Applying Value-Based Software Process:An ERP Example

Commercial organizations increasingly need software processes sensitive to business value, quick to apply, supportive of multi-stakeholder collaboration, and capable of early analysis for the cost- e ectiveness of process instances This paper presents experience in applying a lightweight synthesis of a Value-Based Software Quality Achievement process and an Object-Petri-Net-based process model to achieve a stakeholder win-win outcome for software quality achievement in an on-going ERP software project in China The application results con rmed that 1) the Object-Petri-Net-based process model provided project managers with a synchronization and stabilization framework for process activities, successcritical stakeholders and their value propositions; 2) process visualization and simulation tools signi cantly increased management visibility and controllability for the success of the software project     

基于AADL的软件开发技术研究*

形式化方法对于软件的开发过程有着重要的作用。为了研究体系结构分析与设计语言（AADL）在软件开发中的作用及其技术现状,介绍了AADL的语言组成和相关特性,分析了AADL在软件开发过程中的作用,给出了一个相应AADL工具集的框架模型。在此基础上,对现有的AADL相关工具进行了综述比较,总结出该框架的技术现状,并指出了AADL相关工具开发与应用的趋势。     

HeiDATAProVIT-Heidelberg data archiving, tag assembling, processing and visualization tool

The demands that have to be met by software tools for biomedical data evaluation strongly differ depending on the background of their application. In clinical routine emphasis is placed on ease of handling and application of standardized procedures, whereas in biomedical research the main focus lies on flexibility and extensibility. These contradictory requirements are reflected by the design principles of existing software solutions: programs for routine application are barely extensible or modifiable by the user and the complexity of highly flexible data processing tools for research purposes hampers the application of new methods to larger data volumes. This gap poses technical difficulties to the transfer of methods from research into clinical routine. The software we present in this paper bridges this discrepancy by incorporating two different levels of application. The lower level offers options to integrate custom written MATLAB((R)) processing routines and to add new evaluation schemes to a pool of existing procedures. The higher level allows for performing standard evaluations by accessing and applying these previously defined procedures. Four basic concepts were introduced to ensure that the program is both maximally flexible on a lower level and readily applicable on a higher level: the tag concept, the concept of modularized visualization, the dummy file concept, and the batchjob concept. These concepts are the key to flexibly assemble and apply the three universal stages of data evaluation: (1) archiving of acquired data, (2) processing the data using signal processing algorithms and (3) visualizing the results in appropriate graphical formats. The present paper illustrates the four concepts within the two levels of the software architecture. The basic functionality and usefulness of the program are demonstrated using an evaluation of gait analysis data as sample application. In summary, this software tool closely integrates a database for biomedical datasets and an extensible pool of evaluation and visualization procedures realized using MATLAB((R)). It is well suited both for data processing in clinical routine and for evaluation of measurement data in any medical research project.     

Providing Architectural Languages and Tools Interoperability through Model Transformation Technologies

Many architectural languages have been proposed in the last 15 years, each one with the chief aim of becoming the ideal language for specifying software architectures. What is evident nowadays, instead, is that architectural languages are defined by stakeholder concerns. Capturing all such concerns within a single, narrowly focused notation is impossible. At the same time, it is also impractical to define and use a “universal” notation, such as UML. As a result, many domain-specific notations for architectural modeling have been proposed, each one focusing on a specific application domain, analysis type, or modeling environment. As a drawback, a proliferation of languages exists, each one with its own specific notation, tools, and domain specificity. No effective interoperability is possible to date. Therefore, if a software architect has to model a concern not supported by his own language/tool, he has to manually transform (and, eventually, keep aligned) the available architectural specification into the required language/tool. This paper presents DUALLy, an automated framework that allows architectural languages and tools interoperability. Given a number of architectural languages and tools, they can all interoperate thanks to automated model transformation techniques. DUALLy is implemented as an Eclipse plugin. Putting it in practice, we apply the DUALLy approach to the Darwin/FSP ADL and to a UML2.0 profile for software architectures. By making use of an industrial complex system, we transform a UML software architecture specification in Darwin/FSP, make some verifications by using LTSA, and reflect changes required by the verifications back to the UML specification.     

