Iterative criteria-based approach to engineering the requirements of software development methodologies

Software engineering endeavours are typically based on and governed by the requirements of the target software; requirements identification is therefore an integral part of software development methodologies. Similarly, engineering a software development methodology (SDM) involves the identification of the requirements of the target methodology. Methodology engineering approaches pay special attention to this issue; however, they make little use of existing methodologies as sources of insight into methodology requirements. The authors propose an iterative method for eliciting and specifying the requirements of a SDM using existing methodologies as supplementary resources. The method is performed as the analysis phase of a methodology engineering process aimed at the ultimate design and implementation of a target methodology. An initial set of requirements is first identified through analysing the characteristics of the development situation at hand and/or via delineating the general features desirable in the target methodology. These initial requirements are used as evaluation criteria; refined through iterative application to a select set of relevant methodologies. The finalised criteria highlight the qualities that the target methodology is expected to possess, and are therefore used as a basis for de. ning the final set of requirements. In an example, the authors demonstrate how the proposed elicitation process can be used for identifying the requirements of a general object-oriented SDM. Owing to its basis in knowledge gained from existing methodologies and practices, the proposed method can help methodology engineers produce a set of requirements that is not only more complete in span, but also more concrete and rigorous

Advanced Cloud Privacy Threat Modeling

Privacy-preservation for sensitive data has become a challenging issue in cloud computing. Threat modeling as a part of requirements engineering in secure software development provides a structured approach for identifying attacks and proposing countermeasures against the exploitation of vulnerabilities in a system . This paper describes an extension of Cloud Privacy Threat Modeling (CPTM) methodology for privacy threat modeling in relation to processing sensitive data in cloud computing environments. It describes the modeling methodology that involved applying Method Engineering to specify characteristics of a cloud privacy threat modeling methodology, different steps in the proposed methodology and corresponding products. We believe that the extended methodology facilitates the application of a privacy-preserving cloud software development approach from requirements engineering to design

An Incremental and Model Driven Approach for the Dynamic Reconfiguration of Cloud Application Architectures

In incremental development approaches, the integration of new services into the actual cloud application may trigger the dynamic reconfiguration of the cloud application architecture, thus changing its structure and behavior at runtime. This paper presents a model driven approach that uses the specification of how the integration of new services will change the current cloud application architecture to obtain: i) the orchestration of services, ii) skeletons of interface implementations, and iii) the operationalization of reconfiguration actions to be applied at runtime. This approach follows the DIARy-process, which defines the activities needed to reconfigure dynamically the architecture of cloud services. The feasibility of the approach is illustrated by means of a case study that uses Microsoft Azure© as a service deployment platform. WCF Workflow services are generated and deployed for orchestration, whereas XML transformation files are generated to update services’ binding configurations at runtim

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

Design of a communication framework for interpoerable information systems

Frameworks are class hierarchies plus models of interactions which can be turned into complete applications through various kinds of specialization. Design patterns often guide the construction and documentation of frameworks. The runtime architecture of a framework is characterized by an inversion of control: event handler objects of the application are invoked via the framework s reactive dispatching mechanism. This paper reports the development process of a software architecture that has been designed for accomplishing the transfer of operation specifications among interoperable information systems within a larger project, such that -the communication framework does not need to know the structure and different types of operation specifications to be transferred and the individual information systems do not need to know the communication platform (in our case CORBA). Some design patterns guided the construction of the resulting object-oriented framework to achieve a flexible software architecture. The emphasis of this paper is the description of the way in which the communication framework has been designed

Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow