrations and development methodologies

DeepSoft: A vision for a deep model of software

Although software analytics has experienced rapid growth as a research area, it has not yet reached its full potential for wide industrial adoption. Most of the existing work in software analytics still relies heavily on costly manual feature engineering processes, and they mainly address the traditional classification problems, as opposed to predicting future events. We present a vision for \emph{DeepSoft}, an \emph{end-to-end} generic framework for modeling software and its development process to predict future risks and recommend interventions. DeepSoft, partly inspired by human memory, is built upon the powerful deep learning-based Long Short Term Memory architecture that is capable of learning long-term temporal dependencies that occur in software evolution. Such deep learned patterns of software can be used to address a range of challenging problems such as code and task recommendation and prediction. DeepSoft provides a new approach for research into modeling of source code, risk prediction and mitigation, developer modeling, and automatically generating code patches from bug reports.Comment: FSE 201

Book review: Basics in medical education

Software evolves continuously. As a consequence, software systems tend to become increasingly complex and, as such, more difficult to change. A software system's complexity is for a large part determined by its structure, or architecture. In this thesis we investigate how to reduce the risks and costs associated with the evolution of software architectures. Automation and abstraction are two basic software engineering techniques to deal with complexity. In this thesis we investigate the applicability of model-driven engineering, a new software development approach based on abstraction and automation, to support the evolution of software architectures. The main research question we address in this thesis is: "How can evolution of software architectures be supported?". Three subquestions related to industrial integration, software product lines, and automation further clarify the scope of our work. We first conducted a survey among several software development organisation to inventory the state-of-the-practice in software engineering technologies. Some trends we observed from this inventory include: the informal use modelling in industry, the use of product-line approaches, and the importance of the evolutionary aspect of software. Next, we investigated how to support four tasks related to software architecture evolution: evaluation, conformance checking, migration, and documentation. We aim to automate this support where possible. To this end, we employ model-driven software development technologies. For each of the software evolution tasks, we present a case study that investigates how that task can be supported. The informal use of modelling in industry calls for a normalisation step to enable the integration of evolution support in practice. Several chapters address the impact of the use of product-line approaches on the evolution support. Although the increased scope make such support more difficult to develop, the return on investment for the model-driven support is much improved. The model-driven evolution support follows a similar three-step pattern. First, a set of source models is preprocessed into a form suitable for the application of model transformations. Then, model transformations are applied that do the actual work, such as conformance checking or a migration. Finally, the resulting models are postprocessed in a resulting into a desired target form.Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Design Concept for a Failover Mechanism in Distributed SDN Controllers

Software defined networking allows the separation of the control plane and data plane in networking. It provides scalability, programmability, and centralized control. It will use these traits to reach ubiquitous connectivity. Like all concepts software defined networking does not offer these advantages without a cost. By utilizing a centralized controller, a single point of failure is created. To address this issue, this paper proposes a distributed controller failover. This failover will provide a mechanism for recovery when controllers are not located in the same location. This failover mechanism is based on number of hops from orphan nodes to the controller in addition to the link connection. This mechanism was simulated in Long Term Evolution telecommunications architecture

A Process Framework for Designing Software Reference Architectures for Providing Tools as a Service

Product-Focused Software Process ImprovementSoftware Reference Architecture (SRA), which is a generic architecture solution for a specific type of software systems, provides foundation for the design of concrete architectures in terms of architecture design guidelines and architecture elements. The complexity and size of certain types of software systems need customized and systematic SRA design and evaluation methods. In this paper, we present a software Reference Architecture Design process Framework (RADeF) that can be used for analysis, design and evaluation of the SRA for provisioning of Tools as a Service as part of a cloud-enabled workSPACE (TSPACE). The framework is based on the state of the art results from literature and our experiences with designing software architectures for cloud-based systems. We have applied RADeF SRA design two types of TSPACE: software architecting TSPACE and software implementation TSPACE. The presented framework emphasizes on keeping the conceptual meta-model of the domain under investigation at the core of SRA design strategy and use it as a guiding tool for design, evaluation, implementation and evolution of the SRA. The framework also emphasizes to consider the nature of the tools to be provisioned and underlying cloud platforms to be used while designing SRA. The framework recommends adoption of the multi-faceted approach for evaluation of SRA and quantifiable measurement scheme to evaluate quality of the SRA. We foresee that RADeF can facilitate software architects and researchers during design, application and evaluation of a SRA and its instantiations into concrete software systems.Muhammad Aufeef Chauhan, Muhammad Ali Babar, and Christian W. Probs