Requirements model driven adaption and evolution of Internetware

Today’s software systems need to support complex business operations and processes.The development of the web-based software systems has been pushing up the limits of traditional software engineering methodologies and technologies as they are required to be used and updated almost real-time,so that users can interact and share the same applications over the internet as needed.These applications have to adapt quickly to the diversified and dynamic changing requirements in the physical,technological,economical and social environments.As a consequence,we are expecting a major paradigm shift in software engineering to reflect such changes in computing environment in order to better address the fundamental needs of organisations in this new era.Existing software technologies,such as model driven development,business process engineering,online(re-)configuration,composition and adaptation of managerial functionalities are being repurposed to reduce the time taken for software development by reusing software codes.The ability to dynamically combine contents from numerous web sites and local resources,and the ability to instantly publish services worldwide have opened up entirely new possibilities for software development.In retrospect to the ten years applied research on Internetware,we have witnessed such a paradigm shift,which brings about many changes to the developmental experience of conventional web applications.Several related technologies,such as cloud computing,service computing,cyber-physical systems and social computing,have converged to address this emerging issue with emphasis on different aspects.In this paper,we first outline the requirements that the Internetware software paradigm should meet to excel at web application adaptation;we then propose a requirement model driven method for adaptive and evolutionary applications;and we report our experiences and case studies of applying it to an enterprise information system.Our goal is to provide high-level guidelines to researchers and practitioners to meet the challenges of building adaptive industrial-strength applications with the spectrum of processes,techniques and facilities provided within the Internetware paradigm.     

Internetware: An Emerging Software Paradigm for Internet Computing

The Internet is undergoing a tremendous change towards the globalized computing environment.Due to the open,dynamic and uncontrollable natures of the Internet,software running in the Internet computing environment has some new features,which bring challenges to current software technologies in terms of software model,software operating platform,software engineering approaches and software quality.Researchers in China have proposed the term "Internetware" to present the emerging software paradigm.Sponsored by the National Basic Research 973 Program,several research practices have been done on the Internetware in the past decade.This paper summarizes the progress and status of the Internetware researches.A technical solution framework for the Internetware paradigm is proposed from four aspects:the Internetware software model defines what the Internetware is to be;the Internetware middleware determines how to run the Internetware applications;the engineering methodology determines how to develop the Internetware applications;the Internetware quality assurance determines how well the Internetware applications can perform.The paper also discusses the ongoing research issues and future trends of Internetware.     

Internetware Computing: Issues and Perspective

The Internetware addresses the unique challenges of software development and maintenance in the open and dynamic Internet environment. The project identifies the four major features as the vision of future Internetware including autonomous services, dynamic collaboration, environment-aware evolution and adaptation, and verifiable and justifiable trustworthiness. The paper discusses four key enabling techniques to achieve the above Internetware capabilities. 1) The lifecycle model: it proposes the model-driven and reuse- centric adaptive lifecycle of service software and the mashup approach for composition-based application development. 2) The ontology system: it discusses a wide range of software development ontology systems that can be used at various abstraction levels throughout all the stages of software lifecycle, and the issues with ontology systems such as consistency and completeness, dependency analysis, merging and change management. 3) Modeling and simulation: it identiˉes the necessary characteristics of the modeling language in the new paradigm such as the modeling of environment , system and environment interactions,the environment-system co-engineering process, and the ontology support for modeling and simulation. 4) Social ranking: it points out that social network will play an important role in Internetware development framework. Traditional software activities such as requirements solicitation and testing can be improved following this social approach. From these above four perspectives, the paper gives an outlook to the emerging techniques and their potential power in Internetware software engineering.     

Technical framework for Internetware: An architecture centric approach

Being a new software paradigm evolved by the Internet, Internetware brings many challenges to the traditional software methods and techniques. Sponsored by the national basic research program （973）, researchers in China have developed an architecture centric technical framework for the definition, incarnation and engineering of Internetware. First of all, a software model for Internetware is defined for what to be, including that Internetware entities should be packaged as components, behaving as agents, interoperating as services, collaborating in a structured and on demand manner, etc. Secondly, a middleware for Internetware is designed and implemented for how to be, including that Internetware entities are incarnated by runtime containers, structured collaborations are enabled by runtime software architecture, Internetware can be managed in a reflective and autonomic manner, etc. Thirdly, an engineering methodology for Internetware is proposed for how to do, including the way to develop Internetware entities and their collaborations by transforming and refining a set of software architectures which cover all the phases of software lifecycle, the way to identify and organize the disordered software assets by domain modeling, etc.     

Software Evolution for Moving into and Moving within Internetware Paradigm

Internetware has been an emerging software paradigm to best support computing in the Internet era. Internetware emphasises accommodating the open, dynamic and uncontrollable natures of Internet, which directly and indirectly relates software evolvability. This paper observes that evolving non-Internetware software into the Internetware paradigm and evolving software within Internetware will be two main research and practical issues, and hence proposes an integrated approach to address these two issues. The proposed framework is based a three-dimension structure, with System Functions, System Quality and System models as dimensions. With this framework, evolving software into internetware paradigm can be viewed mainly as changing the qualities of existing software and evolving software within Internetware paradigm can be viewed mainly as changing software functions. The involved prototype tool, working examples and experiments conducted, are used to illustrate the proposed approach.     

