A language-independent and formal approach to pattern-based modelling with support for composition and analysis

ContextPatterns are used in different disciplines as a way to record expert knowledge for problem solving in specific areas. Their systematic use in Software Engineering promotes quality, standardization, reusability and maintainability of software artefacts. The full realisation of their power is however hindered by the lack of a standard formalization of the notion of pattern.ObjectiveOur goal is to provide a language-independent formalization of the notion of pattern, so that it allows its application to different modelling languages and tools, as well as generic methods to enable pattern discovery, instantiation, composition, and conflict analysis.MethodFor this purpose, we present a new visual and formal, language-independent approach to the specification of patterns. The approach is formulated in a general way, based on graphs and category theory, and allows the specification of patterns in terms of (nested) variable submodels, constraints on their allowed variance, and inter-pattern synchronization across several diagrams (e.g. class and sequence diagrams for UML design patterns).ResultsWe provide a formal notion of pattern satisfaction by models and propose mechanisms to suggest model transformations so that models become consistent with the patterns. We define methods for pattern composition, and conflict analysis. We illustrate our proposal on UML design patterns, and discuss its generality and applicability on different types of patterns, e.g. workflow patterns, enterprise integration patterns and interaction patterns.ConclusionThe approach has proven to be powerful enough to formalize patterns from different domains, providing methods to analyse conflicts and dependencies that usually are expressed only in textual form. Its language independence makes it suitable for integration in meta-modelling tools and for use in Model-Driven Engineering.     

Re-engineering legacy Web applications into RIAs by aligning modernization requirements,patterns and RIA features

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) have become a common platform for Web developments. Its adoption has been accelerated thanks to different factors, among others, the appearance of patterns for typical RIA behaviors and the extension of different Model Driven Web Engineering methodologies to introduce RIA concepts. The real fact is that more and more developers are switching to RIA technologies and, thus, the modernization of legacy Web applications into RIAs has become a trend topic. However, this modernization process lacks of a systematic approach. Currently, it is done in an ad hoc manner, being expensive and error-prone. This work presents a systematic process to modernize legacy Web applications into RIAs. The process is based on the use of traceability matrices that relate modernization requirements, RIA features and patterns. Performing some operations on these matrices, they provide the analyst with the necessary information about the suitability of a pattern or set of patterns to address a given requirement. This work also introduces two measures, the degree of requirement realization and the degree of pattern realization, which are used to discuss the pattern selection. Finally, the applicability of the approach is evaluated by using it in several Web systems.     

An ontology-based approach to security pattern selection

Usually, the security requirements are addressed by abstracting the security problems arising in a specific context and providing a well proven solution to them. Security patterns incorporating proven security expertise solution to the recurring security problems have been widely accepted by the community of security engineering. The fundamental challenge for using security patterns to satisfy security requirements is the lack of defined syntax, which makes it impossible to ask meaningful questions and get semantically meaningful answers. Therefore, this paper presents an ontological approach to facilitating security knowledge mapping from security requirements to their corresponding solutions–security patterns. Ontologies have been developed usingWeb Ontology Language (OWL) and then incorporated into a security pattern search engine which enables sophisticated search and retrieval of security patterns using the proposed algorithm. Applying the introduced approach allows security novices to reuse security expertise to develop secure software system.     

面向Agent的软件设计模式

设计模式针对一类在特定上下文中反复出现的问题给出了通用解决方案,模式的提取和重用有助于提高软件开发的效率和质量,其思想和方法已在面向对象软件工程中得到广泛应用和验证。我们认为同一问题采用不同的实现技术往往具有不同的设计形态,不同软件开发范型也有其各自不同的设计模式。作为一种新颖的软件开发范型,近年来面向Agent软件工程的研究取得了长足进展,如何提高软件Agent技术实用性,发挥其技术潜力,扩大其应用范围成为当前人们关注的焦点。本文将模式思想引入到面向Agent软件工程,针对软件Agent技术的特点,从组织结构、交互协作和个体Agent体系结构三个视点提出了一组面向Agent的软件设计模式,以支持多Agent系统的设计;并进一步给出了面向Agent设计模式的描述框架,进行了典型设计模式和应用案例的分析。     

