Alin Stefanescu

An empirical study of the state of the practice and acceptance of model-driven engineering in four industrial cases

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) has been promoted for many years as a means for handling the complexity of software development by raising the abstraction level and automating labor-intensive and error-prone tasks. However, there is little empirical evidence of the acceptance of MDE in industry which is the subject of this paper. The goal of this empirical study was to investigate the state of the practice of applying MDE and factors considered as important for its adoption. The subjects were developers of four large companies participating in a research project. The collected data came from multiple sources and covered the results of tool evaluations, interviews, and a survey. Among the factors, we found perceived usefulness, ease of use and the maturity of the tools to be important determinants for the adoption of MDE. We also discuss challenges with adopting MDE and present suggestions on how to succeed with the adoption process.

Formal Approach to the Deployment of Distributed Robotic Teams

We present a computational framework for automatic synthesis of control and communication strategies for a robotic team from task specifications that are given as regular expressions about servicing requests in an environment. We assume that the location of the requests in the environment and the robot capacities and cooperation requirements to service the requests are known. Our approach is based on two main ideas. First, we extend recent results from formal synthesis of distributed systems to check for the distributability of the task specification and to generate local specifications, while accounting for the service and communication capabilities of the robots. Second, by using a technique that is inspired by linear temporal logic model checking, we generate individual control and communication strategies. We illustrate the method with experimental results in our robotic urban-like environment.

Where does model-driven engineering help? Experiences from three industrial cases

There have been few experience reports from industry on how Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is applied and what the benefits are. This paper summarizes the experiences of three large industrial participants in a European research project with the objective of developing techniques and tools for applying MDE on the development of large and complex software systems. The participants had varying degrees of previous experience with MDE. They found MDE to be particularly useful for providing abstractions of complex systems at multiple levels or from different viewpoints, for the development of domain-specific models that facilitate communication with non-technical experts, for the purposes of simulation and testing, and for the consumption of models for analysis, such as performance-related decision support and system design improvements. From the industrial perspective, a methodology is considered to be useful and cost-efficient if it is possible to reuse solutions in multiple projects or products. However, developing reusable solutions required extra effort and sometimes had a negative impact on the performance of tools. While the companies identified several benefits of MDE, merging different tools with one another in a seamless development environment required several transformations, which increased the required implementation effort and complexity. Additionally, user-friendliness of tools and the provision of features for managing models of complex systems were identified as crucial for a wider industrial adoption of MDE.

Precise Steps for Choreography Modeling for SOA Validation and Verification

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables organizations to transform their existing IT infrastructure into a more flexible business process platform. In this architecture, decoupled components that provide standard services can be composed to form individually configured and highly flexible applications. When building such applications it is important to have a formal specification of the interaction protocols between the composed services not only because such a specification provides an accurate and unambiguous description of the interactions and their ordering but also to enable automated verification and validation. In this paper, we present a case study from the SAP context showing the interactions between two SAP service components and use that case study to derive a set of modeling requirements. This motivates a discussion about applicable techniques for service choreography modeling and whether existing choreography languages cover the identified needs.

MBT4Chor: A Model-Based Testing Approach for Service Choreographies

Service choreographies describe the global communication protocols between services and testing these choreographies is an important task in the context of service-oriented architectures (SOA). Formal modeling of service choreographies makes a model-based testing (MBT) approach feasible. In this paper we present an MBT approach for SOA integration testing based on SAP proprietary choreography models called Message Choreography Models (MCM). In our approach, MCMs are translated into executable UML models using Java as action language. These UML models are used by a UML model execution engine developed by IBM for test generation and model debugging. We describe the achievements and challenges of our approach based on first experimental evaluation conducted at SAP.

Test Data Provision for ERP Systems

Software development and testing of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems demands dedicated methods to tackle its special features. As manual testing is not able to systematically test ERP systems due to the involved complexity, an effective testing approach should be automated, also requiring that the appropriate test data has to be provided alongside. In this paper we identify four main challenges regarding the provision of test data for automatic testing of ERP software: system test data supply, system test data stability, input test data constraints and test data correlation. Several possible solutions to these challenges are discussed. We conclude with an outlook to possible research activities.

Improving Testing of Enterprise Systems by Model-Based Testing on Graphical User Interfaces

Software development and testing of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems demands dedicated methods to tackle its special features. As manual testing is not able to systematically test ERP systems due to the involved complexity, an efficient testing approach should be automatic. Since the underlying business processes of enterprise systems are realized at the level of the user interface (UI), system level testing is the dominant testing approach. The recent architectural shift to service-based enterprise systems demands to apply blackbox testing techniques. Model-based testing is a method that enables a high degree of automation for black-box testing, but the current research and practice usually does not address the UI. In this paper we describe the state of the art and state of the practice in order to motivate further research activities in this area.

Viewpoints for modeling choreographies in service-oriented architectures

Component integration plays a decisive role in service-oriented architectures (SOAs). The technical implementation must faithfully reflect business and enterprise integration requirements. This implies a good understanding of the globally observable message choreography but also of how messages are handled by the involved components and by the SOA middleware. In this paper we present a solution to the problem of keeping global and local viewpoints in synchronization via a common message choreography metamodel. As main contribution we shape various interpretations of global choreographies, which were left unspecified in state-of-the-art choreography approaches. We have implemented a message choreography modeling (MCM) environment incorporating these contributions. MCM seamlessly complements existing models at SAP. We show how service integration experts, architects, and testers can benefit from our approach that enables model-based integration testing and model verification facilities.

A Formal Approach to Deployment of Robotic Teams in an Urban-Like Environment

We present a computational framework for automatic synthesis of control and communication strategies for a robotic team from task specifications given as regular expressions about servicing requests in an environment. Our approach is based on two main ideas. First, we extend recent results from formal synthesis of distributed systems to check for the distributability of the task specification and to generate local specifications, while accounting for the service and communication capabilities of the robots. Second, by using a technique inspired from LTL model checking, we generate individual control and communication strategies. We illustrate the method with experimental results in our Robotic Urban-Like Environment.

Learn and test for event-b --- a rodin plugin

The Event-B method is a formal approach for reliable systems specification and verification, being supported by the Rodin platform, which includes mature plugins for theorem-proving, model-checking, or model (de)composition features. In order to complement these techniques with test generation and state model inference from Event-B models, we developed a new feature as a Rodin plugin. Our plugin implements a model-learning approach to iteratively construct an approximate automaton model together with an associated test suite. Test suite optimization is further applied according to different optimization criteria.