Integrating early aspects with goal-oriented requirements engineering

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Integrating the theme approach with aspectual scenarios

Dissertação de Mestrado em Engenharia Informática

Analysis of support for modularity in object teams based on design patterns

Dissertação de Mestrado em Engenharia Informática

Workflow-oriented collaborative grid portals

The paper presents how workflow-oriented, single-user Grid portals could be extended to meet the requirements of users with collaborative needs. Through collaborative Grid portals different research and engineering teams would be able to share knowledge and resources. At the same time the workflow concept assures that the shared knowledge and computational capacity is aggregated to achieve the high-level goals of the group. The paper discusses the different issues collaborative support requires from Grid portal environments during the different phases of the workflow-oriented development work. While in the design period the most important task of the portal is to provide consistent and fault tolerant data management, during the workflow execution it must act upon the security framework its back-end Grids are built on.

Agent-Oriented Data Curation in Bioinformatics

The practitioners of bioinformatics require increasing sophistication from their software tools to take into account the particular characteristics that make their domain complex. For example, there is a great variation of experience of researchers, from novices who would like guidance from experts in the best resources to use to experts that wish to take greater management control of the tools used in their experiments. Also, the range of available, and conflicting, data formats is growing and there is a desire to automate the many trivial manual stages of in-silico experiments. Agent-oriented software development is one approach to tackling the design of complex applications. In this paper, we argue that, in fact, agent-oriented development is a particularly well-suited approach to developing bioinformatics tools that take into account the wider domain characteristics. To illustrate this, we design a data curation tool, which manages the format of experimental data, extend it to better account for the extra requirements placed by the domain characteristics, and show how the characteristics lead to a system well suited to an agent-oriented view.

Agent-Oriented Data Curation in Bioinformatics

The practitioners of bioinformatics require increasing sophistication from their software tools to take into account the particular characteristics that make their domain complex. For example, there is a great variation of experience of researchers, from novices who would like guidance from experts in the best resources to use to experts that wish to take greater management control of the tools used in their experiments. Also, the range of available, and conflicting, data formats is growing and there is a desire to automate the many trivial manual stages of in-silico experiments. Agent-oriented software development is one approach to tackling the design of complex applications. In this paper, we argue that, in fact, agent-oriented development is a particularly well-suited approach to developing bioinformatics tools that take into account the wider domain characteristics. To illustrate this, we design a data curation tool, which manages the format of experimental data, extend it to better account for the extra requirements placed by the domain characteristics, and show how the characteristics lead to a system well suited to an agent-oriented view.

A Methodology for Building Service-Oriented Applications in the Presence of Non-Functional Properties

This thesis presents ⇡SOD-M (Policy-based Service Oriented Development Methodology), a methodology for modeling reliable service-based applications using policies. It proposes a model driven method with: (i) a set of meta-models for representing non-functional constraints associated to service-based applications, starting from an use case model until a service composition model; (ii) a platform providing guidelines for expressing the composition and the policies; (iii) model-to-model and model-to-text transformation rules for semi-automatizing the implementation of reliable service-based applications; and (iv) an environment that implements these meta-models and rules, and enables the application of ⇡SOD-M. This thesis also presents a classification and nomenclature for non-functional requirements for developing service-oriented applications. Our approach is intended to add value to the development of service-oriented applications that have quality requirements needs. This work uses concepts from the service-oriented development, non-functional requirements design and model-driven delevopment areas to propose a solution that minimizes the problem of reliable service modeling. Some examples are developed as proof of concepts

MARISA-MDD: uma abordagem para transformações entre modelos orientados a aspectos: dos requisitos ao projeto detalhado

Aspect Oriented approaches associated to different activities of the software development process are, in general, independent and their models and artifacts are not aligned and inserted in a coherent process. In the model driven development, the various models and the correspondence between them are rigorously specified. With the integration of aspect oriented software development (DSOA) and model driven development (MDD) it is possible to automatically propagate models from one activity to another, avoiding the loss of information and important decisions established in each activity. This work presents MARISA-MDD, a strategy based on models that integrate aspect-oriented requirements, architecture and detailed design, using the languages AOV-graph, AspectualACME and aSideML, respectively. MARISA-MDD defines, for each activity, representative models (and corresponding metamodels) and a number of transformations between the models of each language. These transformations have been specified and implemented in ATL (Atlas Definition Language), in the Eclipse environment. MARISA-MDD allows the automatic propagation between AOV-graph, AspectualACME, and aSideML models. To validate the proposed approach two case studies, the Health Watcher and the Mobile Media have been used in the MARISA-MDD environment for the automatic generation of AspectualACME and aSideML models, from the AOV-graph model