A quantitative approach for evaluating the quality of design patterns

In recent years, the influence of design patterns on software quality has attracted an increasing attention in the area of software engineering, as design patterns encapsulate valuable knowledge to resolve design problems, and more importantly to improve design quality. As the paradigm continues to increase in popularity, a systematic and objective approach to verify the design of a pattern is increasingly important. The intent session in a design pattern indicates the problem the design pattern wants to resolve, and the solution session describes the structural model for the problem. When the problem in the intent is a quality problem, the structure model should provide a solution to improve the relevant quality. In this work we provide an approach, based on object-oriented quality model, to validate if a design pattern is well-designed, i.e., it answers the question of the proposed structural model really resolves the quality problems described in the intent. We propose a validation approach to help pattern developers check if a design pattern is well-designed. In addition, a quantitative method is proposed to measure the effectiveness of the quality improvement of a design pattern that pattern users can determine which design patterns are applicable to meet their functional and quality requirements.     

面向Java语言的设计模式抽取方法的研究

从源码中抽取设计模式对于提高软件可理解性和可维护性、软件设计重用以及软件重构具有重要意义。文章面向Java语言提出了一个从源码中抽取设计模式的方法。具体地,研究了一种特定的设计模式描述方法、定义了源码信息模型及其化简方法,以此为基础提出了设计模式模型和源码模型的匹配方法。特别讨论了在抽取设计模式时与container类相关的问题及其解决方案。最后根据抽取结果从模式及其实例的角度对方法进行了评价,并提出了必要的优化技术。     

Blending design patterns with aspects: A quantitative study

Design patterns often need to be blended (or composed) when they are instantiated in a software system. The composition of design patterns consists of assigning multiple pattern elements into overlapping sets of classes in a software system. Whenever the modularity of each design pattern is not preserved in the source code, their implementation becomes tangled with each other and with the classes’ core responsibilities. As a consequence, the change or removal of each design pattern will be costly or prohibitive as the software system evolves. In fact, composing design patterns is much harder than instantiating them in an isolated manner. Previous studies have found design pattern implementations are naturally crosscutting in object-oriented systems, thereby making it difficult to modularly compose them. Therefore, aspect-oriented programming (AOP) has been pointed out as a natural alternative for modularizing and blending design patterns. However, there is little empirical knowledge on how AOP models influence the composability of widely used design patterns. This paper investigates the influence of using AOP models for composing the Gang-of-Four design patterns. Our study categorizes different forms of pattern composition and studies the benefits and drawbacks of AOP in these contexts. We performed assessments of several pair-wise compositions taken from 3 medium-sized systems implemented in Java and two AOP models, namely, AspectJ and Compose*. We also considered complex situations where more than two patterns involved in each composition, and the patterns were interacting with other aspects implementing other crosscutting concerns of the system. In general, we observed two dominant factors impacting the pattern composability with AOP: (i) the category of the pattern composition, and (ii) the AspectJ idioms used to implement the design patterns taking part in the composition.     

Pattern-based design evolution using graph transformation

In recent years, design patterns gain more interest in software engineering communities for both software development and maintenance. As a template to solve a certain recurring problem, a design pattern documents successful experiences of software experts and gradually becomes the design guidelines of software development. Applying design patterns correctly can improve the efficiency of software design in terms of reusability and enhance maintainability during reverse engineering. Software can be evolved when developers modify their initial designs as requirements change. For instance, a developer may add/delete a set of design elements, such as classes and methods. Modifications on software artifacts can introduce conflicts and inconsistencies in the previously applied design patterns, which are difficult to find and time-consuming to correct. This paper presents a graph-transformation approach to pattern level design validation and evolution. Based on a well founded formalism, we validate a given design by a graph grammar parser and automatically evolve the design at pattern level using a graph-transformation system. Rules for potential pattern evolutions are predefined. The graph-transformation approach preserves the integrity and consistency of design patterns in the system when designs change. A prototype system is built and a case study on the Strategy pattern demonstrates the feasibility of pattern-based design validation and evolution using graph transformation techniques.     

