Traceability support in software product lines

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática.Traceability is becoming a necessary quality of any modern software system. The complexity in modern systems is such that, if we cannot rely on good techniques and tools it becomes an unsustainable burden, where software artifacts can hardly be linked to their initial requirements. Modern software systems are composed by a many artifacts (models, code, etc.). Any change in one of them may have repercussions on many components. The assessment of this impact usually comes at a high cost and is highly error-prone. This complexity inherent to software development increases when it comes to Software Product Line Engineering. Traceability aims to respond to this challenge, by linking all the software artifacts that are used, in order to reason about how they influence each others. We propose to specify, design and implement an extensible Traceability Framework that will allow developers to provide traceability for a product line, or the possibility to extend it for other development scenarios. This MSc thesis work is to develop an extensible framework, using Model-Driven techniques and technologies, to provide traceability support for product lines. We also wish to provide basic and advanced traceability queries, and traceability views designed for the needs of each user

OpenUP/MDRE: A Model-Driven Requirements Engineering Approach for Health-Care Systems

The domains and problems for which it would be desirable to introduce information systems are currently very complex and the software development process is thus of the same complexity. One of these domains is health-care. Model-Driven Development (MDD) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) are software development approaches that raise to deal with complexity, to reduce time and cost of development, augmenting flexibility and interoperability. However, many techniques and approaches that have been introduced are of little use when not provided under a formalized and well-documented methodological umbrella. A methodology gives the process a well-defined structure that helps in fast and efficient analysis and design, trouble-free implementation, and finally results in the software product improved quality. While MDD and SOA are gaining their momentum toward the adoption in the software industry, there is one critical issue yet to be addressed before its power is fully realized. It is beyond dispute that requirements engineering (RE) has become a critical task within the software development process. Errors made during this process may have negative effects on subsequent development steps, and on the quality of the resulting software. For this reason, the MDD and SOA development approaches should not only be taken into consideration during design and implementation as usually occurs, but also during the RE process. The contribution of this dissertation aims at improving the development process of health-care applications by proposing OpenUP/MDRE methodology. The main goal of this methodology is to enrich the development process of SOA-based health-care systems by focusing on the requirements engineering processes in the model-driven context. I believe that the integration of those two highly important areas of software engineering, gathered in one consistent process, will provide practitioners with many benets. It is noteworthy that the approach presented here was designed for SOA-based health-care applications, however, it also provides means to adapt it to other architectural paradigms or domains. The OpenUP/MDRE approach is an extension of the lightweight OpenUP methodology for iterative, architecture-oriented and model-driven software development. The motivation for this research comes from the experience I gained as a computer science professional working on the health-care systems. This thesis also presents a comprehensive study about: i) the requirements engineering methods and techniques that are being used in the context of the model-driven development, ii) known generic but flexible and extensible methodologies, as well as approaches for service-oriented systems development, iii) requirements engineering techniques used in the health-care industry. Finally, OpenUP/MDRE was applied to a concrete industrial health-care project in order to show the feasibility and accuracy of this methodological approach.Loniewski, G. (2010). OpenUP/MDRE: A Model-Driven Requirements Engineering Approach for Health-Care Systems. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/11652Archivo delegad