Onyx: A new Canvas-based tool for visualizing biomedical and health ontologies

Ontologies provide formal, machine-readable, and human-interpretable representations of domain knowledge. Therefore, ontologies have come into question with the development of Semantic Web technologies. People who want to use ontologies need an understanding of the ontology, but this understanding is very difficult to attain if the ontology user lacks the background knowledge necessary to comprehend the ontology or if the ontology is very large. Thus, software tools that facilitate the understanding of ontologies are needed. Ontology visualization is an important research area because visualization can help in the development, exploration, verification, and comprehension of ontologies. This paper introduces the design of a new ontology visualization tool, which differs from traditional visualization tools by providing important metrics and analytics about ontology concepts and warning the ontology developer about potential ontology design errors. The tool, called Onyx, also has advantages in terms of speed and readability. Thus, Onyx offers a suitable environment for the representation of large ontologies, especially those used in biomedical and health information systems and those that contain many terms. It is clear that these additional functionalities will increase the value of traditional ontology visualization tools during ontology exploration and evaluation.     

Guest editors’ introduction to the 4th issue of Experimental Software and Toolkits (EST-4)

Experimental software and toolkits play a crucial role in computer science. Elsevier’s Science of Computer Programming special issues on Experimental Software and Toolkits (EST) provide a means for academic tool builders to get more visibility and credit for their work, by publishing a paper along with the corresponding system in a peer-reviewed journal. Typically, tools are presented from both a user and a developer perspective, addressing tool-building issues such as architecture and design, requirements, methodologies and process aspects. This is already the fourth edition of EST with no less than 17 published systems covering application areas ranging from software analysis and visualization to teaching and software development support.     

一种分布式交互仿真的可视化工具软件

该文提出将仿真可视化与仿真计算相分离的观点。阐述了分布式交互仿真（ＤＩＳ）系统可视化的共同要素，给出了作者研制的ＤＩＳ仿真共具软件的结构与实现途径。     

CHARMY: A Framework for Designing and Verifying Architectural Specifications

Introduced in the early stages of software development, the Charmy framework assists the software architect in making and evaluating architectural choices. Rarely, the software architecture of a system can be established once and forever. Most likely poorly defined and understood architectural constraints and requirements force the software architect to accept ambiguities and move forward to the construction of a suboptimal software architecture. Charmy aims to provide an easy and practical tool for supporting the iterative modeling and evaluation of software architectures. From an UML-based architectural design, an executable prototype is automatically created. Charmy simulation and model checking features help in understanding the functioning of the system and discovering potential inconsistencies of the design. When a satisfactory and stable software architecture is reached, Java code conforming to structural software architecture constraints is automatically generated through suitable transformations. The overall approach is tool supported.     

一种基于构件的企业信息系统开发支撑框架

如何设计、管理和利用构件快速、可靠地组装企业信息系统是软件开发工具研究的重要课题之一,该文介绍了“863”／CIMS国产数据库客户端开发工具OpenTools基于构件的软件开发支持框架,详细说明了其总体结构、构件库组织以及构件的分类,检索和集成机制。     

An on‐line performance visualization technology

A new software technology for on‐line performance analysis and the visualization of complex parallel and distributed systems is presented. Often heterogeneous, these systems need capabilities for the flexible integration and configuration of performance analysis and visualization. Our technology is based on an object‐oriented framework for the rapid prototyping and development of distributable visual objects. The visual objects consist of two levels, a platform/device‐specific low level and an analysis‐ and visualization‐specific high level. We have developed a very high‐level markup language called VOML and a compiler for the component‐based development of high‐level visual objects. The VOML is based on a software architecture for on‐line event processing and performance visualization called EPIRA. The technology lends itself to constructing high‐level visual objects from globally distributed component definitions. Details of the technology and tools used, as well as how an example visual object can be rapidly prototyped from several reusable components, are presented. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