Reliability Growth Modeling and Optimal Release Policy Under Fuzzy Environment of an N-version Programming System Incorporating the Effect of Fault Removal Efficiency

Failure of a safety critical system can lead to big losses.Very high software reliability is required for automating the working of systems such as aircraft controller and nuclear reactor controller software systems.Fault-tolerant softwares are used to increase the overall reliability of software systems.Fault tolerance is achieved using the fault-tolerant schemes such as fault recovery (recovery block scheme),fault masking (N-version programming (NVP)) or a combination of both (Hybrid scheme).These softwares incorporate the ability of system survival even on a failure.Many researchers in the field of software engineering have done excellent work to study the reliability of fault-tolerant systems.Most of them consider the stable system reliability.Few attempts have been made in reliability modeling to study the reliability growth for an NVP system.Recently,a model was proposed to analyze the reliability growth of an NVP system incorporating the effect of fault removal efficiency.In this model,a proportion of the number of failures is assumed to be a measure of fault generation while an appropriate measure of fault generation should be the proportion of faults removed.In this paper,we first propose a testing efficiency model incorporating the effect of imperfect fault debugging and error generation.Using this model,a software reliability growth model (SRGM) is developed to model the reliability growth of an NVP system.The proposed model is useful for practical applications and can provide the measures of debugging effectiveness and additional workload or skilled professional required.It is very important for a developer to determine the optimal release time of the software to improve its performance in terms of competition and cost.In this paper,we also formulate the optimal software release time problem for a 3VP system under fuzzy environment and discuss a the fuzzy optimization technique for solving the problem with a numerical illustration.     

A software architecture centric engineering approach for Internetware

As a new software paradigm evolved by the Internet, Internetware brings many challenges for the traditional software development methods and techniques. Though architecture-based component composition (ABC) approach is originated in the traditional software paradigm, it supports the engineering of Internetware effectively due to its philosophy, rationales and mechanisms. ABC has three major contributions to the en- gineering of Internetware in detail. First, the feature oriented domain modeling method can structure the “disordered”“software entities” to “ordered Internetware” bottom-up in the problem space. Second, the architecture centric design and analysis method can support the development of self-adaptive Internetware. Third, the component operating platform is a reflective and self-adaptive middleware that not only provides Internetware with a pow- erful and flexible runtime infrastructure but also enables the self-adaptation of the structure and individual entities of Internetware.     

How commercial involvement affects open source projects: three case studies on issue reporting

Whereas most research on Internetware has focused on new technologies for keeping track of a changing Internet,little attention has been paid to the software development process.A large portion of the software running the Internet is open source software.Open source software is developed both by volunteers and commercial companies,often jointly.Companies get involved in open source projects for commercial reasons,and bring with them a commercial software development process.Thus,it is important to understand how commercial involvement affects the software development process of open source projects.This article presents case studies of three open source application servers that are being developed jointly by a volunteer community and one primary software company.We are interested in better understanding developer behavior,specifically task distribution and performance,based on whether the developer is an external contributor,e.g.,a volunteer working in their spare time,or a commercial developer from inside the primary backing company who is being paid for their time.To achieve this,we look at issue reporting as an example of commercial involvement in open source projects.In particular,we investigate the distribution of tasks among volunteers and commercial developers by studying the source of reported issues and quantify the task performance on user experience via the issue resolution speed.We construct measures based on historical records in issue tracking repositories.Our results show that,with intensified commercial involvement,the majority of issue reporting tasks would be undertaken by commercial developers,and issue resolution time would be reduced,implying a better user experience.We hope our methods and results provide practical insights for designing an efficient hybrid development process in the Internetware environment.     

A Conceptual Approach for Data Integration in Business Analytics

We present some basic concepts of a modelling environment for data integration in business analytics. Main emphasis is on defining a process model for the different activities occurring in connection with data integration, which allow later on assessment of the quality of the data. The model is based on combination of knowledge and techniques from statistical metadata management and from workflow processes. The modelling concepts are presented in a problem oriented formulation. The approach is embedded into an open model framework which aims for a modelling platform for all kinds of models useful in business applications.     

Middleware Support for Internetware: A Service Perspective

The advent of Internet technology introduces a revolution to software application and development paradigms. Traditional software development and application patterns have been shifted to Internet-based service sharing and collaboration among partners across the Internet. This new paradigm imposes new challenges and complexity in the lifecycle of software development, deployment, execution and maintenance. Middleware, an intermediate layer to abstract the homogeneity and hide the di?erence of underlying systems, can be used to reduce the complexity of managing the lifecycle of Internet applications. In this paper, we exploit the needs of middleware support for Internet-based applications from a service perspective. We investigate the potential requirements and features of Internetware, and analyze the state-of-the-art solutions. We also discuss the remaining issues and their challenges, and explore the potential future research directions.     

