A Comparative Study on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering for Software Product Lines

[EN] Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) and Software Product Lines (SPL) are two software development paradigms that emphasize reusing. The former reuse domain knowledge is represented as models and model transformations for product development, and the latter reuse domain knowledge is represented as core assets to produce a family of products in a given domain. The adequate combination of both paradigms can bring together important advantages to the software development community. However, how to manage requirements during a model-driven product line development remains an open challenge. In particular, the Requirements Engineering (RE) activity must deal with specific properties such as variability and commonality for a whole family of products. This paper presents a comparative study of eleven approaches that perform a MDE strategy in the RE activity for SPL, with the aim of identify ing current practices and research gaps. In summary, most of the approaches are focused on the Domain Engineering phase of the SPL development, giving less attention to the Application Engineering phase. Moreover there is a lack of coverage of the Scoping activity, which defines the SPL boundaries. Several approaches apply some model transformations to obtain architectural and application requirements artifacts. Regarding the tool support for requirements specification and management, we found that most of the approaches use only academic prototypes. Regarding the validation of the approaches, the use of Case Studies as a proof of concept was the most commonly used method; however, there is a lack of well-defined case studies and empirical studies to improve the proposals.This research is part of the MULTIPLE project (with ref. TIN2009-13838).Blanes Domínguez, D.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE. (2012). A Comparative Study on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering for Software Product Lines. Revista de Sistemas e Computação. 2(1):3-13. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/43841S3132

Review of Requirement Engineering Approaches for Software Product Lines

The Software Product Lines (SPL) paradigm is one of the most recent topics of interest for the software engineering community. On the one hand, the Software Product Lines is based on a reuse strategy with the aim to reduce the global time-to-market of the software product, to improve the software product quality, and to reduce the cost. On the other hand, traditional Requirement Engineering approaches could not be appropriated to deal with the new challenges that arises the SPL adoption. In the last years, several approaches have been proposed to cover this limitation. This technical report presents an analysis of specific approaches used in the development of SPL to provide solutions to model variability and to deal with the requirements engineering activities. The obtained results show that most of the research in this context is focused on the Domain Engineering, covering mainly the Feature Modeling and the Scenario Modeling. Among the studied approaches, only one of them supported the delta identification; this fact implies that new mechanisms to incorporate new deltas in the Domain specification are needed. Regarding the SPL adoption strategy, most of the approaches support a proactive strategy. However, this strategy is the most expensive and risk-prone. Finally, most of the approaches were based on modeling requirements with feature models giving less support to other important activities in the requirements engineering process such as elicitation, validation, or verification of requirements. The results of this study provide a wide view of the current state of research in requirements engineering for SPL and also highlight possible research gaps that may be of interest for researchers and practitioners.Blanes Domínguez, D.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE. (2011). Review of Requirement Engineering Approaches for Software Product Lines. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/1023

Requirements Modeling for Multi-Agent Systems

Different approaches for building modern software systems in complex and open environments have been proposed in the last few years. Some efforts try to take advantage of the agent-oriented paradigm to model/engineer complex information systems in terms of independent agents. These agents may collaborate in a computational organization (Multi-Agent Systems, MAS) by playing some specific roles having to interact with others in order to reach a global or individual goal. In addition, due to the complex nature of this type of systems, dealing with the classical functional and structural perspectives of software systems are not enough. The organizational perspective, that describes the context where these agents need to collaborate, and the social behavior perspective, that describes the different "intelligent" manners in which these agents can collaborate, need to be identified and properly specified. Several methodologies have been proposed to drive the development of MAS (e.g., Ingenias, Gaia, Tropos) although most of them mainly focus on the design and implementation phases and do not provide adequate mechanisms for capturing, defining, and specifying software requirements. Poor requirements engineering is recognized as the root of most errors in current software development projects, and as a means for improving the quality of current practices in the development of MAS, the main objective of this work is to propose a requirements modeling process to deal with software requirements covering the functional, structural, organizational, and social behavior perspectives of MAS. The requirements modeling proposed is developed within the model-driven engineering context defining the corresponding metamodel and its graphical syntax. In addition, a MAS requirements modeling process is specified using the Object Management Group's (OMG) Software Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM). Finally, in order to illustrate the feasibility of our approach, we specified the software requirements of a strategic board game (the Diplomacy game).Rodríguez Viruel, ML. (2011). Requirements Modeling for Multi-Agent Systems. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/11416Archivo delegad

