Grids enable the aggregation, virtualization and sharing of massive heterogeneous and geographically dispersed resources, using files, applications and storage devices, to solve computation and data intensive problems, across institutions and countries via temporary collaborations called virtual organizations (VO). Most implementations result in complex superposition of software layers, often delivering low quality of service and quality of applications. As a consequence, Grid-based applications design and development is increasingly complex, and the use of most classical engineering practices is unsuccessful. Not only is the development of such applications a time-consuming, error prone and expensive task, but also the resulting applications are often hard-coded for specific Grid configurations, platforms and infra-structures. Having neither guidelines nor rules in the design of a Grid-based application is a paradox since there are many existing architectural approaches for distributed computing, which could ease and promote rigorous engineering methods based on the re-use of software components. It is our belief that ad-hoc and semi-formal engineer-ing approaches, in current use, are insufficient to tackle tomorrows Grid develop-ments requirements. Because Grid-based applications address multi-disciplinary and complex domains (health, military, scientific computation), their engineering requires rigor and control. This paper therefore advocates a formal model-driven engineering process and corresponding design framework and tools for building the next generation of Grids.
With the increased dependence on software, there is a pressing need for engineering long-lived software. As architectures have a profound effect on the life-span of the software and the provisioned quality of service, stable architectures are significant assets. Architectural stability tends to reflect the success of the system in supporting continuous changes without phasing-out. The \textit{behavioural} aspect of stability is essential for seamless operation, to continuously keep the provision of quality requirements stable and prevent architecture's drifting and phasing-out. In this paper, …
The architectural style of microservices has been gaining popularity in recent years. In this architectural style, small and loosely coupled modules are deployed and scaled independently to compose cloud-native applications. Carrier-grade service providers are migrating their legacy applications to a microservice based architecture running on Kubernetes which is an open source platform for orchestrating containerized microservice based applications. However, in this migration, service availability remains a concern. Service availability is measured as the percentage of time the service is prov…
Integrated development environments (IDE) play an important role in supporting developers during program comprehension and completion. Many of these supportive features focus on low-level programming and debugging activities. Unfortunately, there is less support in understanding and implementing architectural concerns in the form of patterns, tactics and/or other concerns. In this paper we present ArCode, a tool designed as a plugin for a popular IDE, IntelliJ IDEA. ArCode is able to learn correct ways of using frameworks' API to implement architectural concerns such as Authentication and Auth…
We define a method to modularize crosscutting concerns in Component-Based Systems (CBSs) expressed using the Behavior Interaction Priority (BIP) framework. Our method is inspired from the Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) paradigm which was initially conceived to support the separation of concerns during the development of monolithic systems. BIP has a formal operational semantics and makes a clear separation between architecture and behavior to allow for compositional and incremental design and analysis of systems. We distinguish local from global aspects. Local aspects model concerns at the …
A Software Product Line (SPL) aims at applying a pre-planned systematic reuse of large-grained software artifacts to increase the software productivity and reduce the development cost. The idea of SPL is to analyze the business domain of a family of products to identify the common and the variable parts between the products. However, it is common for companies to develop, in an ad-hoc manner (e.g. clone and own), a set of products that share common functionalities and differ in terms of others. Thus, many recent research contributions are proposed to re-engineer existing product variants to a …
The Architecture Tradeoff and Risk Analysis Framework (ATRAF): A Unified Approach for Evaluating Software Architectures, Reference Architectures, and Architectural Frameworks
Managing Uncertainty in LLM-based Multi-Agent System Operation
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Maternal-Fetal Medicine Center in Fetal Heart Disease, Capital Medical University, Beijing Anzhen Hospital（首都医科大学附属北京安贞医院胎儿心脏病母胎医学中心）
The number of works addressing the role of energy efficiency in the software development has been increasing recently. But, designers and programmers still complain about the lack of tools that help them to make energy-efficiency decisions. Some works show that energy-aware design decisions tend to have a larger impact in the power consumed by applications, than code optimizations. In this paper we present the HADAS green assistant, which helps developers to identify the energy-consuming concerns of their applications (i.e., points in the application that consume more energy, like storing or t…
This article presents a model for describing the architecture of software-intensive systems, based on the use of multiple, concurrent views. This use of multiple views allows to address separately the concerns of the various stakeholders of the architecture: end-user, developers, systems engineers, project managers, etc., and to handle separately the functional and non functional requirements. Each of the five views is described, together with a notation to capture it. The views are designed using an architecture-centered, scenario-driven, iterative development process.