Desarrollo integral de aplicaciones domóticas: una perspectiva metodológica

[SPA] Los rápidos avances en electrónica, informática y tecnologías de la comunicación (Solé, 2003.) (Que conduce a la miniaturización y mejora del rendimiento de los ordenadores, sensores y redes) han dado lugar al desarrollo de nuevas tecnologías en el campo de la domótica (Espinoza, 2011). Las aplicaciones domóticas integran funciones de confort, ahorro energético, seguridad y comunicaciones. El objetivo principal de estos sistemas es dotar a las viviendas de un cierto grado de inteligencia que permita mejorar la calidad de vida de sus habitantes. Tareas tales como el encendido y regulación de luces de forma automática, control de la temperatura, corte de agua y gas cuando se detectan fugas o el control de los dispositivos del hogar de forma remota desde el móvil u ordenador con conexión a internet son algunas de las aplicaciones típicas del dominio domótico. Uno de los principales problemas en el desarrollo de sistemas domóticos es el hecho de que no hay un estándar de facto para implementar estas aplicaciones. Existen varios estándares y protocolos adoptados por las empresas que lideran el mercado. Por ejemplo KNX (ISO/IEC14543-3-X), Lonworks (ISO/IEC 14908) y X10. Como se indica en (Aenor, 2009), es improbable que se establezca una única tecnología dominante en el campo de la domótica a corto plaza. Además, cada uno de estos estándares proporciona su propio software con el que crear las aplicaciones domóticas y programar los dispositivos. Por lo tanto se debe seleccionar una tecnología en particular (plataforma) en la etapa de diseño inicial, puesto que las herramientas y dispositivos a usar dependen de esta elección. Estos hechos hacen que el desarrollo de aplicaciones domóticas sea totalmente dependiente de la plataforma, siendo muy complicado incrementar el nivel de abstracción y trabajar con conceptos del dominio domótico en lugar de trabajar con elementos de la tecnología. Por ello, y continuando con la línea de investigación iniciada del Dr. D. Manuel Jiménez en el campo de la domótica (Jiménez, 2009), donde se definió un marco general y los elementos iníciales de un DSL para domótica, se propone aplicar nuevas técnicas de la Ingeniería del Software que permitan la gestión integral del desarrollo del software en todas sus etapas. En concreto para este trabajo de Tesis se propone una metodología que sigue un enfoque de desarrollo dirigido por modelos (MDE) (Bézivin, 2005) (Favre, 2004) junto con un framework de soporte que proporciona los metamodelos y herramientas necesarias en cada nivel. A continuación, en el capítulo 2 se describen los objetivos estimados para el trabajo de Tesis. En el capítulo 3 se presenta el estado del arte, sobre el que se asienta el desarrollo de la nueva metodología propuesta, que se describe en el capítulo 4, haciendo especial hincapié en la gestión de requisitos y el soporte a la trazabilidad. A continuación, en el capítulo 5 se presentan los resúmenes del compendio de artículos incluidos en esta Tesis. Por último, el capítulo 6 resume las aportaciones realizadas por esta Tesis Doctoral y los resultados obtenidos.[ENG] (Solé, 2003) (Leading to miniaturization and improvement of performance of computers, sensor and networking) have given rise to de development of several Home Automation (HA) technologies (Espinoza, 2011). HA applications integrate comfort, energy saving, security and communications functions. The aim of an HA system is to provide homes with a certain degree of intelligence and to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants. Task like automatically switching lights and heating, cutting off the supply when gas or water leaks are detected or controlling the home devices remotely from a mobile or a computer through an Internet connection are typical applications of HA domain. One of the main problems of HA development lies in the fact that there is no agreement in the standard to implement the applications. HA applications and devices currently belonging to different manufactures are isolated from each other thereby creating the main obstacle to HA market growth. Leading companies in this market have adopted several standards and protocols [8]. Some worth mentioning examples are the KNX (ISO/IEC14543-3-X), Lonworks (ISO/IEC 14908) and X10 technologies. Furthermore, as stated in (Aenor, 2009) it is improbable that there will be a single dominant technology for HA in the short term. Each of these technologies provides its own software suite to create HA applications and program the devices. Hence the particular technology (specific platform) must be selected at the initial design stages, inasmuch as the tools and devices to be used depend on this choice. These facts make the development of HA applications strongly platform dependent, making it very difficult to raise the abstraction level and work with HA domain concepts rather than technology elements. Therefore, and continuing the research initiated by Dr. D. Manuel Jimenez in the domain of home automation (Jimenez, 2009), which defined a general framework and initial elements of a DSL for home automation, intends to apply new techniques of software engineering to enable the integrated management of software development in all its stages. Specifically, for this thesis, proposes the use of the approach of modeldriven development (MDE) (Bézivin, 2005) (Fabre,2004) together with a set of management tools models ranging from requirements management, traceability, validation and verification , all integrated in a same methodology. This thesis is structured as follows: Section 2 deals with introducing the objectives. Section 3 presents the state of the art on which rests the development of the proposed new methodology which is described in Section 4, whit particular emphasis on requirements management and traceability support. Later, Section 5 presents the abstracts of the articles included in the compendium. Finally Section 6 summarizes the results and contributions of this thesis.Universidad Politécnica de CartagenaPrograma de doctorado en Técnicas Avanzadas en Investigación y Desarrollo Agrario y Alimentari

Habitation: a domain-specific language for home automation

The appearance of model-driven engineering (MDE) has invigorated research on domain-specific languages (DSLs) and automatic code generation. MDE uses models to build software, thereby displacing source code as the development process's main feature. DSLs provide easy, intuitive descriptions of the system using graphic models. In this new context, DSLs facilitate work in the first design stages. In addition, MDE helps reduce DSL development costs. It therefore represents a synergistic union that can significantly improve software development.The Spanish Interministerial Commission of Science and Technology’s MEDWSA (a conceptual and technological framework for the development of reactive software systems) project (TIN2006-15175-C05-02) and the Technical University of Cartagena partially supported this work

A model-driven traceability framework for software product lines

International audienceSoftware product line (SPL) engineering is a recent approach to software development where a set of software products are derived for a well defined target application domain, from a common set of core assets using analogous means of production (for instance, through Model Driven Engineering). Therefore, such family of products are built from reuse, instead of developed individually from scratch. SPL promise to lower the costs of development, increase the quality of software, give clients more flexibility and reduce time to market. These benefits come with a set of new problems and turn some older problems possibly more complex. One of these problems is traceability management. In the Europe an AMPLE project we are creating a common traceability framework across the various activities of the SPL development. We identified four orthogonal traceability dimensions in SPL development, one of which is an extension of what is often considered as "traceability of variability". This constitutes one of the two contributions of this paper. The second contribution is the specification of a metamodel for a repository of traceability links in the context of SPL and the implementation of a respective traceability framework. This framework enables fundamental traceability management operations, such as trace import and export, modification, query and visualization. The power of our framework is highlighted with an example scenari

Adaptive model-driven user interface development systems

Adaptive user interfaces (UIs) were introduced to address some of the usability problems that plague many software applications. Model-driven engineering formed the basis for most of the systems targeting the development of such UIs. An overview of these systems is presented and a set of criteria is established to evaluate the strengths and shortcomings of the state-of-the-art, which is categorized under architectures, techniques, and tools. A summary of the evaluation is presented in tables that visually illustrate the fulfillment of each criterion by each system. The evaluation identified several gaps in the existing art and highlighted the areas of promising improvement

NDT-Suite: A Methodological Tool Solution in the Model-Driven Engineering Paradigm

Although the Model-Driven paradigm is being accepted in the research environment as a very useful and powerful option for effective software development, its real application in the enter prise context is still a challenge for software engineering. Several causes can be stacked out, but one of them can be the lack of tool support for the efficient application of this paradigm. This pa per presents a set of tools, grouped in a suite named NDT-Suite, which under the Model-Driven paradigm offer a suitable solution for software development. These tools explore different options that this paradigm can improve such as, development, quality assurance or requirement treat ment. Besides, this paper analyses how they are being successfully applied in the industryMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RJunta de Andalucía TIC-578