Innovación docente para el desarrollo de la competencia transversal “Conocimiento de problemas contemporáneos” en el marco de una asignatura de Calidad de Software

[EN] This paper presents a teaching innovation based on the implementation of different training activities for the development of the competency "CT-10 Knowledge of Contemporary Problems" of the Transversal Competences Project of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). The innovation is based on the use of different training activities conducted in the context of a course on Software Quality of the Bachelor's Degree in Informatics Engineering at the UPV. In particular, Projects, Report Writing and Seminar have been carried out to present the results of practical activities, close to the work that will be conducted by a software quality engineer in a business environment. We present the results of the competence acquisition by the students. A survey has also been carried out in order to assess the students’ opinion about the teaching activities. Finally, we describe our lessons learned and posible improvements to the training activities based on the experience gained.[ES] En este artículo se presenta una innovación docente basada en la puesta enmarcha de diferentes actividades formativas para poder desarrollar la competencia “CT-10 Conocimiento de problemas contemporáneos” del Proyecto de Competencias Transversales de la Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). La innovación se basa en la utilización de diferentes actividades formativas dentro de la asignatura Calidad de Software del Grado de Ingeniería Informática de la UPV. En particular, se ha realizado proyectos, redacción de informes y exposición oral para presentar los resultados de actividades de carácter práctico cercanas al trabajo que realizaría un ingeniero de calidad de software en un entorno profesional. Se presentan los resultados de la adquisición de la competencia por parte de los alumnos y de una encuesta realizada para conocer su opinión sobre las actividades docentes. Finalmente, se describen las lecciones aprendidas y posibles mejoras al programa de actividades formativas en base a la obtenida.Abrahao Gonzales, SM.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE. (2019). Innovación docente para el desarrollo de la competencia transversal “Conocimiento de problemas contemporáneos” en el marco de una asignatura de Calidad de Software. En IN-RED 2019. V Congreso de Innovación Educativa y Docencia en Red. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 1302-1315. https://doi.org/10.4995/INRED2019.2019.10342OCS1302131

A systematic review of quality attributes and measures for software product lines

