6,049 research outputs found
Towards guidelines for building a business case and gathering evidence of software reference architectures in industry
Background: Software reference architectures are becoming widely adopted by organizations that need to support the design and maintenance of software applications of a shared domain. For organizations that plan to adopt this architecture-centric approach, it becomes fundamental to know the return on investment and to understand how software reference architectures are designed, maintained, and used. Unfortunately, there is little evidence-based support to help organizations with these challenges.
Methods: We have conducted action research in an industry-academia collaboration between the GESSI research group and everis, a multinational IT consulting firm based in Spain.
Results: The results from such collaboration are being packaged in order to create guidelines that could be used in similar contexts as the one of everis. The main result of this paper is the construction of empirically-grounded guidelines that support organizations to decide on the adoption of software reference architectures and to gather evidence to improve RA-related practices.
Conclusions: The created guidelines could be used by other organizations outside of our industry-academia collaboration. With this goal in mind, we describe the guidelines in detail for their use.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Computing server power modeling in a data center: survey,taxonomy and performance evaluation
Data centers are large scale, energy-hungry infrastructure serving the
increasing computational demands as the world is becoming more connected in
smart cities. The emergence of advanced technologies such as cloud-based
services, internet of things (IoT) and big data analytics has augmented the
growth of global data centers, leading to high energy consumption. This upsurge
in energy consumption of the data centers not only incurs the issue of surging
high cost (operational and maintenance) but also has an adverse effect on the
environment. Dynamic power management in a data center environment requires the
cognizance of the correlation between the system and hardware level performance
counters and the power consumption. Power consumption modeling exhibits this
correlation and is crucial in designing energy-efficient optimization
strategies based on resource utilization. Several works in power modeling are
proposed and used in the literature. However, these power models have been
evaluated using different benchmarking applications, power measurement
techniques and error calculation formula on different machines. In this work,
we present a taxonomy and evaluation of 24 software-based power models using a
unified environment, benchmarking applications, power measurement technique and
error formula, with the aim of achieving an objective comparison. We use
different servers architectures to assess the impact of heterogeneity on the
models' comparison. The performance analysis of these models is elaborated in
the paper
Validating a model-driven software architecture evaluation and improvement method: A family of experiments
Context: Software architectures should be evaluated during the early stages of software development in
order to verify whether the non-functional requirements (NFRs) of the product can be fulfilled. This
activity is even more crucial in software product line (SPL) development, since it is also necessary to
identify whether the NFRs of a particular product can be achieved by exercising the variation
mechanisms provided by the product line architecture or whether additional transformations are
required. These issues have motivated us to propose QuaDAI, a method for the derivation, evaluation
and improvement of software architectures in model-driven SPL development.
Objective: We present in this paper the results of a family of four experiments carried out to empirically
validate the evaluation and improvement strategy of QuaDAI.
Method: The family of experiments was carried out by 92 participants: Computer Science Master s and
undergraduate students from Spain and Italy. The goal was to compare the effectiveness, efficiency,
perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and intention to use with regard to participants using the
evaluation and improvement strategy of QuaDAI as opposed to the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis
Method (ATAM).
Results: The main result was that the participants produced their best results when applying QuaDAI, signifying
that the participants obtained architectures with better values for the NFRs faster, and that they
found the method easier to use, more useful and more likely to be used. The results of the meta-analysis
carried out to aggregate the results obtained in the individual experiments also confirmed these results.
Conclusions: The results support the hypothesis that QuaDAI would achieve better results than ATAM in
the experiments and that QuaDAI can be considered as a promising approach with which to perform
architectural evaluations that occur after the product architecture derivation in model-driven SPL
development processes when carried out by novice software evaluators.The authors would like to thank all the participants in the experiments for their selfless involvement in this research. This research is supported by the MULTIPLE Project (MICINN TIN2009-13838) and the ValI+D Program (ACIF/2011/235).González Huerta, J.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE.; Abrahao Gonzales, SM.; Scanniello, G. (2015). Validating a model-driven software architecture evaluation and improvement method: A family of experiments. Information and Software Technology. 57:405-429. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2014.05.018S4054295
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
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