Workshop on FAMIX and Moose in Software Reengineering (FAMOOSr 2009)

The increasing amount of data available about software systems poses new challenges for re- and reverse engineering research, as the proposed approaches need to scale. In this context, concerns about meta-modeling and analysis techniques need to be augmented by technical concerns about how to reuse and how to build upon the efforts of previous research. MOOSE is an extensive infrastructure for reverse engineering evolved for over 10 years that promotes the reuse of engineering efforts in research. MOOSE accommodates various types of data modeled in the FAMIX family of meta-models. The goal of this half-day workshop is to strengthen the community of researchers and practitioners who are working in re- and reverse engineering, by providing a forum for building future research starting from MOOSE and FAMIX as shared infrastructure.

Software Engineering and eLearning: The MuSofT Project

eLearning supports the education in certain disciplines. Here, we report about novel eLearning concepts, techniques, and tools to support education in Software Engineering, a subdiscipline of computer science. We call this "Software Engineering eLearning". On the other side, software support is a substantial prerequisite for eLearning in any discipline. Thus, Software Engineering techniques have to be applied to develop and maintain those software systems. We call this "eLearning Software Engineering". Both aspects have been investigated in a large joint, BMBF-funded research project, termed MuSofT (Multimedia in Software Engineering). The main results are summarized in this paper.

Explaining Variations in Client Extra Costs between Software Projects Offshored to India

Gaining economic benefits from substantially lower labor costs has been reported as a major reason for offshoring labor-intensive information systems services to low-wage countries. However, if wage differences are so high, why is there such a high level of variation in the economic success between offshored IS projects? This study argues that offshore outsourcing involves a number of extra costs for the ^his paper was recommended for acceptance by Associate Guest Editor Erran Carmel. client organization that account for the economic failure of offshore projects. The objective is to disaggregate these extra costs into their constituent parts and to explain why they differ between offshored software projects. The focus is on software development and maintenance projects that are offshored to Indian vendors. A theoretical framework is developed a priori based on transaction cost economics (TCE) and the knowledge-based view of the firm, comple mented by factors that acknowledge the specific offshore context The framework is empirically explored using a multiple case study design including six offshored software projects in a large German financial service institution. The results of our analysis indicate that the client incurs post contractual extra costs for four types of activities: (1) re quirements specification and design, (2) knowledge transfer, (3) control, and (4) coordination. In projects that require a high level of client-specific knowledge about idiosyncratic business processes and software systems, these extra costs were found to be substantially higher than in projects where more general knowledge was needed. Notably, these costs most often arose independently from the threat of oppor tunistic behavior, challenging the predominant TCE logic of market failure. Rather, the client extra costs were parti cularly high in client-specific projects because the effort for managing the consequences of the knowledge asymmetries between client and vendor was particularly high in these projects. Prior experiences of the vendor with related client projects were found to reduce the level of extra costs but could not fully offset the increase in extra costs in highly client-specific projects. Moreover, cultural and geographic distance between client and vendor as well as personnel turnover were found to increase client extra costs. Slight evidence was found, however, that the cost-increasing impact of these factors was also leveraged in projects with a high level of required client-specific knowledge (moderator effect).

Usability-Oriented Software Development Process

Usability is the capability of the software product to be understood, learned, used and attractive to the user, when used under specified conditions. Many studies demonstrate the benefits of usability, yet to this day software products continue to exhibit consistently low levels of this quality attribute. Furthermore, poor usability in software systems contributes largely to software failing in actual use. One of the main disciplines involved in usability is that of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Over the past two decades the HCI community has proposed specific features that should be present in applications to improve their usability, yet incorporating them into software continues to be far from trivial for software developers. These difficulties are due to multiple factors, including the high level of abstraction at which these HCI recommendations are made and how far removed they are from actual software implementation. In order to bridge this gap, the Software Engineering community has long proposed software design solutions to help developers include usability features into software, however, the problem remains an open research question. This doctoral thesis addresses the problem of helping software developers include specific usability features into their applications by providing them with a structured and tangible guidance in the form of a process, which we have termed the Usability-Oriented Software Development Process. This process is supported by a set of Software Usability Guidelines that help developers to incorporate a set of eleven usability features with high impact on software design. After developing the Usability-oriented Software Development Process and the Software Usability Guidelines, they have been validated across multiple academic projects and proven to help software developers to include such usability features into their software applications. In doing so, their use significantly reduced development time and improved the quality of the resulting designs of these projects. Furthermore, in this work we propose a software tool to automate the application of the proposed process. In sum, this work contributes to the integration of the Software Engineering and HCI disciplines providing a framework that helps software developers to create usable applications in an efficient way.