[EN] It is widely accepted that software measures provide an appropriate mechanism for understanding, monitoring, controlling, and predicting the quality of software development projects. In software product lines (SPL), quality is even more important than in a single software product since, owing to systematic reuse, a fault or an inadequate design decision could be propagated to several products in the family. Over the last few years, a great number of quality attributes and measures for assessing the quality of SPL have been reported in literature. However, no studies summarizing the current knowledge about them exist. This paper presents a systematic literature review with the objective of identifying and interpreting all the available studies from 1996 to 2010 that present quality attributes and/or measures for SPL. These attributes and measures have been classified using a set of criteria that includes the life cycle phase in which the measures are applied; the corresponding quality characteristics; their support for specific SPL characteristics (e. g., variability, compositionality); the procedure used to validate the measures, etc. We found 165 measures related to 97 different quality attributes. The results of the review indicated that 92% of the measures evaluate attributes that are related to maintainability. In addition, 67% of the measures are used during the design phase of Domain Engineering, and 56% are applied to evaluate the product line architecture. However, only 25% of them have been empirically validated. In conclusion, the results provide a global vision of the state of the research within this area in order to help researchers in detecting weaknesses, directing research efforts, and identifying new research lines. In particular, there is a need for new measures with which to evaluate both the quality of the artifacts produced during the entire SPL life cycle and other quality characteristics. There is also a need for more validation (both theoretical and empirical) of existing measures. In addition, our results may be useful as a reference guide for practitioners to assist them in the selection or the adaptation of existing measures for evaluating their software product lines. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.This research has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the MULTIPLE (Multimodeling Approach For Quality-Aware Software Product Lines) project with ref. TIN2009-13838.Montagud Gregori, S.; Abrahao Gonzales, SM.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE. (2012). A systematic review of quality attributes and measures for software product lines. Software Quality Journal. 20(3-4):425-486. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-011-9146-7S425486203-4Abdelmoez, W., Nassar, D. M., Shereschevsky, M., Gradetsky, N., Gunnalan, R., Ammar, H. H., et al. (2004). Error propagation in software architectures. In 10th international symposium on software metrics (METRICS), Chicago, Illinois, USA.Ajila, S. A., & Dumitrescu, R. T. (2007). Experimental use of code delta, code churn, and rate of change to understand software product line evolution. Journal of Systems and Software, 80, 74–91.Aldekoa, G., Trujillo, S., Sagardui, G., & Díaz, O. (2006). Experience measuring maintainability in software product lines. In XV Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos (JISBD). Barcelona.Aldekoa, G., Trujillo, S., Sagardui, G., & Díaz, O. (2008). Quantifying maintanibility in feature oriented product lines, Athens, Greece, pp. 243–247.Alves de Oliveira Junior, E., Gimenes, I. M. S., & Maldonado, J. C. (2008). A metric suite to support software product line architecture evaluation. In XXXIV Conferencia Latinamericana de Informática (CLEI), Santa Fé, Argentina, pp. 489–498.Alves, V., Niu, N., Alves, C., & Valença, G. (2010). Requirements engineering for software product lines: A systematic literature review. Information & Software Technology, 52(8), 806–820.Bosch, J. (2000). Design and use of software architectures: Adopting and evolving a product line approach. USA: ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.Briand, L. C., Differing, C. M., & Rombach, D. (1996a). Practical guidelines for measurement-based process improvement. Software Process-Improvement and Practice, 2, 253–280.Briand, L. C., Morasca, S., & Basili, V. R. (1996b). Property based software engineering measurement. IEEE Transactions on Software Eng., 22(1), 68–86.Calero, C., Ruiz, J., & Piattini, M. (2005). Classifying web metrics using the web quality model. Online Information Review, 29(3): 227–248.Chen, L., Ali Babar, M., & Ali, N. (2009). Variability management in software product lines: A systematic review. In 13th international software product lines conferences (SPLC), San Francisco, USA.Clements, P., & Northrop, L. (2002). Software product lines. 2003. Software product lines practices and patterns. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.Crnkovic, I., & Larsson, M. (2004). Classification of quality attributes for predictability in component-based systems. Journal of Econometrics, pp. 231–250.Conference Rankings of Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE). (2010). Available in http://core.edu.au/index.php/categories/conference%20rankings/1 .Davis, A., Dieste, Ó., Hickey, A., Juristo, N., & Moreno, A. M. (2006). Effectiveness of requirements elicitation techniques: Empirical results derived from a systematic review. In 14th IEEE international conference requirements engineering, pp. 179–188.de Souza Filho, E. D., de Oliveira Cavalcanti, R., Neiva, D. F. S., Oliveira, T. H. B., Barachisio Lisboa, L., de Almeida E. S., & de Lemos Meira, S. R. (2008). Evaluating domain design approaches using systematic review. In 2nd European conference on software architecture, Cyprus, pp. 50–65.Ejiogu, L. (1991). Software engineering with formal metrics. QED Publishing.Engström, E., & Runeson, P. (2011). Software product line testing—A systematic mapping study. Information & Software Technology, 53(1), 2–13.Etxeberria, L., Sagarui, G., & Belategi, L. (2008). Quality aware software product line engineering. Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, 14(1), Campinas Mar.Ganesan, D., Knodel, J., Kolb, R., Haury, U., & Meier, G. (2007). Comparing costs and benefits of different test strategies for a software product line: A study from Testo AG. In 11th international software product line conference, Kyoto, Japan, pp. 74–83, September 2007.Gómez, O., Oktaba, H., Piattini, M., & García, F. (2006). A systematic review measurement in software engineering: State-of-the-art in measures. In First international conference on software and data technologies (ICSOFT), Setúbal, Portugal, pp. 11–14.IEEE standard for a software quality metrics methodology, IEEE Std 1061-1998, 1998.Inoki, M., & Fukazawa, Y. (2007). Software product line evolution method based on Kaizen approach. In 22nd annual ACM symposium on applied computing, Korea.Insfran, E., & Fernandez, A. (2008). A systematic review of usability evaluation in Web development. 2nd international workshop on web usability and accessibility (IWWUA’08), New Zealand, LNCS 5176, Springer, pp. 81–91.ISO/IEC 25010. (2008). Systems and software engineering. Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE). System and software quality models.ISO/IEC 9126. (2000). Software engineering. Product Quality.Johansson, E., & Höst, R. (2002). Tracking degradation in software product lines through measurement of design rule violations. In 14th International conference on software engineering and knowledge engineering, Ischia, Italy, pp. 249–254.Journal Citation Reports of Thomson Reuters. (2010). Available in http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/science_products/a-z/journal_citation_reports/ .Khurum, M., & Gorschek, T. (2009). A systematic review of domain analysis solutions for product lines. The Journal of Systems and Software.Kim, T., Ko, I. Y., Kang, S. W., & Lee, D. H. (2008). Extending ATAM to assess product line architecture. In 8th IEEE international conference on computer and information technology, pp. 790–797.Kitchenham, B. (2007). Guidelines for performing systematic literature reviews in software engineering. Version 2.3, EBSE Technical Report, Keele University, UK.Kitchenham, B., Pfleeger, S., & Fenton, N. (1995). Towards a framework for software measurement validation. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 21(12).Landis, J. R., & Koch, G. G. (1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics, 33, 159–174.Mendes, E. (2005). A systematic review of Web engineering research. International symposium on empirical software engineering. Noosa Heads, Australia.Meyer, M. H., & Dalal, D. (2002). Managing platform architectures and manufacturing processes for non assembled products. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 19(4), 277–293.Montagud, S., & Abrahão, S. (2009). Gathering Current knowledge about quality evaluation in software product lines. In 13th international software product lines conferences (SPLC), San Francisco, USA.Montagud, S., & Abrahão, S. (2009). A SQuaRE-bassed quality evaluation method for software product lines. Master’s thesis, December 2009 (in Spanish).Needham, D., & Jones, S. (2006). A software fault tree metric. In 22nd international conference on software maintenance (ICSM), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.Niemelä, E., & Immonen, A. (2007). Capturing quality requirements of product family architecture. Information and Software Technology, 49(11–12), 1107–1120.Odia, O. E. (2007). Testing in software product lines. Master Thesis Software Engineering of School of Engineering, Bleking Institute of Technology. Thesis no. MSE-2007:16, Sweden.Olumofin, F. G., & Mišić, V. B. (2007). A holistic architecture assessment method for software product lines. Information and Software Technology, 49, 309–323.Pérez Lamancha, B., Polo Usaola, M., & Piattini Velthius, M. (2009). Software product line testing—a systematic review. ICSOFT, (1), 23–30.Poels, G., & Dedene, G. (2000). Distance-based software measurement: necessary and sufficient properties for software measures. Information and Software Technology, 42(I), 35–46.Prehofer, C., van Gurp, J., & Bosch, J. (2008). Compositionality in software platforms. In Emerging methods, technologies and process management in software engineering. Wiley.Rahman, A. (2004). Metrics for the structural assessment of product line architecture. Master Thesis on Software Engineering, Thesis no. MSE-2004:24. School of Engineering, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden.Sethi, K., Cai, Y., Wong, S., Garcia, A., & Sant’Anna, C. (2009). From retrospect to prospect: Assessing modularity and stability from software architecture. Joint working IEEE/IFIP conference on software architecture, 2009 & European conference on software architecture. WICSA/ECSA.Shaik, I., Abdelmoez, W,. Gunnalan, R., Shereshevsky, M., Zeid, A., Ammar, H. H., et al. (2005). Change propagation for assessing design quality of software architectures. 5th working IEEE/IFIP conference on software architecture (WICSA’05).Siegmund, N., Rosenmüller, M., Kuhlemann, M., Kästner, C., & Saake, G. (2008). Measuring non-functional properties in software product lines for product derivation. 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Defining and validating a multimodel approach for product architecture derivation and improvement

