Migrating from proprietary tools to open-source software for EAST-ADL metamodel generation and evolution

Open-source software has numerous advantages over proprietary commercial-off-The-shelf (COTS) software. However, there are modeling languages, tool chains, and tool frameworks that are developed and maintained in an open-source manner but still incorporate COTS tools. Such an incorporation of COTS tools into an overall open-source approach completely annihilates the actual open-source advantages and goals. In this tool paper, we demonstrate how we eliminated a COTS tool from the otherwise open-source-based generation and evolution workflow of the domain-specific modeling language East-Adl, used in the automotive industry to describe a variety of interdisciplinary aspects of vehicle systems. By switching to a pure open-source solution, East-Adl becomes easier to inspect, evolve, and develop a community around. We compare both the mixed COTS/open-source and the open-source-only workflows, outline the advantages of the open-source-only solution, and show that we achieve equivalent tooling features compared to the original approach

Identifying security-related requirements in regulatory documents based on cross-project classification

Security is getting substantial focus in many industries, especially safety-critical ones. When new regulations and standards which can run to hundreds of pages are introduced, it is necessary to identify the requirements in those documents which have an impact on security. Additionally, it is necessary to revisit the requirements of existing systems and identify the security related ones. We investigate the feasibility of using a classifier for security-related requirements trained on requirement specifications available online. We base our investigation on 15 requirement documents, randomly selected and partially pre-labelled, with a total of 3,880 requirements. To validate the model, we run a cross-project prediction on the data where each specification constitutes a group. We also test the model on three different United Nations (UN) regulations from the automotive domain with different magnitudes of security relevance. Our results indicate the feasibility of training a model from a heterogeneous data set including specifications from multiple domains and in different styles. Additionally, we show the ability of such a classifier to identify security requirements in real-life regulations and discuss scenarios in which such a classification becomes useful to practitioners

Collaborative traceability management: a multiple case study from the perspectives of organization, process, and culture

Traceability is crucial for many activities in software and systems engineering including monitoring the development progress, and proving compliance with standards. In practice, the use and maintenance of trace links are challenging as artifacts undergo constant change, and development takes place in distributed scenarios with multiple collaborating stakeholders. Although traceability management in general has been addressed in previous studies, there is a need for empirical insights into the collaborative aspects of traceability management and how it is situated in existing development contexts. The study reported in this paper aims to close this gap by investigating the relation of collaboration and traceability management, based on an understanding of characteristics of the development effort. In our multiple exploratory case study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 individuals from 15 industrial projects. We explored which challenges arise, how traceability management can support collaboration, how collaboration relates to traceability management approaches, and what characteristics of the development effort influence traceability management and collaboration. We found that practitioners struggle with the following challenges: (1) collaboration across team and tool boundaries, (2) conveying the benefits of traceability, and (3) traceability maintenance. If these challenges are addressed, we found that traceability can facilitate communication and knowledge management in distributed contexts. Moreover, there exist multiple approaches to traceability management with diverse collaboration approaches, i.e., requirements-centered, developer-driven, and mixed approaches. While traceability can be leveraged in software development with both agile and plan-driven paradigms, a certain level of rigor is needed to realize its benefits and overcome challenges. To support practitioners, we provide principles of collaborative traceability management. The main contribution of this paper is empirical evidence of how culture, processes, and organization impact traceability management and collaboration, and principles to support practitioners with collaborative traceability management. We show that collaboration and traceability management have the potential to be mutually beneficial—when investing in one, also the other one is positively affected

Capra: A Configurable and Extendable Traceability Management Tool

Traceability is a known problem both in academia and industry. One of the main challenges is that there is no one solution that will solve traceability problems for everyone in industry. Traceability needs are dependent on the context of the organization and can differ from project to project in the same organization. To cater for this problem we have developed Capra, an open source, flexible, configurable and extendable traceability management tool. Capra can be tailored according to specific traceability needs of individual projects and organizations. \ua9 2016 IEEE

One Block on Top of the Other: Using Minetest to Teach Scrum

Teaching Scrum using Lego has been an established teaching technique for years. However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced teachers all over the globe to rethink this valuable teaching tool. In this experience report, we show how we transferred our version of a Lego Scrum workshop into the world of Minetest, an open-source variant of Minecraft. We detail our reasoning, the concrete technical and pedagogical challenges, as well as experiences and reflections from the students, us as teachers, our peers, and theoretical frameworks. Finally, we share our materials to enable other teachers to use this new tool

CrossFit: Fine-grained Benchmarking of Serverless Application Performance across Cloud Providers

Serverless computing emerged as a promising cloud computing paradigm for deploying cloud-native applications but raises new performance challenges. Existing performance evaluation studies focus on micro-benchmarking to measure an individual aspect of serverless functions, such as CPU speed, but lack an in-depth analysis of differences in application performance across cloud providers. This paper presents CrossFit, an approach for detailed and fair cross-provider performance benchmarking of serverless applications based on a providerindependent tracing model. Our case study demonstrates how detailed distributed tracing enables drill-down analysis to explain performance differences between two leading cloud providers, AWS and Azure. The results for an asynchronous application show that trigger time contributes most delay to the end-to-end latency and explains the main performance difference between cloud providers. Our results further reveal how increasing and bursty workloads affect performance stability, median latency, and tail latency

Impact of the use of industrial modelling tools on modelling education

It has been stated that industrial-grade modelling tools are unsuitable for teaching modelling. We assume, however, that the experiences of the teachers and the students is strongly connected to the support available. In this paper, we present our experience with a university course on software modelling. In the first year of the course, we used a commercial modelling tool, in the second year the open-source alternative Papyrus. Our quantitative analysis shows that the industrial-grade modelling tools with all their complexity did not have a negative impact on the students\u27 experience of modelling. We analyse why our experience differs from published accounts and conclude that the availability of a tool champion and tailored instruction material is key. From this, we derive lessons learned and give recommendations on how to successfully use industrial-strength modelling tools in the classroom

Exploiting Meta-Model Structures in the Generation of Xtext Editors

When generating textual editors for large and highly structured meta-models, it is possible to extend Xtext’s generator capabilities and the default implementations it provides. These extensions provide additional features such as formatters and more precise scoping for cross-references. However, for large metamodels in particular, the realization of such extensions typically is a time-consuming, awkward, and repetitive task. For some of these tasks, we motivate, present, and discuss in this position paper automatic solutions that exploit the structure of the underlying metamodel. Furthermore, we demonstrate how we used them in the development of a textual editor for EATXT, a textual concrete syntax for the automotive architecture description language EAST-ADL. This work in progress contributes to our larger goal of building a language workbench for blended modelling

Visualization of feature locations with the tool FeatureDashboard

Modern development processes and issue trackers often use the notion of features to manage a software system. Features allow communicating system characteristics across stakeholders and keeping an overview understanding - especially important for systems that exist in many different variants. However, maintaining, evolving or reusing features (e.g., propagating across variants, or integrating into a platform) requires knowing their locations to prevent extensive feature-location recovery. We advocate the use of embedded annotations, added directly into software assets by the developers during development. To support this process and provide immediate benefits to developers when using such annotations, we present the open-source tool FeatureDashboard. It extracts and visualizes features and their locations using different views and metrics. As such, it encourages developers recording features and their locations early, to prevent feature identification and location efforts, as well as it supports system comprehension