SQA-Mashup: A mashup framework for continuous integration

ContextContinuous Integration (CI) has become an established best practice of modern software development. Its philosophy of regularly integrating the changes of individual developers with the master code base saves the entire development team from descending into Integration Hell, a term coined in the field of extreme programming. In practice, CI is supported by automated tools to cope with this repeated integration of source code through automated builds and testing. One of the main problems, however, is that relevant information about the quality and health of a software system is both scattered across those tools and across multiple views.ObjectiveThis paper introduces a quality awareness framework for CI-data and its conceptional model used for the data integration and visualization. The framework called SQA-Mashup makes use of the service-based mashup paradigm and integrates information from the entire CI-toolchain into a single service.MethodThe research approach followed in our work consists out of (i) a conceptional model for data integration and visualization, (ii) a prototypical framework implementation based on tool requirements derived from literature, and (iii) a controlled user study to evaluate its usefulness.ResultsThe results of the controlled user study showed that SQA-Mashup’s single point of access allows users to answer questions regarding the state of a system more quickly (57%) and accurately (21.6%) than with standalone CI-tools.ConclusionsThe SQA-Mashup framework can serve as one-stop shop for software quality data monitoring in a software development project. It enables easy access to CI-data which otherwise is not integrated but scattered across multiple CI-tools. Our dynamic visualization approach allows for a tailoring of integrated CI-data according to information needs of different stakeholders such as developers or testers.     

Package-oriented software engineering: a generic architecture

New methodologies and better techniques are the rule in software engineering, and users of large and complex methodologies benefit greatly from specialized software support tools. However, developing such tools is both difficult and expensive, because developers must implement a lot of functionality in a short time. A promising solution is component-based software development, in particular package-oriented programming (POP). POP fails, however, to satisfy all the requirements of large, complex software engineering tasks. A more generic POP architecture would better serve the development of software engineering environments for large and complex methodologies. Such an architecture emerged from our development experiences with two software engineering research tools: Holmes, a domain analysis support tool; and Egidio, a unified-modeling-language-based business modeling tool. We found this particular architecture simple to understand, easy to implement, and a natural candidate for a generic POP architecture. Our generic architecture satisfies the additional requirements we deem important for larger, more complex software engineering activities. Our experiences show that the strength of this architecture lies in its simplicity and ability to work with multiple users and quickly integrate a wide variety of applications. It is not perfect, but we present it as a first step toward a more general package-oriented architecture to encourage further research in this area     

Presenting DEViSE: Data Exchange for Visualizing Security Events

The Data Exchange for Visualizing Security Events (DEViSE) is an open-source architecture designed to enable data sharing between security visualization tools. The security visualization market currently lacks interoperability between different applications, which tend to be constrained to certain log formats. DEViSE is a middleware layer that manages these interactions so one visualization tool can transfer security-related information to another application. DEViSE uses XML for all communication purposes. This allows a much greater level of freedom for application integration. To demonstrate DEViSE, the authors have created several security visualization tools that adhere to different visualization paradigms.     