Uma abordagem baseada em aspectos e composição dinâmica para a construção de aplicações adaptativas cientes ao contexto

Ubiquitous computing systems operate in environments where the available resources significantly change during the system operation, thus requiring adaptive and context aware mechanisms to sense changes in the environment and adapt to new execution contexts. Motivated by this requirement, a framework for developing and executing adaptive context aware applications is proposed. The PACCA framework employs aspect-oriented techniques to modularize the adaptive behavior and to keep apart the application logic from this behavior. PACCA uses abstract aspect concept to provide flexibility by addition of new adaptive concerns that extend the abstract aspect. Furthermore, PACCA has a default aspect model that considers habitual adaptive concerns in ubiquitous applications. It exploits the synergy between aspect-orientation and dynamic composition to achieve context-aware adaptation, guided by predefined policies and aim to allow software modules on demand load making possible better use of mobile devices and yours limited resources. A Development Process for the ubiquitous applications conception is also proposed and presents a set of activities that guide adaptive context-aware developer. Finally, a quantitative study evaluates the approach based on aspects and dynamic composition for the construction of ubiquitous applications based in metrics

AO-OIL: um middleware orientado a aspectos baseado em uma arquitetura de referência

Middleware platforms have been widely used as an underlying infrastructure to the development of distributed applications. They provide distribution and heterogeneity transparency and a set of services that ease the construction of distributed applications. Nowadays, the middlewares accommodate an increasing variety of requirements to satisfy distinct application domains. This broad range of application requirements increases the complexity of the middleware, due to the introduction of many cross-cutting concerns in the architecture, which are not properly modularized by traditional programming techniques, resulting in a tangling and spread of theses concerns in the middleware code. The presence of these cross-cutting concerns limits the middleware scalability and aspect-oriented paradigm has been used successfully to improve the modularity, extensibility and customization capabilities of middleware. This work presents AO-OiL, an aspect-oriented (AO) middleware architecture, based on the AO middleware reference architecture. This middleware follows the philosophy that the middleware functionalities must be driven by the application requirements. AO-OiL consists in an AO refactoring of the OiL (Orb in Lua) middleware in order to separate basic and crosscutting concerns. The proposed architecture was implemented in Lua and RE-AspectLua. To evaluate the refactoring impact in the middleware architecture, this paper presents a comparative analysis of performance between AO-OiL and OiL

CrossMDA-SPL: uma abordagem para gerência de variabilidades dirigida por modelos e aspectos

This paper proposes a systematic approach to management of variability modelsdriven and aspects using the mechanisms of approaches Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) and Model-Driven Development (MDD). The main goal of the approach, named CrossMDA-SPL, is to improve the management(gerência), modularization and isolation ou separation of the variability of the LPSs of architecture in a high level of abstraction (model) at the design and implementing phases of development Software Product Lines (SPLs), exploiting the synergy between AOSD and MDD. The CrossMDA-SPL approach defines some artifacts basis for advance the separation clear in between the mandatory (bounden) and optional features in the architecture of SPL. The artifacts are represented by two models named: (i) core model (base domain) - responsible for specify the common features the all members of the SPL, and (ii) variability model - responsible for represent the variables features of SPL. In addition, the CrossMDA-SPL approach is composed of: (i) guidelines for modeling and representation of variability, (ii) CrossMDA-SPL services and process, and (iii) models of the architecture of SPL or product instance of SPL. The guidelines use the advantages of AOSD and MDD to promote a better modularization of the variable features of the architecture of SPL during the creation of core and variability models of the approach. The services and sub-processes are responsible for combination automatically, through of process of transformation between the core and variability models, and the generation of new models that represent the implementation of the architecture of SPL or a instance model of SPL. Mechanisms for effective modularization of variability for architectures of SPL at model level. The concepts are described and measured with the execution of a case study of an SPL for management systems of transport electronic tickets