An Aspect-Oriented Approach for Supporting Autonomic Reconfiguration of Software Architecture

The increasing complexity of current software systems is encouraging the development of self-managed software architectures, i.e. systems capable of reconfiguring their structure at runtime to fulfil a set of goals. Several approaches have covered different aspects of their development, but some issues remain open, such as the maintainability or the scalability of self-management subsystems. Centralized approaches, like self-adaptive architectures, offer good maintenance properties but do not scale well for large systems. On the contrary, decentralized approaches, like self-organising architectures, offer good scalability but are not maintainable: reconfiguration specifications are spread and often tangled with functional specifications. In order to address these issues, this paper presents an aspect-oriented autonomic reconfiguration approach where: (1) each subsystem is provided with self-management properties so it can evolve itself and the components that it is composed of; (2) self-management concerns are isolated and encapsulated into aspects, thus improving its reuse and maintenance. Povzetek: Predstavljen je pristop s samo-preoblikovanjem programske arhitekture.

Estudio de la fiabilidad software, según defectos, en controladores de velocidad para robots autónomos móviles

Tanto los robots autónomos móviles como los robots móviles remotamente operados se utilizan con éxito actualmente en un gran número de ámbitos, algunos de los cuales son tan dispares como la limpieza en el hogar, movimiento de productos en almacenes o la exploración espacial. Sin embargo, es difícil garantizar la ausencia de defectos en los programas que controlan dichos dispositivos, al igual que ocurre en otros sectores informáticos. Existen diferentes alternativas para medir la calidad de un sistema en el desempeño de las funciones para las que fue diseñado, siendo una de ellas la fiabilidad. En el caso de la mayoría de los sistemas físicos se detecta una degradación en la fiabilidad a medida que el sistema envejece. Esto es debido generalmente a efectos de desgaste. En el caso de los sistemas software esto no suele ocurrir, ya que los defectos que existen en ellos generalmente no han sido adquiridos con el paso del tiempo, sino que han sido insertados en el proceso de desarrollo de los mismos. Si dentro del proceso de generación de un sistema software se focaliza la atención en la etapa de codificación, podría plantearse un estudio que tratara de determinar la fiabilidad de distintos algoritmos, válidos para desempeñar el mismo cometido, según los posibles defectos que pudieran introducir los programadores. Este estudio básico podría tener diferentes aplicaciones, como por ejemplo elegir el algoritmo menos sensible a los defectos, para el desarrollo de un sistema crítico o establecer procedimientos de verificación y validación, más exigentes, si existe la necesidad de utilizar un algoritmo que tenga una alta sensibilidad a los defectos. En el presente trabajo de investigación se ha estudiado la influencia que tienen determinados tipos de defectos software en la fiabilidad de tres controladores de velocidad multivariable (PID, Fuzzy y LQR) al actuar en un robot móvil específico. La hipótesis planteada es que los controladores estudiados ofrecen distinta fiabilidad al verse afectados por similares patrones de defectos, lo cual ha sido confirmado por los resultados obtenidos. Desde el punto de vista de la planificación experimental, en primer lugar se realizaron los ensayos necesarios para determinar si los controladores de una misma familia (PID, Fuzzy o LQR) ofrecían una fiabilidad similar, bajo las mismas condiciones experimentales. Una vez confirmado este extremo, se eligió de forma aleatoria un representante de clase de cada familia de controladores, para efectuar una batería de pruebas más exhaustiva, con el objeto de obtener datos que permitieran comparar de una forma más completa la fiabilidad de los controladores bajo estudio. Ante la imposibilidad de realizar un elevado número de pruebas con un robot real, así como para evitar daños en un dispositivo que generalmente tiene un coste significativo, ha sido necesario construir un simulador multicomputador del robot. Dicho simulador ha sido utilizado tanto en las actividades de obtención de controladores bien ajustados, como en la realización de los diferentes ensayos necesarios para el experimento de fiabilidad. ABSTRACT Autonomous mobile robots and remotely operated robots are used successfully in very diverse scenarios, such as home cleaning, movement of goods in warehouses or space exploration. However, it is difficult to ensure the absence of defects in programs controlling these devices, as it happens in most computer sectors. There exist different quality measures of a system when performing the functions for which it was designed, among them, reliability. For most physical systems, a degradation occurs as the system ages. This is generally due to the wear effect. In software systems, this does not usually happen, and defects often come from system development and not from use. Let us assume that we focus on the coding stage in the software development pro¬cess. We could consider a study to find out the reliability of different and equally valid algorithms, taking into account any flaws that programmers may introduce. This basic study may have several applications, such as choosing the algorithm less sensitive to pro¬gramming defects for the development of a critical system. We could also establish more demanding procedures for verification and validation if we need an algorithm with high sensitivity to programming defects. In this thesis, we studied the influence of certain types of software defects in the reliability of three multivariable speed controllers (PID, Fuzzy and LQR) designed to work in a specific mobile robot. The hypothesis is that similar defect patterns affect differently the reliability of controllers, and it has been confirmed by the results. From the viewpoint of experimental planning, we followed these steps. First, we conducted the necessary test to determine if controllers of the same family (PID, Fuzzy or LQR) offered a similar reliability under the same experimental conditions. Then, a class representative was chosen at ramdom within each controller family to perform a more comprehensive test set, with the purpose of getting data to compare more extensively the reliability of the controllers under study. The impossibility of performing a large number of tests with a real robot and the need to prevent the damage of a device with a significant cost, lead us to construct a multicomputer robot simulator. This simulator has been used to obtain well adjusted controllers and to carry out the required reliability experiments.

Analysis of service-oriented computing systems

La computación basada en servicios (Service-Oriented Computing, SOC) se estableció como un paradigma ampliamente aceptado para el desarollo de sistemas de software flexibles, distribuidos y adaptables, donde las composiciones de los servicios realizan las tareas más complejas o de nivel más alto, frecuentemente tareas inter-organizativas usando los servicios atómicos u otras composiciones de servicios. En tales sistemas, las propriedades de la calidad de servicio (Quality of Service, QoS), como la rapídez de procesamiento, coste, disponibilidad o seguridad, son críticas para la usabilidad de los servicios o sus composiciones en cualquier aplicación concreta. El análisis de estas propriedades se puede realizarse de una forma más precisa y rica en información si se utilizan las técnicas de análisis de programas, como el análisis de complejidad o de compartición de datos, que son capables de analizar simultáneamente tanto las estructuras de control como las de datos, dependencias y operaciones en una composición. El análisis de coste computacional para la composicion de servicios puede ayudar a una monitorización predictiva así como a una adaptación proactiva a través de una inferencia automática de coste computacional, usando los limites altos y bajos como funciones del valor o del tamaño de los mensajes de entrada. Tales funciones de coste se pueden usar para adaptación en la forma de selección de los candidatos entre los servicios que minimizan el coste total de la composición, basado en los datos reales que se pasan al servicio. Las funciones de coste también pueden ser combinadas con los parámetros extraídos empíricamente desde la infraestructura, para producir las funciones de los límites de QoS sobre los datos de entrada, cuales se pueden usar para previsar, en el momento de invocación, las violaciones de los compromisos al nivel de servicios (Service Level Agreements, SLA) potenciales or inminentes. En las composiciones críticas, una previsión continua de QoS bastante eficaz y precisa se puede basar en el modelado con restricciones de QoS desde la estructura de la composition, datos empiricos en tiempo de ejecución y (cuando estén disponibles) los resultados del análisis de complejidad. Este enfoque se puede aplicar a las orquestaciones de servicios con un control centralizado del flujo, así como a las coreografías con participantes multiples, siguiendo unas interacciones complejas que modifican su estado. El análisis del compartición de datos puede servir de apoyo para acciones de adaptación, como la paralelización, fragmentación y selección de los componentes, las cuales son basadas en dependencias funcionales y en el contenido de información en los mensajes, datos internos y las actividades de la composición, cuando se usan construcciones de control complejas, como bucles, bifurcaciones y flujos anidados. Tanto las dependencias funcionales como el contenido de información (descrito a través de algunos atributos definidos por el usuario) se pueden expresar usando una representación basada en la lógica de primer orden (claúsulas de Horn), y los resultados del análisis se pueden interpretar como modelos conceptuales basados en retículos. ABSTRACT Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is a widely accepted paradigm for development of flexible, distributed and adaptable software systems, in which service compositions perform more complex, higher-level, often cross-organizational tasks using atomic services or other service compositions. In such systems, Quality of Service (QoS) properties, such as the performance, cost, availability or security, are critical for the usability of services and their compositions in concrete applications. Analysis of these properties can become more precise and richer in information, if it employs program analysis techniques, such as the complexity and sharing analyses, which are able to simultaneously take into account both the control and the data structures, dependencies, and operations in a composition. Computation cost analysis for service composition can support predictive monitoring and proactive adaptation by automatically inferring computation cost using the upper and lower bound functions of value or size of input messages. These cost functions can be used for adaptation by selecting service candidates that minimize total cost of the composition, based on the actual data that is passed to them. The cost functions can also be combined with the empirically collected infrastructural parameters to produce QoS bounds functions of input data that can be used to predict potential or imminent Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations at the moment of invocation. In mission-critical applications, an effective and accurate continuous QoS prediction, based on continuations, can be achieved by constraint modeling of composition QoS based on its structure, known data at runtime, and (when available) the results of complexity analysis. This approach can be applied to service orchestrations with centralized flow control, and choreographies with multiple participants with complex stateful interactions. Sharing analysis can support adaptation actions, such as parallelization, fragmentation, and component selection, which are based on functional dependencies and information content of the composition messages, internal data, and activities, in presence of complex control constructs, such as loops, branches, and sub-workflows. Both the functional dependencies and the information content (described using user-defined attributes) can be expressed using a first-order logic (Horn clause) representation, and the analysis results can be interpreted as a lattice-based conceptual models.