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41533-3_24Software architectures are the key to achieving the non-functional requirements (NFRs) in any software project. In software product line (SPL) development, it is crucial to identify whether the NFRs for a specific product can be attained with the built-in architectural variation mechanisms of the product line architecture, or whether additional architectural transformations are required. This paper presents a multimodel approach for quality-driven product architecture derivation and improvement (QuaDAI). A controlled experiment is also presented with the objective of comparing the effectiveness, efficiency, perceived ease of use, intention to use and perceived usefulness with regard to participants using QuaDAI as opposed to the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM). The results show that QuaDAI is more efficient and perceived as easier to use than ATAM, from the perspective of novice software architecture evaluators. However, the other variables were not found to be statistically significant. Further replications are needed to obtain more conclusive results.This research is supported by the MULTIPLE project (MICINN TIN2009-13838) and the Vali+D fellowship program (ACIF/2011/235).González Huerta, J.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE.; Abrahao Gonzales, SM. (2013). Defining and validating a multimodel approach for product architecture derivation and improvement. En Model-Driven Engineering Languages and Systems. Springer. 388-404. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41533-3_24S388404Ali-Babar, M., Lago, P., Van Deursen, A.: Empirical research in software architecture: opportunities, challenges, and approaches. 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Workshop on Software Factories, San Diego-CA (2005)Datorro, J.: Convex Optimization & Euclidean Distance Geometry. Meboo Publishing (2005)Davis, F.D.: Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and user acceptance of information technology. MIS Quarterly 13(3), 319–340 (1989)Douglass, B.P.: Real-Time Design Patterns: Robust Scalable Architecture for Real-Time Systems. Addison-Wesley, Boston (2002)Feiler, P.H., Gluch, D.P., Hudak, J.: The Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL): An Introduction. Tech. Report CMU/SEI-2006-TN-011. SEI, Carnegie Mellon University (2006)Gómez, A., Ramos, I.: Cardinality-based feature modeling and model-driven engineering: Fitting them together. In: 4th Int. Workshop on Variability Modeling of Software Intensive Systems, Linz, Austria (2010)Gonzalez-Huerta, J., Insfran, E., Abrahao, S.: A Multimodel for Integrating Quality Assessment in Model-Driven Engineering. In: 8th International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology (QUATIC 2012), Lisbon, Portugal, September 3-6 (2012)Gonzalez-Huerta, J., Insfran, E., Abrahao, S., McGregor, J.D.: Non-functional Requirements in Model-Driven Software Product Line Engineering. In: 4th Int. Workshop on Non-functional System Properties in Domain Specific Modeling Languages, Insbruck, Austria (2012)Guana, V., Correal, V.: Variability quality evaluation on component-based software product lines. In: 15th Int. Software Product Line Conference, Munich, Germany, vol. 2, pp. 19.1–19.8 (2011)Insfrán, E., Abrahão, S., González-Huerta, J., McGregor, J.D., Ramos, I.: A Multimodeling Approach for Quality-Driven Architecture Derivation. In: 21st Int. Conf. on Information Systems Development (ISD 2012), Prato, Italy (2012)ISO/IEC 25000:2005, Software Engineering. 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Requirements engineering in software product line engineering

