Support for collaborative component-based software engineering

Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described. This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject. In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice. Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects. Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools). Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying, assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing. Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation, empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further advances

Utilizing multifaceted requirement traceability approach: a case study

Software evolution is inevitable. When a system evolves, there are certain relationships among software artifacts that must be maintained. Requirement traceability is one of the important factors in facilitating software evolution since it maintains the artifacts relationship before and after a change is performed. Requirement traceability can be expensive activities. Many researchers have addressed the problem of requirement traceability, especially to support software evolution activities. Yet, the evaluation results of these approaches show that most of them typically provide only limited support to software evolution. Based on the problems of requirement traceability, we have identified three directions that are important for traceability to support software evolution, i.e. process automation, procedure simplicity, and best results achievement. Those three directions are addressed in our multifaceted approach of requirement traceability. This approach utilizes three facets to generate links between artifacts, i.e. syntactical similarity matching, link prioritization, and heuristic-list based processes. This paper proposes the utilization of multifaceted approach to traceability generation and recovery in facilitating software evolution process. The complete experiment has been applied in a real case study. The results show that utilization of these three facets in generating the traceability among artifacts is better than the existing approach, especially in terms of its accuracy

A Model-Based Approach to Impact Analysis Using Model Differencing

Impact analysis is concerned with the identification of consequences of changes and is therefore an important activity for software evolution. In modelbased software development, models are core artifacts, which are often used to generate essential parts of a software system. Changes to a model can thus substantially affect different artifacts of a software system. In this paper, we propose a modelbased approach to impact analysis, in which explicit impact rules can be specified in a domain specific language (DSL). These impact rules define consequences of designated UML class diagram changes on software artifacts and the need of dependent activities such as data evolution. The UML class diagram changes are identified automatically using model differencing. The advantage of using explicit impact rules is that they enable the formalization of knowledge about a product. By explicitly defining this knowledge, it is possible to create a checklist with hints about development steps that are (potentially) necessary to manage the evolution. To validate the feasibility of our approach, we provide results of a case study.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, In: Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Software Quality and Maintainability (SQM), ECEASST Journal, vol. 65 201

Designing visual analytics systems for disease spread and evolution: VAST 2010 mini challenge 2 and 3 award: Good overall design and analysis

Using two of the VAST 2010 mini challenges as a case study, we report on the design decisions and software development process used to create visual analytics software for understanding disease spread and mutation. The software we developed and the analysis conducted attempted to help us understand (a) how a fictitious disease may have spread between selected cities around the globe; and (b) how genetic sequences taken from infected patients may be used to chart the evolution of the disease and changes in its severity, drug resistance and other characteristics

Dynamics of Open Source Movements

This paper considers a dynamic model of the evolution of open source software projects, focusing on the evolution of quality, contributing programmers, and users who contribute customer support to other users. Programmers who have used open source software are motivated by reciprocal altruism to publish their own improvements. The evolution of the open-source project depends on the form of the altruistic benefits: in a base case the project grows to a steady-state size from any initial condition; whereas adding a need for customer support makes zero-quality a locally absorbing state. We also analyze competition by commercial firms with OSS projects. Optimal pricing policies again vary: in some cases the commercial firm will set low prices when the open-source project is small; in other cases it mostly waits until the open-source project has matured.

Evolution of Open Source Software: A Study on the Samba Project

Open Source Software (OSS) development model has attracted considerable attention in recent years, primarily because it offers a non-proprietary and socially beneficial model of software development backed by a dedicated community of developers and users who share and expand their knowledge and expertise. This research investigates the evolution of open source software using a case study of the Samba project. Through the application of both qualitative and quantitative techniques, Samba\u27s software development and evolution over a seven-year period are tracked and assessed. This assessment and the findings of similar, previously reported studies lead us to propose a general framework for the evolvabiltity and the key drivers of open source software evolution. open-source communities for socially coordinated software development

Assessing architectural evolution: A case study

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 SpringerThis paper proposes to use a historical perspective on generic laws, principles, and guidelines, like Lehman’s software evolution laws and Martin’s design principles, in order to achieve a multi-faceted process and structural assessment of a system’s architectural evolution. We present a simple structural model with associated historical metrics and visualizations that could form part of an architect’s dashboard. We perform such an assessment for the Eclipse SDK, as a case study of a large, complex, and long-lived system for which sustained effective architectural evolution is paramount. The twofold aim of checking generic principles on a well-know system is, on the one hand, to see whether there are certain lessons that could be learned for best practice of architectural evolution, and on the other hand to get more insights about the applicability of such principles. We find that while the Eclipse SDK does follow several of the laws and principles, there are some deviations, and we discuss areas of architectural improvement and limitations of the assessment approach