Systems in Engineering Education: account of an experience

Systems Engineering (SE in the following) has not received much attention as a subject matter in engineering curricula. There are several dozens of universities around the world offering programs (most of them at the graduate level) on systems science and engineering. However, SE is, per se, rarely found among the courses offered by engineering schools. This observation does not strictly mean that systems concepts be left apart. For example, it is usual to find specialized courses for systems of some particular classes (e.g., courses on software systems engineering for computing curricula) or for particular phases of the system life cycle (e.g., courses on systems analysis). Even so, these kinds of courses tend to over-emphasize the importance of specific methodologies and, in consequence, to deviate the attention from the realm of systernness

Categorization of Anti-Patterns in Software Project Management

In the last decades, software systems have become an intrinsic element in our daily lives. Software exists in our computers, in our cars, and even in our refrigerators. Today’s world has become heavily dependent on software and yet, we still struggle to deliver quality software products, on-time and within budget. When searching for the causes of such alarming scenario, we find concurrent voices pointing to the role of the project manager. But what is project management and what makes it so challenging? Part of the answer to this question requires a deeper analysis of why software project managers have been largely ineffective. Answering this question might assist current and future software project managers in avoiding, or at least effectively mitigating, problematic scenarios that, if unresolved, will eventually lead to additional failures. This is where anti-patterns come into play and where they can be a useful tool in identifying and addressing software project management failure. Unfortunately, anti-patterns are still a fairly recent concept, and thus, available information is still scarce and loosely organized. This thesis will attempt to help remedy this scenario. The objective of this work is to help organize existing, documented software project management anti-patterns by answering our two research questions: · What are the different anti-patterns in software project management? · How can these anti-patterns be categorized?

Propuesta de integración de agentes software inteligentes sobre JADE con entornos virtuales en Unity3D

La unión de distintos sistemas software constituye un elemento principal de las nuevas Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación. La integración de entornos virtuales tridimensionales con agentes software inteligentes es el objetivo que persigue este trabajo de investigación. Para llevar a cabo esta integración se parte de la creación de un agente virtual, un personaje que es controlado por una mente desarrollada siguiendo un enfoque basado en agentes software. Se busca así dotar al sistema de cierto nivel de inteligencia, tomando como referencia el funcionamiento del cerebro humano. Lo que se consigue es que el agente capte los estímulos del entorno, los procese y genere comportamientos, tanto reactivos como deliberativos, que son ejecutados por el personaje. Los resultados obtenidos resaltan el dinamismo del sistema, a la vez que animan a seguir investigando en este campo lleno de aplicaciones directas y reales sobre el mundo. En conclusión, esta investigación busca y consigue un nuevo paso en el progreso de las nuevas tecnologías mediante una integración real de distintos sistemas software. ---ABSTRACT---The union of different software systems is a major element of Information and Communications Technology. The aim of this research is the integration of 3D virtual environments and intelligent software agents. This integration is based on the development of a virtual agent, a character that is controlled by a mind developed following a software agent approach. It is sought to provide the system with some intelligence level, taking the human brain function as a reference point. The consequence is that the agent captures environmental stimuli, processes them and creates reactive and deliberative behaviours that can be executed by the avatar. The findings emphasize the dynamism of the system as well as they encourage to research more in this field that has a lot of direct and real-life applications on the world. In conclusion, this research seeks and takes a new step in the progress of new technologies through a real integration of different software systems.