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00766-013-0189-0Many attempts have been made to increase the productivity and quality of software products based on software reuse. Software product line practice is one such approach, one that focuses on developing a family of products which have a majority of features in common. Hence, there are numerous requirements that are common across the family, but others are unique to individual products. Traditional requirements engineering methods were conceived to deal with single product requirements and are usually not flexible enough to address the needs arising from reusing requirements for a family of products. There is also the additional burden of correctly identifying and engineering both product-line-wide requirements and product-specific requirements as well as evolving them. Therefore, in this special issue, we want to highlight the importance and the role of requirements engineering for product line development as well as to provide insights into the state of the art in the field.Insfrán Pelozo, CE.; Chastek, G.; Donohoe, P.; Sampaio Do Prado Leite, JC. (2014). Requirements engineering in software product line engineering. Requirements Engineering. 19(4):331-332. doi:10.1007/s00766-013-0189-0S331332194Clements P, Northrop LM (2001) Software product lines: practices and patterns. Addison-Wesley, BostonDerakhshanmanesh M, Fox J, Ebert J (2012) Adopting feature-centric reuse of requirements assets: an industrial experience report. First international workshop on requirements engineering practices on software product line engineering, Salvador, BrazilKuloor C, Eberlein A (2002) Requirements engineering for software product lines, proceedings of the 15th international conference on software and systems engineering and their applications (ICSSEA’02), Paris, FranceNorthrop LM, Clements P (2013) A framework for software product line practice. Software engineering institute. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/tools/framework/index.cfm . Accessed 22 July 2013Yu Y, Lapouchnian A, Liaskos S, Mylopoulos J, Leite JCSP (2008) From Goals to High-Variability Software Design. Foundations of Intelligent Systems, 17th International Symposium Proceedings. ISMIS 2008. Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4994: 1–1

