CHARMY: A Framework for Designing and Verifying Architectural Specifications

Metric-based Evaluation of Implemented Software Architectures

This research recognizes the limitation and challenges of adapting and applying Process Mining as a powerful tool and technique in the Hypothetical Software Architecture (SA) Evaluation Framework with the features and factors of lightweightness. Process mining deals with the large-scale complexity of security and performance analysis, which are the goals of SA evaluation frameworks. As a result of these conjectures, all Process Mining researches in the realm of SA are thoroughly reviewed, and nine challenges for Process Mining Adaption are recognized. Process mining is embedded in the framework and to boost the quality of the SA model for further analysis, the framework nominates architectural discovery algorithms Flower, Alpha, Integer Linear Programming (ILP), Heuristic, and Inductive and compares them vs. twelve quality criteria. Finally, the framework’s testing on three case studies approves the feasibility of applying process mining to architectural evaluation. The extraction of the SA model is also done by the best model discovery algorithm, which is selected by intensive benchmarking in this research. This research presents case studies of SA in service-oriented, Pipe and Filter, and component-based styles, modeled and simulated by Hierarchical Colored Petri Net techniques based on the cases’ documentation. Process mining within this framework deals with the system’s log files obtained from SA simulation. Applying process mining is challenging, especially for a SA evaluation framework, as it has not been done yet. The research recognizes the problems of process mining adaption to a hypothetical lightweight SA evaluation framework and addresses these problems during the solution development.

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Ensuring software quality is one of the key challenges associated with the development of automotive embedded systems. Software architecture plays a pivotal role in realizing functional and non-functional requirements for automotive embedded systems. Software architecture is a work-product of the early stages of software development. The design errors introduced at the early stages of development will increase cost of rework. Hence, an early evaluation of software architecture is important.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">PERSIST (Powertrain control architecture Enabling Reusable Software development for Intelligent System Tailoring) is a model-based software product line approach which focuses on cross-project standardization of powertrain software. The product line is characterized by common design guidelines and adherence to industry standards like ISO 25010, AUTOSAR and ISO 26262. This paper shows a systematic approach to ensure objective, early and repeated analysis of software architecture for the PERSIST product line using metrics. The systematic approach for architecture metrics involves the definition, implementation, measurement and, evaluation of the metrics for hybrid control unit software. With a new approach of architecture-driven development, this paper demonstrates how an early evaluation of the software architecture helps to frontload development efforts and improves software quality.</div></div>

The need for software architecture evaluation is based on the realization that software development, like all engineering disciplines, is a process of continuous modeling and refinement. Detecting architectural problems before the bulk of development work is done allows re‐architecting activities to take place in due time, without having to rework what has already been done. At the same time, tuning activities allow software performance to be enhanced and maintained during the software lifetime. When dealing with product families, architectural evaluations have an even more crucial role: the evaluations are targeted to a set of common products. We have tried different approaches to software assessments with our mobile phone software, an embedded real‐time software platform, which must support an increasingly large number of different product variants. In this paper, we present a case study and discuss the experiences gained with three different assessment techniques that we have worked on during the past five years. The assessment techniques presented include scenario‐based software architecture assessment, software performance assessment and experience‐based assessment. The various evaluation techniques are complementary and, when used together, constitute a tool which a software architect must be aware of in order to maintain and evolve a large software intensive system. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Software architecture (SA) is the blueprint of the software system and considered as one of the most important artifacts in component based development. The design and analysis of SA can be very complex. Under the inspiration of Model-Driven Development, the design of SA has been no more constrained in one stage. It is a trend to construct multiple SA models in multiple stages during the software life cycle. Thus, the traceability between these SA models becomes a new challenge. The information between these SA models in deferent stages is usually not recorded well and easy to be lost lately, which makes the maintenance and evolution difficult and error-prone. In this paper, we present an approach to recording the information between SA models via a traceability model for reducing the loss of design decisions and helping developers understand the software system well.

: Software architecture is critical to the quality of a software-intensive system. For an acquisition organization, such as the Department of Defense (DoD), the ability to evaluate software architectures early in an acquisition can have a favorable impact on the delivered system. This technical note discusses the role of software architecture evaluations in a system acquisition and describes the contractual elements that are needed to accommodate architecture evaluations in an acquisition. The note then provides an example of contractual language that incorporates the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) as a software architecture evaluation method in a system acquisition.