A pattern-based model-driven approach for situational method engineering

ContextConstructing bespoke software development methodologies for specific project situations has become a crucial need, giving rise to Situational Method Engineering (SME). Compared with Software Engineering, SME has a long way to go yet; SME approaches are especially deficient as to support for modeling, portability, and automation. Model-Driven Development (MDD) has been effectively used for addressing these issues in Software Engineering, and is also considered a promising approach for resolving them in SME.ObjectiveThis paper aims to address the shortcomings of existing SME approaches by introducing a novel MDD approach, specifically intended for SME purposes, that uses a pattern-based approach for model transformation.MethodDeveloping a MDD approach for SME requires that a modeling framework, consisting of modeling levels, be defined for modeling software development methodologies. Transformation patterns should also be specified for converting the models from one level to the next. A process should then be defined for applying the framework and transformations patterns to real SME projects. The resulting MDD approach requires proper evaluation to demonstrate its applicability.ResultsA framework and a semi-automated process have been proposed that adapt pattern-based model transformation techniques for application to the methodology models used in SME. The transformation patterns have been implemented in the Medini-QVT model transformation tool, along with two supplementary method bases: one for mapping the situational factors of SME projects to requirements, and the other for mapping the requirements to method fragments. The method engineer can produce the methodology models by using the method bases and executing the transformation patterns via the tool.ConclusionThe validity of the proposed approach has been assessed based on special evaluation criteria, and also through application to a real-world project. Evaluation results indicate that the proposed approach addresses the deficiencies of existing approaches, and satisfies the practicality requirements of SME approaches.     

Bridging patterns: An approach to bridge gaps between SE and HCI

Adding usability improving solutions during late stage development is to some extent restricted by the software architecture. However, few software engineers and human–computer interaction engineers are aware of this important constraint and as a result avoidable rework is frequently necessary. In this paper we present a new type of pattern called a bridging pattern. Bridging patterns extend interaction design patterns by adding information on how to generally implement this pattern. Bridging patterns can be used for architectural analysis: when the generic implementation is known, software architects can assess what it means in their context and can decide whether they need to modify the software architecture to support these patterns. This may prevent part of the high costs incurred by adaptive maintenance activities once the system has been implemented and leads to architectures with better support for usability.     

Optimized memory based accelerator for scalable pattern matching

One of the most promising techniques to detect and thwart a network attack in a network intrusion detection system is to compare each incoming packet with pre-defined attack patterns. This comparison can be performed by a pattern matching engine which has several key requirements including scalability to line rates of network traffic and easy updating of new attack patterns. Memory-based deterministic finite automata meet these requirements, however their storage requirement will grow exponentially with the number of patterns which makes it impractical for implementation. In this paper, we propose a customized memory-based pattern matching engine, whose storage requirement linearly increases with the number of patterns. The basic idea is to allocate one memory slot for each state instead of each edge of the deterministic finite automaton. To demonstrate this idea, we have developed two customized memory decoders. We evaluate them by comparing with a traditional approach in terms of programmability and resource requirements. We also examine their effectiveness for different optimized deterministic finite automata. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the validity of our proposed approach.     

Enterprise security pattern: A model-driven architecture instance

To secure their information assets, organizations should seek support from enterprise security architectures. Security patterns are a good way to build and test new security mechanisms, but they have some limitations related to their usability. In previous work, we defined a new type of security pattern called Enterprise Security Pattern. The main objective of these patterns is to provide an instance of model-driven architecture, which offers a solution to recurring problems that have to do with information systems security. In recent years, the hiring of Software as a Service (SaaS) from cloud providers has become very popular. There seem to be many advantages of using these services, but organizations need to be aware of a variety of threats, as well as being prepared to handle them. In another work undertaken previously, we defined an enterprise security pattern called Secure Software as a Service (Secure SaaS), which the organizations could apply to protect their information assets when using SaaS. In this paper, we present different instances of the solution models of the enterprise security pattern Secure SaaS, aiming to verify the risks that an organization would assume if each of the instances were deployed. With this approach, we intend to show how the design decisions adopted when performing the transformations between the solution models can have a direct impact on the security provided by the pattern.     

Design patterns selection: An automatic two-phase method

Over many years of research and practices in software development, hundreds of software design patterns have been invented and published. Now, a question which naturally arises is how software developers select the right design patterns from all relevant patterns to solve design problems in the software design phase. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a two-phase method to select a right design pattern. The proposed method is based on a text classification approach that aims to show an appropriate way to suggest the right design pattern(s) to developers for solving each given design problem. There are two advantages of the proposed method in comparison to previous works. First, there is no need for semi-formal specifications of design patterns and second, the suitable design patterns are suggested with their degree of similarity to the design problem. To evaluate the proposed method, we apply it on real problems and several case studies. The experimental results show that the proposed method is promising and effective.     