Assessing the effectiveness of sequence diagrams in the comprehension of functional requirements: results from a family of five experiments

Modeling is a fundamental activity within the requirements engineering process and concerns the construction of abstract descriptions of requirements that are amenable to interpretation and validation. The choice of a modeling technique is critical whenever it is necessary to discuss the interpretation and validation of requirements. This is particularly true in the case of functional requirements and stakeholders with divergent goals and different backgrounds and experience. This paper presents the results of a family of experiments conducted with students and professionals to investigate whether the comprehension of functional requirements is influenced by the use of dynamic models that are represented by means of the UML sequence diagrams. The family contains five experiments performed in different locations and with 112 participants of different abilities and levels of experience with UML. The results show that sequence diagrams improve the comprehension of the modeled functional requirements in the case of high ability and more experienced participants.The authors wish to thank all the participants in the experiments. This research was partially supported by the MULTIPLE project (with ref. TIN2009-13838).Abrahao Gonzales, SM.; Gravino, .C.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE.; Scaniello, .G.; Tortora, .G. (2013). Assessing the effectiveness of sequence diagrams in the comprehension of functional requirements: results from a family of five experiments. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. 39(3):327-342. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2012.27S32734239

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

Towards a monitoring middleware for cloud services

© 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Cloud Computing represents a new trend in the development and use of software. Many organizations are currently adopting the use of services that are hosted in the cloud by employing the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Services are typically accompanied by a Service Level Agreement (SLA), which defines the quality terms that a provider offers to its customers. Many monitoring tools have been proposed to report compliance with the SLA. However, they have some limitations when changes to monitoring requirements must be made and because of the complexity involved in capturing low-level raw data from services at runtime. In this paper, we propose the design of a platform-independent monitoring middleware for cloud services, which supports the monitoring of SLA compliance and provides a report containing SLA violations that may help stakeholders to make decisions regarding how to improve the quality of cloud services. Moreover, our middleware definition is based on the use of [email protected], which allows the dynamic change of quality requirements and/or the dynamic selection of different metric operationalizations (i.e., calculation formulas) with which to measure the quality of services. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we show the instantiation of the proposed middleware that can be used to monitor services when deployed on the Microsoft Azure© platform.This research is supported by the Value@Cloud project (TIN2013-46300-R); the Scholarship Program Senescyt - Ecuador; University of Cuenca – Ecuador; and the Microsoft Azure for Research Award ProgramCedillo Orellana, IP.; Jiménez Gómez, J.; Abrahao Gonzales, SM.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE. (2015). Towards a monitoring middleware for cloud services. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/SCC.2015.68