Robotic control systems based on bioinspired multi-agent systems: application of the principles of neuroscience to robotics

Robotics is a field that presents a large number of problems because it depends on a large number of disciplines, devices, technologies and tasks. Its expansion from perfectly controlled industrial environments toward open and dynamic environment presents a many new challenges, such as robots household robots or professional robots. To facilitate the rapid development of robotic systems, low cost, reusability of code, its medium and long term maintainability and robustness are required novel approaches to provide generic models and software systems who develop paradigms capable of solving these problems. For this purpose, in this paper we propose a model based on multi-agent systems inspired by the human nervous system able to transfer the control characteristics of the biological system and able to take advantage of the best properties of distributed software systems.

SubCM: A tool for improved visibility of software change in an industrial setting

Software Configuration Management is the discipline of managing large collections of software development artefacts from which software products are built. Software configuration management tools typically deal with artefacts at fine levels of granularity - such as individual source code files - and assist with coordination of changes to such artefacts. This paper describes a lightweight tool, designed to be used on top of a traditional file-based configuration management system. The add-on tool support enables users to flexibly define new hierarchical views of product structure, independent of the underlying artefact-repository structure. The tool extracts configuration and change data with respect to the user-defined hierarchy, leading to improved visibility of how individual subsystems have changed. The approach yields a range of new capabilities for build managers, and verification and validation teams. The paper includes a description of our experience using the tool in an organization that builds large embedded software systems.

Towards platform-independent real-time systems

Real-time software systems are rarely developed once and left to run. They are subject to changes of requirements as the applications they support expand, and they commonly outlive the platforms they were designed to run on. A successful real-time system is duplicated and adapted to a variety of applications - it becomes a product line. Current methods for real-time software development are commonly based on low-level programming languages and involve considerable duplication of effort when a similar system is to be developed or the hardware platform changes. To provide more dependable, flexible and maintainable real-time systems at a lower cost what is needed is a platform-independent approach to real-time systems development. The development process is composed of two phases: a platform-independent phase, that defines the desired system behaviour and develops a platform-independent design and implementation, and a platform-dependent phase that maps the implementation onto the target platform. The last phase should be highly automated. For critical systems, assessing dependability is crucial. The partitioning into platform dependent and independent phases has to support verification of system properties through both phases.

Developing relational navigation to effectively understand software

Effective comprehension of complex software systems requires understanding of both the individual documents that represent software and the complex relationships that exist within and between documents. Relationships of all kinds play a vital role in a software engineer's comprehension of, and navigation within and between, software documents. User-determined relationships have the additional role of enabling the engineer to create and maintain relational documentation that cannot be generated by tools or derived from other relationships. We argue that for a software development environment to effectively support the understanding of complex software systems, relational navigation must be supported at both the document-focused (intra-document) and relation-focused (inter-document) levels. The need for a relation-focused approach is highlighted by an evaluation of an existing document-focused relational interface. We conclude with the requirements for a relation-focused approach to relational navigation. These requirements focus on the user's perspective when interacting with a collection of related documents. We define the requirements for a software development environment that effectively supports the understanding of the software documents and relationships that define a complex software system.

On the use of software models during software execution

Increasingly software systems are required to survive variations in their execution environment without or with only little human intervention. Such systems are called "eternal software systems". In contrast to the traditional view of development and execution as separate cycles, these modern software systems should not present such a separation. Research in MDE has been primarily concerned with the use of models during the first cycle or development (i.e. during the design, implementation, and deployment) and has shown excellent results. In this paper the author argues that an eternal software system must have a first-class representation of itself available to enable change. These runtime representations (or runtime models) will depend on the kind of dynamic changes that we want to make available during execution or on the kind of analysis we want the system to support. Hence, different models can be conceived. Self-representation inevitably implies the use of reflection. In this paper the author briefly summarizes research that supports the use of runtime models, and points out different issues and research questions. © 2009 IEEE.