Quantitative properties of modern software systems are often defined as a part of a service-level agreement (SLA) that fixes the maximal load to be submitted to a system and guarantees bounds for the response time or delay. The evaluation of software architectures in order to validate SLAs is a challenging task since the systems tend to be complex, highly dynamic and to some extent unpredictable. Thus, there is a need for fast and abstract techniques to evaluate the performance of modern software architectures based on the information available in the SLAs. The paper presents an efficient approach to compute bounds on the delay of composed systems based on available bounds for the load and the response times of components. The technique can be used by a user of a software architecture to validate SLAs of composed services based on SLAs of the components. It can also be used by a provider of a software architecture to validate whether additional users can be accepted or to compute required service capacities to fulfill an SLA.

The aspect-oriented software architectural weaving mechanism, to integrate aspectual components that encapsulate crosscutting behaviors and features into components and connectors constituting software architecture (SA), contributes to analyze and verify overall behaviors and quality attributes of SA. This paper proposes a new kind of weaving process and rules, which offer the measure to transform the unwoven SA model into the woven SA model. The unwoven SA model is described in a special aspect-oriented architecture description language, called AC2-ADL, and specifies the locations, times and constrains of injection. Then a woven SA model only containing components and connectors is acquired after weaving, and easier to analyze and verify.

Software architecture research focuses on models of software architectures as specified in architecture description languages (ADLs). As research progresses in specific areas of software architectures, more and more architectural information is created. Ideally, this information can be stored in the model. An extensible modeling language is crucial to experimenting with and building tools for novel modeling constructs that arise from evolving research. Traditional ADLs typically support a small set of modeling constructs very well, but adapt to others poorly. XML provides an ideal platform upon which to develop an extensible modeling language for software architectures. Previous XML-based ADLs successfully leveraged XML's large base of off-the-shelf tool support, but did not take advantage of its extensibility. To give software architecture researchers more freedom to explore new possibilities and modeling techniques, while maximizing reuse of tools and modeling constructs, we have developed xADL 2.0, a highly extensible XML-based ADL. xADL 2.0 supports run-time and design time modeling, architecture configuration management and model-based system instantiation. Additionally, xADL 2.0 has a set of extensible infrastructure tools that support the creation, manipulation, and sharing of xADL 2.0 documents.

Bioinformaticists use the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) to characterize an unknown sequence by comparing it against a database of known sequences, thus detecting evolutionary relationships and biological properties. mpiBLAST is a widely-used, high-performance, open-source parallelization of BLAST that runs on a computer cluster delivering super-linear speedups. However, the Achilles heel of mpiBLAST is its lack of modularity, thus adversely affecting maintainability and extensibility. Alleviating this shortcoming requires an architectural refactoring to improve maintenance and extensibility while preserving high performance. Toward that end, this paper evaluates five different software architectures and details how each satisfies our design objectives. In addition, we introduce a novel approach to using mixin layers to enable mixing-and-matching of modules in constructing sequence-search applications for a variety of high-performance computing systems. Our design, which we call "mixin layers with refined roles", utilizes mixin layers to separate functionality into complementary modules and the refined roles in each layer improve the inherently modular design by precipitating flexible and structured parallel development, a necessity for an open-source application. We believe that this new software architecture for mpiBLAST-2.0 will benefit both the users and developers of the package and that our evaluation of different software architectures will be of value to other software engineers faced with the challenges of creating maintainable and extensible, high-performance, bioinformatics software.

The function and significance of mission-critical software-intensive systems have got substantial recognition. Software architecture has become a new field since system software is all the time more intricate. Agile software development counters the advancement in requirement, besides to attend to the fixed plan. In this paper, the effort has been made to find parameters for software architecture evaluation and then evaluate software architecture under agile environment based on the determined parameters.