Manually ensuring that the implementation of a software system is consistent with the software architecture is a laborious and error-prone task. Thus, a variety of approaches towards automated consistency checking have been developed to counteract architecture erosion. However, these approaches lack means to define and check architectural restrictions concerning plugin dependencies, which is required for plugin-based software systems. In this paper, we propose a domain-specific language called Dependency Constraint Language (DepCoL) to facilitate the definition of constraints concerning plugin…
Architectural design contexts contain a set of factors that influence software application development. Among them, organizational design contexts consist of high-level company concerns and how it is structured, for example, stakeholders and development schedule, heavily impacting design considerations. Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), as a vital concept in the Web3 space, is an organization constructed by automatically executed rules such as via smart contracts, holding features of the permissionless committee, transparent proposals, and fair contribution by stakeholders. In this …
Unbiased and objective architectural design decisions are crucial for the success of a software development project. Stakeholder inputs play an important role in arriving at such design decisions. However, the stakeholders may act in a biased manner in order to ensure that their requirements and concerns are addressed in a specific way in the software. Most of the existing methods of architectural decision-making do not adequately account for such biased behaviour of stakeholders. We view the software architecture design as a collective decision making (CDM) problem in social choice theory, an…
Indian Institute of Technology Ropar（印度理工学院鲁尔基分校（鲁普纳加尔））
This paper proposes Architectural Pattern Recommender (APR) system which helps in such architecture selection process. Main contribution of this work is in replacing the manual effort required to identify and analyse relevant architectural patterns in context of a particular set of software requirements. Key input to APR is a set of architecturally significant use cases concerning the application being developed. Central idea of APR's design is two folds: a) transform the unstructured information about software architecture design into a structured form which is suitable for recognizing textua…
CSIRO（联邦科学与工业研究组织）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）
Federated learning has received fast-growing interests from academia and industry to tackle the challenges of data hungriness and privacy in machine learning. A federated learning system can be viewed as a large-scale distributed system with different components and stakeholders as numerous client devices participate in federated learning. Designing a federated learning system requires software system design thinking apart from machine learning knowledge. Although much effort has been put into federated learning from the machine learning technique aspects, the software architecture design conc…
Often, security is considered in an advanced stage of the implementation of a system, rather than integrating it into the system design. This leads to less secure systems, as the security mechanisms are only applied as an afterthought and therefore do not integrate well with the rest of the design. Also, several statistics about discovered vulnerabilities in existing systems suggest, that most of the vulnerabilities of a system are not caused by errors in the cryptographic primitives, but in other parts of the implementation. So integrating security concerns early in the design process seems a…
Code smells are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices, which might hinder comprehension, increase code complexity and fault-proneness and decrease maintainability of software systems. The aim of our study was to perform a triangulation of bibliometric and thematic analysis on code smell literature production. The search was performed on Scopus (Elsevier, Netherlands) database using the search string code smells which resulted in 442 publications. The Go-to statement was the first bad code smells identified in software engineering history in 1968. The literature production trend ha…
The use of free and open source software is gaining momentum due to the ever increasing availability and use of the Internet. Organizations are also now adopting open source software, despite some reservations in particular regarding the provision and availability of support. One of the greatest concerns about free and open source software is the availability of post release support and the handling of for support. A common belief is that there is no appropriate support available for this class of software, while an alternative argument is that due to the active involvement of Internet users i…
