The robotics experience

The classical engineering fields have evolved standards and techniques for developing complex systems. For example, both mechanical and electrical engineers have a wide variety of standard components, with defined capabilities, that they can draw upon (e.g., gears, transistors) in the design of complex systems. On the other hand, software engineering has struggled with the basic idea of reusability. Software engineering approaches, such as the use of components [1] that promote the concept of information hiding [2] and the introduction of structured programming languages [3], offer a roadmap to an improved software reuse. Unfortunately, their adoption by robotics researchers has been slow, impeded by the tradition of individual research groups crafting independent and incompatible solutions to common problems.     

组件及其复用技术研究

软件复用是软件工程学科的一个研究的热点 ,也是解决软件危机的有效途径之一。随着 Internet应用技术的发展 ,网络环境下的软件复用变得越来越重要 ,网络环境下的软件复用可以通过面向 Agent的方法实现 ,由 Agent自主地搜索、匹配所需要的组件     

Reusing software: issues and research directions

Software productivity has been steadily increasing over the past 30 years, but not enough to close the gap between the demands placed on the software industry and what the state of the practice can deliver; nothing short of an order of magnitude increase in productivity will extricate the software industry from its perennial crisis. Several decades of intensive research in software engineering and artificial intelligence left few alternatives but software reuse as the (only) realistic approach to bring about the gains of productivity and quality that the software industry needs. In this paper, we discuss the implications of reuse on the production, with an emphasis on the technical challenges. Software reuse involves building software that is reusable by design and building with reusable software. Software reuse includes reusing both the products of previous software projects and the processes deployed to produce them, leading to a wide spectrum of reuse approaches, from the building blocks (reusing products) approach, on one hand, to the generative or reusable processor (reusing processes), on the other. We discuss the implication of such approaches on the organization, control, and method of software development and discuss proposed models for their economic analysis. Software reuse benefits from methodologies and tools to: (1) build more readily reusable software and (2) locate, evaluate, and tailor reusable software, the last being critical for the building blocks approach. Both sets of issues are discussed in this paper, with a focus on application generators and OO development for the first and a thorough discussion of retrieval techniques for software components, component composition (or bottom-up design), and transformational systems for the second. We conclude by highlighting areas that, in our opinion, are worthy of further investigation     

软件复用技术及其在嵌入式系统中应用的可行性

随着计算机应用领域的迅速扩大,软件规模及复杂性的不断提高,软件危机愈加明显地暴露出来。软件复用是在软件开发中避免重复劳动的解决方案,软件复用是软件工程的重要研究领域,被认为是解决软件危机,提高软件生产率和软件质量的主要途径。基于构件的软件复用是当前复用研究的焦点,被视为是实现成功复用的关键技术之一。该文将对软件复用技术的作一全面综述,介绍基于构件的软件复用的基本概念及其在嵌入式系统中的简单应用。     

Trends in software reuse research: A tertiary study

ContextThe reuse of software has been a research topic for more than 50 years. Throughout that time, many approaches, tools and proposed techniques have reached maturity. However, it is not yet a widespread practice and some issues need to be further investigated. The latest study on software reuse trends dates back to 2005 and we think that it should be updated.ObjectiveTo identify the current trends in software reuse research.MethodA tertiary study based on systematic secondary studies published up to July 2018.ResultsWe identified 4,423 works related to software reuse, from which 3,102 were filtered by selection criteria and quality assessment to produce a final set of 56 relevant studies. We identified 30 current research topics and 127 proposals for future work, grouped into three broad categories: Software Product Lines, Other reuse approaches and General reuse topics.ConclusionsFrequently reported topics include: Requirements and Testing in the category of Lifecycle phases for Software Product Lines, and Systematic reuse for decision making in the category of General Reuse. The most mentioned future work proposals were Requirements, and Evolution and Variability management for Software Product Lines, and Systematic reuse for decision making. The identified trends, based on future work proposals, demonstrate that software reuse is still an interesting area for research. Researchers can use these trends as a guide to lead their future projects.     

