Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

During an architectural evolution of a component-based software, certain quality attributes may be weakened. This is due to the lack of an explicit definition of the links between these non-functional characteristics and the architectural decisions implementing them. In this paper, we present a solution that aims at assisting the software maintainer during an evolution activity on his demand. It requires the definition of a documentation during development, organized in the form of bindings between formal descriptions of architectural decisions and their targeted quality attributes. Through an assistance algorithm, the approach uses this documentation in order to notify the maintainer of the possible effects of architectural changes on quality requirements. We also present a prototype tool which automates our proposals. This tool and the overall approach has been experienced on a real-world software in order to validate them.

Most large software systems are architected as component-based systems. In such systems, components are developed and tested separately. As components cooperate for providing services, testing of a component also reveals defects in other components. In this paper we study the role testing of other components plays in finding defects in a component by analyzing defect data of an earlier version of Windows. Our analysis shows that testing of other components often is the largest source of finding defects in a component. The analysis also shows that though many components reveal defects in a component, often a small set of components – the Test Buddies – exists whose testing reveals the vast majority of the defects found by testing other components. The Test Buddies of a component are those with a heavy interaction with the component and represent the high priority customers for testing. The Test Buddy information for a system can be determined by the test data of an earlier release, and then can be used in different ways to improve the testing.

in component-based software development intuitively means the ability to predict effectively properties of a system, making essential use of properties of its components. A formal definition is difficult to give, because the idea is a large, vague one. As an outgrowth of an informal workshop, this paper frames a mathematical definition. A somewhat surprising consequence of the formal definition is that assembly is usually predictable, but each particular case requires engineering effort to establish.

As the number of available web services is steadily increasing, many applications are being developed by reusing web services. Accordingly, a tool to generate an adapter which integrates interfaces of several web services is proposed in this paper. The concept of the adapter for the integration of web services interface is described. The purpose of the adapter is to help developers use several web services with little effort for their application development. Then, implementation of the tool to generate an adapter is presented. The architecture of the tool, the process, and the algorithm to generate an adapter are described. The tool will help developers integrate several web services when they develop applications.

Non-functional specifications of software components are considered an important asset in constructing dependable systems, since they enable early Quality of Service (QoS) evaluations. Several approaches for the QoS analysis of component-based software architectures have been introduced. However, most of these approaches do not consider the integration into the development process sufficiently. For example, they envision a pure bottom-up development or neglect that system architects do not have complete information for QoS analyses at their disposal. We extent an existing component-based development process model by Cheesman and Daniels to explicitly include early, model-based QoS analyses. Besides the system architect, we describe further involved roles. Exemplary for the performance domain, we analyse what information these roles can provide to construct a performance model of a software architecture.

When designing applications with (EJBs) and more specifically with , a major difficulty (or even an impossibility) is being able to properly transform business models and more precisely UML 2 models, into such component types, while including the expression of their mutual compositions. This contradicts with the spirit of the emerging (MDA) software engineering paradigm based on the definition of seamless model transformations. In this scope, this paper proposes and describes an appropriate Java library in order to increase the composition power of EJBs. The proposition includes a support for a broadcast communication mode (assimilated to “horizontal composition” in the paper) which is, , incompatible with non reentrance, a key characteristic of EJBs. Besides, “vertical composition” is the counterpart of “horizontal compo-sition”. “Vertical composition” enables the consistent hierarchical combination of composite behaviors and compound behaviors, both being specified and implemented by means of UML 2 .

This paper addresses the unavoidable problem of dynamic reconfig-uration in component-based system with a hierarchical component model. The presented solution is based on (1) allowing several well defined patterns of dynamic reconfiguration and on (2) introducing a concept, which allows using a service provided under the SOA paradigm from a component-based system. The paper is based on our experience with non-trivial case studies written for component-based systems SOFA and Fractal.

Dynamicity is an important requirement for critical software adaptation where a stop can be dangerous (e.g. for humans or environment) or costly (e.g. power plants or production lines). Adaptation at run-time is also required in context-aware applications where execution conditions often change. In this paper, we introduce , an abstract model of dynamic automatic adaptation engines for (re-)assembling component-based software. aims at being a conceptual framework for developing customizable engines reusable in multiple applications and execution contexts. Besides, provides a uniform solution for automating both the construction of application from scratch and the adaptation of existing component assemblies.

We present in this paper an approach aiming at adapting component structures instead of adapting component services. It focuses on transforming a software component from a monolithic configuration to a composite one. Among the motivations of this kind of adaptation, we note its possible application to permit flexible deployment of software components and flexible loading of component service-code according to the available resources (CPU, memory). This adaptation is based on the analysis and the instrumentation of component codes.

A component-based system consists of components linked by connectors. Data can reside in components and/or in external data stores. Operations on data, such as access, update and transfer are carried out during computations performed by components. Typically, in current component models, control, computation and data are mixed up in the components, while control and data are both communicated by the connectors. As a result, such systems are tightly coupled, making reasoning difficult. In this paper we propose an approach for encapsulating data by separating it from control and computation.