Report from GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394: Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World

This report documents the program and the outcomes of GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394 "Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World". The seminar addressed the problem of performance-aware DevOps. Both, DevOps and performance engineering have been growing trends over the past one to two years, in no small part due to the rise in importance of identifying performance anomalies in the operations (Ops) of cloud and big data systems and feeding these back to the development (Dev). However, so far, the research community has treated software engineering, performance engineering, and cloud computing mostly as individual research areas. We aimed to identify cross-community collaboration, and to set the path for long-lasting collaborations towards performance-aware DevOps. The main goal of the seminar was to bring together young researchers (PhD students in a later stage of their PhD, as well as PostDocs or Junior Professors) in the areas of (i) software engineering, (ii) performance engineering, and (iii) cloud computing and big data to present their current research projects, to exchange experience and expertise, to discuss research challenges, and to develop ideas for future collaborations

An empirical study of architecting for continuous delivery and deployment

Recently, many software organizations have been adopting Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment (CD) practices to develop and deliver quality software more frequently and reliably. Whilst an increasing amount of the literature covers different aspects of CD, little is known about the role of software architecture in CD and how an application should be (re-) architected to enable and support CD. We have conducted a mixed-methods empirical study that collected data through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 21 industrial practitioners from 19 organizations, and a survey of 91 professional software practitioners. Based on a systematic and rigorous analysis of the gathered qualitative and quantitative data, we present a conceptual framework to support the process of (re-) architecting for CD. We provide evidence-based insights about practicing CD within monolithic systems and characterize the principle of "small and independent deployment units" as an alternative to the monoliths. Our framework supplements the architecting process in a CD context through introducing the quality attributes (e.g., resilience) that require more attention and demonstrating the strategies (e.g., prioritizing operations concerns) to design operations-friendly architectures. We discuss the key insights (e.g., monoliths and CD are not intrinsically oxymoronic) gained from our study and draw implications for research and practice.Comment: To appear in Empirical Software Engineerin

Eco‐Holonic 4.0 Circular Business Model to Conceptualize Sustainable Value Chain Towards Digital Transition

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a circular business model based on an Eco-Holonic Architecture, through the integration of circular economy and holonic principles. A conceptual model is developed to manage the complexity of integrating circular economy principles, digital transformation, and tools and frameworks for sustainability into business models. The proposed architecture is multilevel and multiscale in order to achieve the instantiation of the sustainable value chain in any territory. The architecture promotes the incorporation of circular economy and holonic principles into new circular business models. This integrated perspective of business model can support the design and upgrade of the manufacturing companies in their respective industrial sectors. The conceptual model proposed is based on activity theory that considers the interactions between technical and social systems and allows the mitigation of the metabolic rift that exists between natural and social metabolism. This study contributes to the existing literature on circular economy, circular business models and activity theory by considering holonic paradigm concerns, which have not been explored yet. This research also offers a unique holonic architecture of circular business model by considering different levels, relationships, dynamism and contextualization (territory) aspects

Enabling Community Health Care with Microservices

Microservice architectures (MA) are composed of loosely coupled, course-grained services that emphasise resilience and autonomy, enabling more scalable applications to be developed. Such architectures are more tolerant of changing demands from users and enterprises, in response to emerging technologies and their associated influences upon human interaction and behaviour. This article looks at microservices in the Internet of Things (IoT) through the lens of agency, and using an example in the community health care domain explores how a complex application scenario (both in terms of software and hardware interactions) might be modelled