复用研究在软件应用开发领域研述

软件重用是近年来软件工程一个很活跃的研究领域。实践证明,软件重用是从根本上提高软件生产率、降低成本、提高质量的有效途径。但同时,软件重用还需要在关键技术、管理等很多方面引入注重实效的变革。该文首先介绍了软件重用的概念以及可重用的软件成分,随即介绍了软件重用技术,最后提出了在实际应用中使用软件重用技术的要点。     

Web metadata standards: observations and prescriptions

The World Wide Web has spawned numerous standards initiatives that aim to facilitate more powerful and interoperable functionality based on text exchange, but beyond mere Web page transfers. Software can take a Web page's data as input to further value-added processing, such as filtering items of interest, comparison shopping, finding potential business partners, and executing transactions. But software can do this only if the page's meaning is formalized and explicit. We review various Web content metadata standards and offer observations on their development efforts. We're motivated both by the sheer number of standards and a concern that in our haste to advance these standards and their promised functionality, we might overlook key lessons learned in various disciplines, including software engineering, software reuse, and library science. We call particular attention to the apparent confluence of standards development and artificial intelligence, which raises additional possibilities and concerns.     

基于结构的软件可靠性建模研究进展

软件体系结构作为提高软件系统质量、支持复杂软件开发和复用的重要手段,已经成为软件工程的一个重要研究领域,软件结构的研究对软件可靠性度量也带来的新的问题。分析和总结近年来基于软件体系结构的可靠性建模方法,并对其今后若干研究方向进行了探讨。     

Assessing the cost-effectiveness of software reuse: A model for planned reuse

Information systems development is typically acknowledged as an expensive and lengthy process, often producing code that is of uneven quality and difficult to maintain. Software reuse has been advocated as a means of revolutionizing this process. The claimed benefits from software reuse are reduction in development cost and time, improvement in software quality, increase in programmer productivity, and improvement in maintainability. Software reuse entails undeniable costs of creating, populating, and maintaining a library of reusable components. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that some organizations benefit from reuse. However, many software developers practicing reuse claim these benefits without formal demonstration thereof. There is little research to suggest when the benefits are expected and to what extent they will be realized. For example, does a larger library of reusable components lead to increased savings? What is the impact of component size on the effectiveness of reuse? This research seeks to address some of these questions. It represents the first step in a series wherein the effects of software reuse on overall development effort and costs are modeled with a view to understanding when it is most effective.     

ATS软件的面向对象框架开发

面向对象框架是现代软件工程中一种重要的软件复用方式,不仅提供了代码复用;而且实现了更具有软件生产力意义的设计复用;在ATS(自动测试系统)软件开发中引入面向对象框架开发方法,分析总结了ATS软件领域共性,进行了ATS软件面向对象框架的设计,完成了一个适用于常规ATS软件开发的面向对象框架-ATSSF,并且,基于ATSSF开发了某型空地导弹ATS软件;实践表明,采用面向对象框架开发方法,可大幅度提高ATS软件开发效率。     

分布式集成化CAD系统框架

软件复用已成为软件工程领域的研究热点之一。本文介绍了一个客户机／服务器结构的分布式集成化ＣＡＤ系统框架和基于此框架建造的分布式集成化商业设计ＣＡＤ系统。阐述了框架构件的制作方法和原则，并展示这种较大粒度的可复用构件在特定应用领域的效益。     

软件复用技术研究

软件复用是解决软件危机、提高软件生产效率和质量的现实可行的途径。该文着重软件复用的基本概念及软件复用的思想,研究了软件复用的过程及实现,分析和研究了软件复用所采用的软件构件技术中的关键技术。探讨了软件复用技术未来的发展趋势。     

基于复用技术的分布式Web软件开发方法的研究

该文从软件工程的角度出发,将面向对象技术与软件复用技术相结合,针对分布式WEB软件设计中的复杂性过高提出了一种新的开发方法———主题库法。利用该方法开发的系统,不但可以使问题域能够良好地求解,而且可实现分析及设计结果、最终代码各个层面的复用,较易获取构件/构架库。文中详细描述了该方法的原理、具体实现过程及步骤。     

Model-Based Adaptation of Behavioral Mismatching Components

Component-Based Software Engineering focuses on the reuse of existing software components. In practice, most components cannot be integrated directly into an application-to-be, because they are incompatible. Software Adaptation aims at generating, as automatically as possible, adaptors to compensate mismatch between component interfaces, and is therefore a promising solution for the development of a real market of components promoting software reuse. In this article, we present our approach for software adaptation which relies on an abstract notation based on synchronous vectors and transition systems for governing adaptation rules. Our proposal is supported by dedicated algorithms that generate automatically adaptor protocols. These algorithms have been implemented in a tool, called Adaptor, that can be used through a user-friendly graphical interface.     