MaRISA-AOCode: uma abordagem genérica para geração de código orientado a aspectos

Currently there are several aspect-oriented approaches that are related to different stages of software development process. These approaches often lack integration with each other and their models and artifacts are not aligned in a coherent process. The integration of Aspect-Oriented Software development (AOSD) and Model-Driven Development (MDD) enables automatic propagation of models from one phase to another, avoiding loss of important information and decisions established in each. This paper presents a model driven approach, called Marisa-AOCode, which supports the processing of detailed design artifacts to code in different Aspect-Oriented Programming languages. The approach proposed by Maris- AOCode defines transformation rules between aSideML, a modeling language for aspectoriented detailed design, and Metaspin, a generic metamodel for aspect-oriented programming languages. The instantiation of the generic metamodel (Metaspin) provided by the approach of Maris-AOCode is illustrated by the transformation of Metaspin for two languages: AspectLua and CaesarJ. We illustrate the approach with a case study based on the Health Watcher System

CrossMDA2: Uma abordagem para minimizar o problema da fragilidade de pointcuts na evolução de sistemas orientados a aspectos

This work proposes a model based approach for pointcut management in the presence of evolution in aspect oriented systems. The proposed approach, called conceptual visions based pointcuts, is motivated by the observation of the shortcomings in traditional approaches pointcuts definition, which generally refer directly to software structure and/or behavior, thereby creating a strong coupling between pointcut definition and the base code. This coupling causes the problem known as pointcut fragility problem and hinders the evolution of aspect-oriented systems. This problem occurs when all the pointcuts of each aspect should be reviewed due to any software changes/evolution, to ensure that they remain valid even after the changes made in the software. Our approach is focused on the pointcuts definition based on a conceptual model, which has definitions of the system's structure in a more abstract level. The conceptual model consists of classifications (called conceptual views) on entities of the business model elements based on common characteristics, and relationships between these views. Thus the pointcuts definitions are created based on the conceptual model rather than directly referencing the base model. Moreover, the conceptual model contains a set of relationships that allows it to be automatically verified if the classifications in the conceptual model remain valid even after a software change. To this end, all the development using the conceptual views based pointcuts approach is supported by a conceptual framework called CrossMDA2 and a development process based on MDA, both also proposed in this work. As proof of concept, we present two versions of a case study, setting up a scenario of evolution that shows how the use of conceptual visions based pointcuts helps detecting and minimizing the pointcuts fragility. For the proposal evaluation the Goal/Question/Metric (GQM) technique is used together with metrics for efficiency analysis in the pointcuts definition

GingaForAll: linha de Produtos do Middleware Ginga

Many challenges have been imposed on the middleware to support applications for digital TV because of the heterogeneity and resource constraints of execution platforms. In this scenario, the middleware must be highly configurable so that it can be customized to meet the requirements of applications and underlying platforms. This work aims to present the GingaForAll, a software product line developed for the Ginga - the middleware of the Brazilian Digital TV (SBTVD). GingaForAll adds the concepts of software product line, aspect orientation and model-driven development to allow: (i) the specification of the common characteristics and variables of the middleware, (ii) the modularization of crosscutting concerns - both mandatory and concepts variables - through aspects, (iii) the expression of concepts as a set of models that increase the level of abstraction and enables management of various software artifacts in terms of configurable models. This work presents the architecture of the software product line that implements such a tool and architecture that supports automatic customization of middleware. The work also presents a tool that implements the process of generating products GingaForAll

Um framework de agentes de recomendação para sistemas Web

The World Wide Web has been consolidated over the last years as a standard platform to provide software systems in the Internet. Nowadays, a great variety of user applications are available on the Web, varying from corporate applications to the banking domain, or from electronic commerce to the governmental domain. Given the quantity of information available and the quantity of users dealing with their services, many Web systems have sought to present recommendations of use as part of their functionalities, in order to let the users to have a better usage of the services available, based on their profile, history navigation and system use. In this context, this dissertation proposes the development of an agent-based framework that offers recommendations for users of Web systems. It involves the conception, design and implementation of an object-oriented framework. The framework agents can be plugged or unplugged in a non-invasive way in existing Web applications using aspect-oriented techniques. The framework is evaluated through its instantiation to three different Web systems