The Internet of Things-based systems and software allow computations anywhere at any time by interconnecting individuals, networks, services, computers and artefacts that allow autonomous systems to form digitized communities. As the blueprint for software-intensive applications, and software architecture that precise the complexity of a network’s planning, development, and changing phases to effectively and efficiently build complex IoT-driven applications. In any case, there exists no comprehensive analysis in the state of the research on the adoption of MSA for IoT systems. This study effort is needed to explore architectural concepts and practices for designing and developing IoT software to excel state-of-the-art for IoTs along with suggestions and recommendations for IoT software to the adoption of MSA to fulfil the identified gaps. A systematic analysis was coordinated, covering up the literature on existing IoT solutions by studying 140 qualitatively selected articles performed between 2005 and Jan 2020. One hundred forty articles were comprised in this SLR. The findings of this study demonstrated different research topics including software architectural styles, patterns, and models to build IoT software. This research presents cloud-based computing environments, autonomous, software-defined networking, and responsive applications, and IoT-driven agent-based systems, (1) thirteen MSA architectural and design patterns for IoTs and classification of patterns, (2) classification of software architectures for IoTs into nine main categories and their sub-categories, (3) twenty-three most investigated IoT challenges, and (4) mapping of IoT challenges with software architectural solutions. The study revealed the innovative work on IoT software architecture and trends that help in the creation and dynamic adaptation of IoT software for reusability, automation and human decision-making. The outputs of this SLR are useful in revealing many recommendations to the software industry, software engineering community, and computer sciences community with over the past 15 years of research into the adoption of MSA. This study reflects a distilled awareness of architectural practices and principles to assist researchers and practitioners in promoting information sharing software architectural roles and responsibilities for the Internet of Things software.

This paper provides an introduction to the field of software engineering requires facility in architectural software design. The goal is to demonstrate the current state of the discipline and examine the ways in which architectural design can impact soft-ware design. Software architecture is used to describe a high level design methodology of large software systems. It provides the overall structure of a system in an abstract and structured fashion. A smart architectural demonstration holds the key to the effectiveness of a software architecture description and usage. This paper focuses on criterion to select appropriate architecture style for software system. It also gives overview of definition, goals and requirements of software architecture with various architecture styles, their benefits and applications. The authors have also described the requirements and goals of robotic software architecture. The proposal for layered robotic software architecture for a distributed system is also presented.

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 8th International ACM Sigsoft Conference on the Quality of Software Architectures -- QoSA'12. For almost a decade, QoSA aims at advancing the state of the art in the quality assessment and management for software architectures. Specific issues of interest are defining quality measures, evaluating and managing architecture quality, linking architecture to requirements and implementation, and preserving architecture quality throughout the lifetime of the system. Past themes for QoSA include Quality throughout the Software Lifecycle (2011), Research into Practice -- Reality and Gaps (2010), Architectures for Adaptive Software Systems (2009), and Models and Architecture (2008). The umbrella theme of QoSA 2012 is Evolving Architectures. The QoSA'12 call for papers attracted 52 abstracts leading to the final number of 44 submissions from Europe, North and South America, Australia, Asia, and Africa. The program committee accepted 11 long papers and 7 short papers that cover a variety of topics related to the quality of software architectures. In addition, the program includes two keynote speeches, first by Alberto Montresor (University of Trento, Italy) on Designing Extreme Distributed Systems: Challenges and Opportunities, and second by Johan Bendz (Convenor of the ISO/IEC-JTC1-SC7 Working Group on Architecture) on International Standards Supporting Quality in Software Architecture. QoSA is part of the federated event CompArch, this year together with "CBSE 2012: 15th International ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Component Based Software Engineering," "ISARCS 2012: 3rd International ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Architecting Critical Systems," "WCOP 2012: 17th International Doctoral Symposium on Components and Architecture," and "ROSS 2012: Workshop on Reusing Open-Source Components." We are grateful to the organizers of all these events for making CompArch a successful federated event on Component-based Software Engineering and Software Architecture.

An increasingly important requirement for software system is the capability to evolve dynamically at runtime according to the users' requirements and computing environments. From the angle of software architecture, in this paper, a framework of supporting dynamic evolution based on reflective aspect-oriented software architecture-RAOSA is proposed and software architecture is reified as an explicit entity. Notably, the concept of aspect of AOP is introduced into the traditional software architecture and a core model of aspect-oriented software architecture is established. Evolution rules and strategies are formalized to support deduction of the system evolutionary behaviors; by using reflection mechanism, RAOSA, which is causal-connected to software specification and implementation, monitors the contextual information of runtime system to guide the evolution and update the software specification, ensuring system consistency and integrity. Furthermore, a simple application case illustrates the feasibility of proposed framework.