软件复用在消防远程监控系统中的应用

软件复用有利于提高软件开发的生产效率,降低软件开发的成本,软件构件和领域工程是实现软件复用的核心技术。本文以消防远程监控系统为例,详细阐述了领域分析、领域体系结构设计等过程,并介绍了可复用构件实现方法。     

Analogy-based domain analysis approach to software reuse

Domain analysis is an expansion of conventional requirements analysis. Domain analysis can support effective software reuse. However, domain analysis is time consuming and is limited to a particular application area. Analogical approaches to software reuse, on the other hand, often occur across domains. Analogical problem solving is a process of transferring knowledge from a well-understood base domain to a new target problem area. Analogy can facilitate software reuse for poorly understood problems or new application areas. Analogy shares similar concepts with reuse and some analogy theories have been applied to software reuse. However, current research on software analogy often overlooks the importance of analysis for the base domain and does not consider some critical aspects of analogy concepts. Reuse must be based on high quality artifacts, especially reuse across domains. This paper presents an approach to integrate domain analysis and analogy methods. In our view, domain analysis and software analogy have complementary roles. Domain analysis is regarded as a process to identify and supply necessary information for analogical transfer. Software analogy can provide the analyst with similar problems and solutions to reuse previous domain analysis knowledge or artifacts for a new domain. This paper presents case studies to demonstrate the increase of efficiency in applying the approach. Evaluation of the approach from various perspectives is also reported.     

Status report: software reusability

It is argued that the problem with software engineering is not a lack of reuse, but a lack of widespread, systematic reuse. The reuse research community is focusing on formalizing reuse because it recognizes that substantial quality and productivity payoffs will be achieved only if reuse is conducted systematically and formally. The history of reuse, which is characterized by this struggle to formalize in a setting where pragmatic problems are the norm and fast informal solutions usually take precedence, is reviewed. Several reuse methods are discussed     

A Framework for Design Tradeoffs

Designs almost always require tradeoffs between competing design choices to meet system requirements. We present a framework for evaluating design choices with respect to meeting competing requirements. Specifically, we develop a model to estimate the performance of a UML design subject to changing levels of security and fault-tolerance. This analysis gives us a way to identify design solutions that are infeasible. Multi-criteria decision making techniques are applied to evaluate the remaining feasible alternatives. The method is illustrated with two examples: a small sensor network and a system for controlling traffic lights. Dr. Anneliese Amschler Andrews is Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Denver. Before that she was the Huie Rogers Endowed Chair in Software Engineering at Washington State University. Dr. Andrews is the author of a text book and over 130 articles in the area of Software Engineering, particularly software testing and maintenance. Dr. Andrews holds an MS and PhD from Duke University and a Dipl.-Inf. from the Technical University of Karlsruhe. She served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. She has also served on several other editorial boards including the IEEE Transactions on Reliability, the Empirical Software Engineering Journal, the Software Quality Journal, the Journal of Information Science and Technology, and the Journal of Software Maintenance. She was Director of the Colorado Advanced Software Institute from 1995 to 2002. CASI's mission was to support technology transfer research related to software through collaborations between industry and academia. Ed Mancebo studied software engineering at Milwaukee School of Engineering and computer science at Washington State University. His masters thesis explored applying systematic decision making methods to software engineering problems. He is currently a software developer at Amazon.com. Dr. Per Runeson is a professor in software engineering at Lund University, Sweden. His research interests include methods to facilitate, measure and manage aspects of software quality. He received a PhD from Lund University in 1998 and has industrial experience as a consulting expert. He is a member of the editorial board of Empirical Software Engineering and several program committees, and currently has a senior researcher position funded by the Swedish Research Council. Robert France is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Colorado State University. His research interests are in the area of Software Engineering, in particular formal specification techniques, software modeling techniques, design patterns, and domain-specific modeling languages. He is an Editor-in-Chief of the Springer journal on Software and System Modeling (SoSyM), and is a Steering Committee member and past Steering Committee Chair of the MoDELS/UML conference series. He was also a member of the revision task forces for the UML 1.x standards.     

Engineering Web-Based Systems with UML Assets

Software development is a product of evolution. It builds on the experiences of the individual and the community, continually refining every aspect of process. Web centric architectures are no different. Their ever-increasing levels of functionality and complexity are evident in the latest generations of web applications. In this paper we discuss some standards that enable teams to build, communicate and apply their experiences in the art of web application software development. These standards appropriate various levels of abstraction, and bring the focus of web application development back to the team. Combining UML representation of web-based systems with techniques for packaging these solutions for reuse can positively impact development timelines and efficiencies.