Deriving requirements from process models via the problem frames approach

Jackson's problem frames is an approach to describing a recurring software problem. It is presumed that some knowledge of the application domain and context has been gathered so that an appropriate problem frame can be determined. However, the identification of aspects of the problem, and its appropriate ‘framing’ is recognised as a difficult task. One way to describe a software problem context is through process modelling. Once contextual information has been elicited, and explicitly described, an understanding of what problems need to be solved should emerge. However, this use of process models to inform requirements is often rather ad hoc; the traceability from business process to software requirement is not always as straightforward as it ought to be. Hence, this paper proposes an approach for deriving and contextualising software requirements through use of the problem frames approach from business process models. We apply the approach on a live industrial e-business project in which we assess the relevance and usefulness of problem frames as a means of describing the requirements context. We found that the software problem did not always match easily with Jackson's five existing frames. Where no frame was identified, however, we found that Jackson's problem diagrams did couch the requirements in their right context, and thus application of the problem frames approach was useful. This implies a need for further work in adapting a problem frames approach to the context of e-business systems.     

关于软件标本重用技术的研究

文中阐述了具有类Ａｄａ风格的软件标本重用的技术，阐明了标本重用的基本概念，途径及实现方法，提出将杯本作为重用库中的可重用单元，其重用途径是将部件作为重用参数，标本作为一种模板，实现重用的关键策略是通过预处理生成标本实例，同时，提出了重用库中的单元组成标准的建议。     

Towards runtime discovery, selection and composition of semantic services

Service-orientation is gaining momentum in distributed software applications, mainly because it facilitates interoperability and allows application designers to abstract from underlying implementation technologies. Service composition has been acknowledged as a promising approach to create composite services that are capable of supporting service user needs, possibly by personalising the service delivery through the use of context information or user preferences. In this paper we discuss the challenges of automatic service composition, and present DynamiCoS, which is a novel framework that aims at supporting service composition on-demand and at runtime for the benefit of service end-users. We define the DynamiCoS framework based on a service composition life-cycle. Framework mechanisms are introduced to tackle each of the phases and requirements of this life-cycle. Semantic services are used in our framework to enable reasoning on the service requests issued by end-users, making it possible to automate service discovery, selection and composition. We validate our framework with a prototype that we have built in order to experiment with the mechanisms we have designed. The prototype was evaluated in a testing environment using some use case scenarios. The results of our evaluation give evidences of the feasibility of our approach to support runtime service composition. We also show the benefits of semantic-based frameworks for service composition, particularly for end-users who will be able to have more control on the service composition process.     

A service composition approach based on sequence mining for migrating e-learning legacy system to SOA

With the fast development of business logic and information technology, today's best solutions are tomorrow's legacy systems. In China, the situation in the education domain follows the same path. Currently, there exists a number of e-learning legacy assets with accumulated practical business experience, such as program resource, usage behaviour data resource, and so on. In order to use these legacy assets adequately and efficiently, we should not only utilize the explicit assets but also discover the hidden assets. The usage behaviour data resource is the set of practical operation sequences requested by all users. The hidden patterns in this data resource will provide users' practical experiences, which can benefit the service composition in service-oriented architecture (SOA) migration. Namely, these discovered patterns will be the candidate composite services (coarse-grained) in SOA systems. Although data mining techniques have been used for software engineering tasks, little is known about how they can be used for service composition of migrating an e-learning legacy system (MELS) to SOA. In this paper, we propose a service composition approach based on sequence mining techniques for MELS. Composite services found by this approach will be the complementation of business logic analysis results of MELS. The core of this approach is to develop an appropriate sequence mining algorithm for mining related data collected from an e-learning legacy system. According to the features of execution trace data on usage behaviour from this e-learning legacy system and needs of further pattern analysis, we propose a sequential mining algorithm to mine this kind of data of the legacy system. For validation, this approach has been applied to the corresponding real data, which was collected from the e-learning legacy system; meanwhile, some investigation questionnaires were set up to collect satisfaction data. The investigation result is 90% the same with the result obtained through our approach.     

实用软件质量管理方法

随着信息技术在军民用产品中的广泛应用，软件已成为大多数产品的重要组成部分，如何提高软件质量，使软件更好地服务于各种应用需要，已成为各行各业广泛关注的课题。本文针对软件的特点和软件研制的实践情况，提出了软件质量管理实用方法，该方法通过实际应用并取得较好的效果。