iTAP Methods, Processes and Tools

6th Annual SERC Sponsor Research Review December 4, 2014 Georgetown Universit

The Essence of Software Engineering

This open access book includes contributions by leading researchers and industry thought leaders on various topics related to the essence of software engineering and their application in industrial projects. It offers a broad overview of research findings dealing with current practical software engineering issues and also pointers to potential future developments. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of adesso AG, adesso gathered some of the pioneers of software engineering including Manfred Broy, Ivar Jacobson and Carlo Ghezzi at a special symposium, where they presented their thoughts about latest software engineering research and which are part of this book. This way it offers readers a concise overview of the essence of software engineering, providing valuable insights into the latest methodological research findings and adesso’s experience applying these results in real-world projects

Android on x86: An Introduction to Optimizing for Intel® Architecture

Android on x86: an Introduction to Optimizing for Intel® Architecture serves two main purposes. First, it makes the case for adapting your applications onto Intel’s x86 architecture, including discussions of the business potential, the changing landscape of the Android marketplace, and the unique challenges and opportunities that arise from x86 devices. The fundamental idea is that extending your applications to support x86 or creating new ones is not difficult, but it is imperative to know all of the technicalities. This book is dedicated to providing you with an awareness of these nuances and an understanding of how to tackle them. Second, and most importantly, this book provides a one-stop detailed resource for best practices and procedures associated with the installation issues, hardware optimization issues, software requirements, programming tasks, and performance optimizations that emerge when developers consider the x86 Android devices. Optimization discussions dive into native code, hardware acceleration, and advanced profiling of multimedia applications. The authors have collected this information so that you can use the book as a guide for the specific requirements of each application project. This book is not dedicated solely to code; instead it is filled with the information you need in order to take advantage of x86 architecture. It will guide you through installing the Android SDK for Intel Architecture, help you understand the differences and similarities between processor architectures available in Android devices, teach you to create and port applications, debug existing x86 applications, offer solutions for NDK and C++ optimizations, and introduce the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager. This book provides the most useful information to help you get the job done quickly while utilizing best practices

Enterprise Composition Architecture for Micro-Granular Digital Services and Products

The digitization of our society changes the way we live, work, learn, communicate, and collaborate. This defines the strategical context for composing resilient enterprise architectures for micro-granular digital services and products. The change from a closed-world modeling perspective to more flexible open-world composition and evolution of system architectures defines the moving context for adaptable systems, which are essential to enable the digital transformation. Enterprises are presently transforming their strategy and culture together with their processes and information systems to become more digital. The digital transformation deeply disrupts existing enterprises and economies. Since years a lot of new business opportunities appeared using the potential of the Internet and related digital technologies, like Internet of Things, services computing, cloud computing, big data with analytics, mobile systems, collaboration networks, and cyber physical systems. Digitization fosters the development of IT systems with many rather small and distributed structures, like Internet of Things or mobile systems. In this paper, we are focusing on the continuous bottom-up integration of micro-granular architectures for a huge amount of dynamically growing systems and services, like Internet of Things and Microservices, as part of a new digital enterprise architecture. To integrate micro-granular architecture models to living architectural model versions we are extending more traditional enterprise architecture reference models with state of art elements for agile architectural engineering to support the digitalization of services with related products, and their processes

Patterns as Software Design Canon

This paper explores the value of the architecture profession’s notion of ‘the canon’ as a design transfer and knowledge transmission model for software architecture, and the overlap with the design patterns movement. The emerging body of architectural and design patterns has already become a kind of software ‘canon’— patterns and pattern languages exemplify design and act as design archetypes, have shared visibility through conventional and online media, and result from an established and intensive canonisation process consisting of shepherding (mentored authoring) and writer’s workshops (a review protocol). Research is underway to understand the need for a ‘software design canon’ and its accompanying discourse, and how well the design pattern form can fulfil this need

The Essence of Software Engineering

Software Engineering; Software Development; Software Processes; Software Architectures; Software Managemen

Modeling System Events and Negative Events Using Thinging Machines Based on Lupascian Logic