Context: Security is vital to software developed for commercial or personal use. Although more organizations are realizing the importance of applying secure coding practices, in many of them, security concerns are not known or addressed until a security failure occurs. The root cause of security failures is vulnerable code. While metrics have been used to predict software vulnerabilities, we explore the relationship between code and architectural smells with security weaknesses. As smells are surface indicators of a deeper problem in software, determining the relationship between smells and so…
This paper highlights humans' social and mobility behaviors' role in the continuous engineering of sustainable socio-technical systems. Our approach relates the humans' characteristics and intentions with the system's goals, and models such interaction. Such a modeling approach aligns the architectural design and associated quality of service (QoS) with humans' quality of experience (QoE). We design a simulation environment that combines agent-based social simulation (ABSS) with architectural models generated through a model-driven engineering approach. Our modeling approach facilitates choosi…
The stakeholders of a system are legitimately interested in whether and how its architecture reflects their respective concerns at each point of its development and maintenance processes. Having such knowledge available at all times would enable them to continually adjust their systems structure at each juncture and reduce the buildup of technical debt that can be hard to reduce once it has persisted over many iterations. Unfortunately, software systems often lack reliable and current documentation about their architecture. In order to remedy this situation, researchers have conceived a number…
Context: Software architecture is a knowledge-intensive field. One mechanism for storing architecture knowledge is the recognition and description of architectural patterns. Selecting architectural patterns is a challenging task for software architects, as knowledge about these patterns is scattered among a wide range of literature. Method: We report on a systematic literature review, with the aim of building a decision model for the architectural pattern selection problem. Moreover, twelve experienced practitioners at software-producing organizations evaluated the usability and usefulness of …
Privacy has been frequently identified as a main concern for system developers while dealing with/managing personal information. Despite this, most existing work on privacy requirements deals with them as a special case of security requirements. Therefore, key aspects of privacy are, usually, overlooked. In this context, wrong design decisions might be made due to insufficient understanding of privacy concerns. In this paper, we address this problem with a systematic literature review whose main purpose is to identify the main concepts/relations for capturing privacy requirements. In addition,…
Over the past two decades, researchers and engineers have extensively studied the problem of how to enable a software system to deal with uncertain operating conditions. One prominent solution to this problem is self-adaptation, which equips a software system with a feedback loop that resolves uncertainties during operation and adapts the system to deal with them when necessary. Most self-adaptation approaches developed so far use decision-making mechanisms that focus on achieving a set of goals, i.e., that select for execution the adaptation option with the best estimated benefit. A few appro…
Context: Architecture Tactics (ATs) are architectural building blocks that provide general architectural solutions for addressing Quality Attributes (QAs) issues. Mining and analyzing QA-AT knowledge can help the software architecture community better understand architecture design. However, manually capturing and mining this knowledge is labor-intensive and difficult. Objective: Using Stack Overflow (SO) as our source, our main goals are to effectively mine such knowledge; and to have some sense of how developers use ATs with respect to QA concerns from related discussions. Methods: We applie…
Runtime adaptability is often a crucial requirement for today's complex software systems. Several approaches use an architectural model as a runtime representation of a managed system for monitoring, reasoning and performing adaptation. To ease the causal connection between a system and a model, these models are often closely related to the implementation and at a rather low level of abstraction. This makes them as complex as the implementation and it impedes reusability and extensibility of autonomic managers. Moreover, the models often do not cover different concerns, like security or perfor…
Management of information is an important aspect of every application. This includes, for example, protecting user data against breaches (like the one reported in the news about 50 million Facebook profiles being harvested for Cambridge Analytica), complying with data protection laws and regulations (like EU's new General Data Protection Regulation), coping with large databases, and retaining user data across software versions. Today, every application needs to cope with such concerns by itself and on its own. In this paper we introduce Managed Information (MI), an abstraction mechanism for ma…
