Lightweight coarse-grained coordination: a scalable system-level approach

In this paper, our solution to the problem of modelling functionally complex communication systems at the application level, based on lightweight coordination, is extended to seamlessly capture system-level testing as well. This extension could be realized simply by self-application: the bulk of the work for integrating system-level testing into our development environment, the ABC, concerned domain modelling, which can be done using the ABC. Therefore, the extension of the ABC to cover system-level testing was merely an application development on the basis of the ABC, illustrated here in the domain of Computer Telephony Integration. Here the adoption of a coarse-grained approach to test design, which is central to the scalability of the overall testing environment, is the enabling aspect for system-level test automation. Together with our lightweight coordination approach this induces an understandable modelling paradigm of system-wide test cases that is adequate for the needs and requirements of industrial test engineers. In particular, it enables test engineers to graphically design complex test cases that, in addition, can even be automatically checked for their intended purposes via model checking.     

Program verification and testing technologies

Program verification and testing techniques are crucial in fruitfully analyzing and validating complex software systems. This is an active research area and has produced various promising techniques in the last decade. However, many challenges lie ahead. We review the research area and summarize six papers selected from the Sixth International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering (TASE 2012).     

Tool-supported enhancement of diagnosis in model-driven verification

We show on a case study from an autonomous aerospace context how to apply a game-based model-checking approach as a powerful technique for the verification, diagnosis, and adaptation of system behaviors based on temporal properties. This work is part of our contribution within the SHADOWS project, where we provide a number of enabling technologies for model-driven self-healing. We propose here to use GEAR, a game-based model checker, as a user-friendly tool that can offer automatic proofs of critical properties of such systems. Although it is a model checker for the full modal μ-calculus, it also supports derived, more user-oriented logics. With GEAR, designers and engineers can interactively investigate automatically generated winning strategies for the games, by this way exploring the connection between the property, the system, and the proof. This work has been partially supported by the European Union Specific Targeted Research Project SHADOWS (IST-2006-35157), exploring a Self-Healing Approach to Designing cOmplex softWare Systems. The project’s web page is at . This article is an extended version of Renner et al. [18] presented at ISoLA 2007, Poitiers, December 2007.     

Preface by the section editor

This special section is devoted to some of the novel approaches to hardware-like system verification that are currently being used in industry or the object of fielded research. The topics presented in this special section are based on a selection of the papers which appeared originally in the Proceedings of CHARME 2001, the Eleventh Advanced Research Working Conference on Correct Hardware Design and Verification Methods which took place in Livingston, Scotland, UK in September 2001. They are by no means a complete account of the numerous ways in which hardware and hardware-like systems are being subject to rigorous investigation, but they represent an interesting sample of today’s problems and of the techniques oriented around new uses of verification techniques. Published online: 10 April 2003     

A constraint-based variability modeling framework

Constraint-based variability modeling is a flexible, declarative approach to managing solution-space variability. Product variants are defined in a top-down manner by successively restricting the admissible combinations of product artifacts until a specific product variant is determined. In this paper, we illustrate the range of constraint-based variability modeling by discussing two of its extreme flavors: constraint-guarded variability modeling and constraint-driven variability modeling. The former applies model checking to establish the global consistency of product variants which are built by manual specification of variations points, whereas the latter uses synthesis technology to fully automatically generate product variants that satisfy all given constraints. Each flavor is illustrated by means of a concrete case study.     

Continuous Model-Driven Engineering

CMDE has been successfully applied in several industrial projects, including telecommunication services, supply-chain management, bioinformatics, logistics, and healthcare. In all these cases, agility at the customer, user, and application level proved key to aligning and linking business and IT. We now expect an additional boost when integrating this approach into a processor project-management environment that oversees development and evolution. This environment will include deadline management and progress reports, automatically informing all relevant parties when certain actions are required, managing different versions and product lines, and automatically steering the build and quality-management process. Perhaps not surprisingly, the development of this management environment proved to be a prime application of CMDE.     

Service Engineering: Linking Business and IT

With its strong emphasis on modularization, service-oriented computing radically alters the way business processes are modeled, realized, and maintained. Domain-specific services virtualize complex functions of the underlying business applications so that they can be loosely coupled to form transorganizational processes. This level of abstraction fosters agility and lessens traditional provider dependence. Service-oriented design has long driven the development of the telecommunications infrastructure and applications, especially intelligent network services. Applying the same principles of domain specificity, visualization, loose coupling, and seamless vertical integration to business processes has the potential to lead to a new generation of personalized, secure, and highly available Web services     

The Electronic Tool Integration Platform as a Supplier and User of Graph Based Tools

ETI is an Electronic Tool Integration platform designed for project-oriented, domain-specific, public or private interactive experimentation with heterogeneous tools. Its users can experiment at ease over the web with the integrated tools and functionalities, and build own prototypical problem solvers on the basis of components (tools and transformations) contained in the ETI repository. In this paper we describe the graph concept underlying ETIs flexibility, the significant role played by graphs in the ETI platform, and the kind of support ETI offers to deal with graph objects. This way we sketch the potential of a closer cooperation between the ETI community and the community of research on graph-based tools.     

Dynamic and Formal Verification of Embedded Systems: A Comparative Survey

Embedded Systems, by their nature, constitute a meeting point for communities with extremely different background. In particular, the high demands for quality and reliability for embedded systems have led to complementary quality assurance efforts: hardware engineers have developed techniques for dynamic verification in terms of co-simulation, which, in particular, addresses the different nature of hardware and software components. Thus these techniques are tailored for the transactional level, which comprises dedicated models for the hardware and the software parts. On the other hand, there is a bulk of work on formal verification techniques, which typically address higher levels of abstraction. These techniques are exhaustive in the sense that they cover all the infinite possible paths of their models, however at the price of neglecting many of the low-level aspects treated by co-simulation. It is the goal of this paper to increase the mutual understanding between these communities and to animate research at this exciting borderline.