A systematic review of software architecture visualization techniques

ContextGiven the increased interest in using visualization techniques (VTs) to help communicate and understand software architecture (SA) of large scale complex systems, several VTs and tools have been reported to represent architectural elements (such as architecture design, architectural patterns, and architectural design decisions). However, there is no attempt to systematically review and classify the VTs and associated tools reported for SA, and how they have been assessed and applied.ObjectiveThis work aimed at systematically reviewing the literature on software architecture visualization to develop a classification of VTs in SA, analyze the level of reported evidence and the use of different VTs for representing SA in different application domains, and identify the gaps for future research in the area.MethodWe used systematic literature review (SLR) method of the evidence-based software engineering (EBSE) for reviewing the literature on VTs for SA. We used both manual and automatic search strategies for searching the relevant papers published between 1 February 1999 and 1 July 2011.ResultsWe selected 53 papers from the initially retrieved 23,056 articles for data extraction, analysis, and synthesis based on pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria. The results from the data analysis enabled us to classify the identified VTs into four types based on the usage popularity: graph-based, notation-based, matrix-based, and metaphor-based VTs. The VTs in SA are mostly used for architecture recovery and architectural evolution activities. We have also identified ten purposes of using VTs in SA. Our results also revealed that VTs in SA have been applied to a wide range of application domains, among which “graphics software” and “distributed system” have received the most attention.ConclusionSA visualization has gained significant importance in understanding and evolving software-intensive systems. However, only a few VTs have been employed in industrial practice. This review has enabled us to identify the following areas for further research and improvement: (i) it is necessary to perform more research on applying visualization techniques in architectural analysis, architectural synthesis, architectural implementation, and architecture reuse activities; (ii) it is essential to pay more attention to use more objective evaluation methods (e.g., controlled experiment) for providing more convincing evidence to support the promised benefits of using VTs in SA; (iii) it is important to conduct industrial surveys for investigating how software architecture practitioners actually employ VTs in architecting process and what are the issues that hinder and prevent them from adopting VTs in SA.     

Survey of reliability and availability prediction methods from the viewpoint of software architecture

Many future software systems will be distributed across a network, extensively providing different kinds of services for their users. These systems must be highly reliable and provide services when required. Reliability and availability must be engineered into software from the onset of its development, and potential problems must be detected in the early stages, when it is easier and less expensive to implement modifications. The software architecture design phase is the first stage of software development in which it is possible to evaluate how well the quality requirements are being met. For this reason, a method is needed for analyzing software architecture with respect to reliability and availability. In this paper, we define a framework for comparing reliability and availability analysis methods from the viewpoint of software architecture. Our contribution is the comparison of the existing analysis methods and techniques that can be used for reliability and availability prediction at the architectural level. The objective is to discover which methods are suitable for the reliability and availability prediction of today’s complex systems, what are the shortcomings of the methods, and which research activities need to be conducted in order to overcome these identified shortcomings. The comparison reveals that none of the existing methods entirely fulfill the requirements that are defined in the framework. The comparison framework also defines the characteristics required of new reliability and availability analysis methods. Additionally, the framework is a valuable tool for selecting the best suitable method for architecture analysis. Furthermore, the framework can be extended and used for other evaluation methods as well.     

IssuePlayer: An extensible framework for visual assessment of issue management in software development projects

This article presents a software visualization framework which can help project managers and team leaders in overseeing issues and their management in software development. To automate the framework, a dashboard tool called IssuePlayer is developed. The tool is used to study the trends in which different types of issues (e.g., bugs, support requests) are submitted, handled and piled up in software projects and use that information to identify process symptoms, e.g., the times when the code maintenance team is not responsive enough. The interactive nature of the tool enables identification of the team members who have not been as active as they were expected to be in such cases. The user can play, pause, rewind and forward the issue management histories using the tool. The tool is empirically evaluated by two industrial partners in North America and Europe. The survey and qualitative feedback support the usefulness and effectiveness of the tool in assessing the issue management processes and the performance of team members. The tool can be used complementarily in parallel with textual information provided by issue management tools (e.g., BugZilla) to enable team leaders to conduct effective and successful monitoring of issue management in software development projects.     

Improving agile requirements: the Quality User Story framework and tool

User stories are a widely adopted requirements notation in agile development. Yet, user stories are too often poorly written in practice and exhibit inherent quality defects. Triggered by this observation, we propose the Quality User Story (QUS) framework, a set of 13 quality criteria that user story writers should strive to conform to. Based on QUS, we present the Automatic Quality User Story Artisan (AQUSA) software tool. Relying on natural language processing (NLP) techniques, AQUSA detects quality defects and suggest possible remedies. We describe the architecture of AQUSA, its implementation, and we report on an evaluation that analyzes 1023 user stories obtained from 18 software companies. Our tool does not yet reach the ambitious 100 % recall that Daniel Berry and colleagues require NLP tools for RE to achieve. However, we obtain promising results and we identify some improvements that will substantially improve recall and precision.