This paper is an exploration of the ontological foundations of conceptual modeling that addresses the concept of events and related notions. Development models that convey how things change over space and time demand continued attention in systems and software engineering. In this context, foundational matters in modeling systems include the definition of an event, the types of events, and the kinds of relationships that can be recognized among events. Although a broad spectrum of research of such issues exists in various fields of study, events have extensive applicability in computing (e.g., event-driven programming, architecture, data modeling, automation, and surveillance). While these computing notions are diverse, their event-based nature lets us apply many of the same software engineering techniques to all of them. In this paper, the focus is on addressing the dynamic concepts of system events and negative events. Specifically, we concentrate on what computer scientists would refer to as an event grammar and event calculus. Analyzing the concept of event would further the understanding of the event notion and provide a sound foundation for improving the theory and practice of conceptual modeling. An event in computer science has many definitions (e.g., anything that happens, changes in the properties of objects, and the occurrence of and transition between states). This paper is based upon a different conceptualization using thinging machines and Lupascian logic to define negative events. An event is defined as a time penetrated domain s region, which is described in terms of things and five-action machines. Accordingly, samples from event grammar and event calculus are remodeled and analyzed in terms of this definition. The results point to an enriched modeling technique with an enhanced conceptualization of events that can benefit behavior modeling in systems.Comment: 12 pages, 29 figure

Behavior models for software architecture

Monterey Phoenix (MP) is an approach to formal software system architecture specification based on behavior models. Architecture modeling focuses not only on the activities and interactions within the system, but also on the interactions between the system and its environment, providing an abstraction for interaction specification. The behavior of the system is defined as a set of events (event trace) with two basic relations: precedence and inclusion. The structure of possible event traces is specified using event grammars and other constraints organized into schemas. The separation of the interaction description from the components behavior is an essential MP feature. The schema framework is amenable to stepwise architecture refinement, reuse, composition, visualization, and multiple view extraction. The approach yields a basis for executable architecture specification supporting early testing and verification, systematic use case generation, and performance estimates with automated tools.Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER)Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER)Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Optimizing decomposition of software architecture for local recovery

Cataloged from PDF version of article.The increasing size and complexity of software systems has led to an amplified number of potential failures and as such makes it harder to ensure software reliability. Since it is usually hard to prevent all the failures, fault tolerance techniques have become more important. An essential element of fault tolerance is the recovery from failures. Local recovery is an effective approach whereby only the erroneous parts of the system are recovered while the other parts remain available. For achieving local recovery, the architecture needs to be decomposed into separate units that can be recovered in isolation. Usually, there are many different alternative ways to decompose the system into recoverable units. It appears that each of these decomposition alternatives performs differently with respect to availability and performance metrics. We propose a systematic approach dedicated to optimizing the decomposition of software architecture for local recovery. The approach provides systematic guidelines to depict the design space of the possible decomposition alternatives, to reduce the design space with respect to domain and stakeholder constraints and to balance the feasible alternatives with respect to availability and performance. The approach is supported by an integrated set of tools and illustrated for the open-source MPlayer software

A model for assessment of human assistive robot capability

The purpose of this research is to develop a generalised model for levels of autonomy and sophistication for autonomous systems. It begins with an introduction to the research, its aims and objectives before a detailed review of related literature is presented as it pertains to the subject matter and the methodology used in the research. The research tasks are carried out using appropriate methods including literature reviews, case studies and semi-structured interviews. Through identifying the gaps in the current work on human assistive robots, a generalised model for assessing levels of autonomy and sophistication for human assistive robots (ALFHAR) is created through logical modelling, semi-structured interview methods and case studies. A web-based tool for the ALFHAR model is also created to support the model application. The ALFHAR model evaluates levels of autonomy and sophistication with regard to the decision making, interaction, and mechanical ability aspects of human assistive robots. The verification of the model is achieved by analysing evaluation results from the web-based tool and ALFHAR model. The model is validated using a set of tests with stakeholders participation through the conduction of a case study using the web-based tool. The main finding from this research is that the ALFHAR model can be considered as a model to be used in the evaluation of levels of autonomy and sophistication for human assistive robots. It can also prove helpful as part of through life management support for autonomous systems. The thesis concludes with a critical review of the research and some recommendations for further research