Towards Software Architecture and Mechanisms for Improving Runtime Variability of Internetware System

As an emerging software paradigm, Internetware is proposed to handle openness, dynamism of software systems in the context of Internet, which implies that such software systems typically have runtime variability that can be improved dynamically to handle various or even unexpected changes of requirements and open environment. Though many progresses of Internetware software technologies have been made to support the adaptation, evolution, context-awareness, etc. of Internetware, how to construct Internetware systems with the ability to improve their runtime variability is still a great challenge in the literature of software engineering. In this paper, we propose software architecture and mechanisms for Internetware systems to support the improvement of their runtime variability by combining software variability and autonomic computing techniques. The Internetware system is organized as three levels that are consist of variable autonomic elements and Internetware entities, and architecture of these software entities is defined and discussed respectively. Moreover, we put forward a series of runtime mechanisms based on these levels, including module selection, intermediator and horizontal management, to realize operations upon the variation points and variants in software architectures and thus achieve the improvement of runtime variability. We develop a sample of Personal Data Resource Network to depict the requirements and scenario of improving runtime variability, and further study the case based on our proposed approach to show its effectiveness and applicability.     

基于服务更新的网构软件可靠性模型研究(英文)

网构软件是在开放、动态和多变的Internet环境下软件系统基本形态的一种抽象。这种新的软件系统,它的构建依赖于开放环境中各异构、自治的软件服务实体之间的有效协同。其可靠性不单取决于拥有自主性的软件服务实体本身,还取决于外部环境的动态变化,主要表现为开放环境下服务实体元素的更新,所以传统的软件可靠性的度量模型已不能适应这种新的软件形态。能否在网构软件形态下建立一个好的可靠性度量模型成为其中一个较为核心的问题。文章以服务更新过程中失效数(failurecounts)为基础,将服务更新强度引入Musa-Okumoto(M-O)模型中,作为M-O模型在新的软件形态下的一个推广。最后讨论了网构软件退化的情形和退化条件,为开放环境下网构软件可靠性研究提供一种思路。     

Preface

The vision of ''Internet as a computer'' motivates many technical trends, like pervasive computing, grid computing, service computing and recently, cloud computing, as well as some business trends, like modern service industry, digital economy and smarter planet. These evolutionary changes demand that the software systems which are running on the open and dynamic Internet have to be autonomous, context-sensitive, continuous-reactive, evolutionary, and proactive, and the software entities dispersed on distributed nodes over the Internet will be turned into self-contained, autonomous and adaptive. Thus, like the information Web, i.e. the World Wide Web, these Internet-based software entities will constitute a software Web. That gives birth a new software paradigm. A portmanteau term ''Internetware'' is used to denote the future software-web. An Internetware system will be able to perceive the changes of the open and dynamic environment, respond to the changes, and exhibit the context-aware, adaptive and trustworthy behaviors. The mission of Internetware may challenge many aspects of software technologies, from the operating platforms and the programming models to the engineering approaches. Internetware 2010, the second Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware, aims to provide an interactive forum where researchers and professionals from multiple disciplines and domains meet and exchange ideas to explore and address the challenges brought by Internetware. The symposium was held at Suzhou, China, during the 2-4 of Nov, 2010. Thirty three papers were submitted and each of them was reviewed by at least two members of an International Program Committee. Among them, 12 have been accepted (which means an acceptance rate of 36%) for their quality as well as for their interesting terms of discussions for the symposium attendees. This special issue contains 7 revised and substantially extended papers from the 12 based on presentations at the symposium: ......     

Flourishing creativity in software development via Internetware paradigm

While culture being the software controlling human mind, computer software development becomes one of the most creative activities that human undertake since the civilisation began. The only limitation in software creation is human imagination, and that limit is often self-imposed. The “Internetware”, referring to a software paradigm, aims to satisfy the need of human kind using Internet as an integrated development and execution platform. Such software systems are composed of entities distributed through the Internetwork, allowing connections that would be impossible or difficult to make otherwise. One of the tasks for the Internetware is to accommodate creativity, to understand the general settings of creative design process and to develop programs that can enhance creativity without necessarily being creative themselves. Therefore, it can be summarized that a development environment needs to be built to best support software creation process of six steps including searching, ideating, specifying, coding, testing and evolving. An E-Health application eco-system is used to illustrate the proposed development process model.     

基于Agent的网构软件构件模型及其实现

网构软件代表了Internet环境下的一种新型的软件形态,但仍然面临着外部环境显式化、软件实体主体化、运行机制自适应等问题.从构件的角度出发,提出了EBDI(electronic business document exchange)结构以表示能够根据环境变化实施自主行为的构件,利用动态绑定关系解释了构件的自适应演化特征.根据形式化的Role模型,描述了构件的运行状态、自主运行及自适应演化运行机制.开发了DAgent-Internetware原型作为网构软件的支撑平台,支持以DAgent为构件的网构软件从设计到实现、部署、运行、演化等一系列流程.