Ana Luisa Medeiros

Reflections on the modularity of business process models: The case for introducing the aspect‐oriented paradigm

Purpose – The aspect‐oriented (AO) paradigm is first proposed to deal with programing modularity issues, but different researchers have been exploring AO concepts in the designing and definition of software systems. The goal of this paper is to discuss and present a proposal that addresses the application of AO concepts to the design of business processes (BPs) in order to improve usability and understandability of process models.Design/methodology/approach – The paper departs from previous work on analyzing the application of AO for software design. The observations were backed by a case study, which was used to illustrate the issues by means of examples.Findings – The paper presents findings on important issues related to the integration of AO paradigm and BP modeling, such as crosscutting representation, crosscutting composition, quantification, and join point exposure.Originality/value – The paper explores a new frontier: the application of AO concepts to the design of BPs. As of now, few works have e...

On the symbiosis of aspect-oriented requirements and architectural descriptions

With iterative development increasingly becoming the de factopractice in mainstream software processes, distinct early lifecycle artifacts need to be synchronized in order to leverage their correspondences. Requirements engineering and software architecture models have been recently enriched with aspect-oriented (AO) abstractions and composition mechanisms. In this context, this paper proposes a symbiotic relation between early AO development phases by specifying mapping rules between a requirements model, AOV-graph, and an architecture description language, AspectualACME. AOV-graph and Aspectual ACME are, respectively, symmetric AO extensions to the V-graph goals model and the ACME language, with features to modularize crosscutting concerns. The meta-models of these modeling languages offer abstractions that are recurrently supported in other requirements models and architectural approaches. Hence, this paper also discusses how the proposed suite of mapping rules can be exploited in other similar approaches. The evaluation of the mappings is carried out in the context of a case study called Health Watcher.

Variability Management in Aspect-Oriented Architecture Description Languages: An Integrated Approach

In this paper we propose an integrated approach for managing variabilities in architectural specifications of software product lines. Our approach combines an aspect-oriented architectural description language for product lines, PL-AspectualACME, with a variability modeling language, VML4Arch. PL-AspectualACME, also proposed in this paper, is used to specify the overall architectural description consisting of the modular representation of architecture commonalities and variabilities. VML4Arch is used to automatically derive product-specific architecture descriptions by specifying features dependencies and the variabilities that must be included in the products. We illustrate the application of our approach by using a software product line from the mobile domain.

Describing cloud applications architectures

The architecture of cloud applications differs from traditional software architectures mainly regarding their basic architectural elements, the services, the metadata about the services for expressing information related to quality parameters and pricing models, and the constraints over the applications and the used services. This paper presents Cloud-ADL, a seamless extension of the ACME ADL to support the architectural representation of cloud applications by relying on the existing ACME abstractions. In addition, it defines contracts to modularly encapsulate typical contract information of cloud applications, such as quality parameters, pricing model of the services, and constraints. Finally, Cloud-ADL also supports the dynamic reconfiguration of cloud applications through programmed changes, which can be foreseen at design time and specified at the ADL level.

Concern-Based Assessment of Architectural Stability: A Comparative Study

A concern is any consideration that can impact the software architecture and other artefacts. Sustaining stability of concerns realised in architectural designs is essential to obtain long-lasting software products. It is often assumed that concern assessment mechanisms are effective to predict architecture stability. They ought to exert a positive or detrimental effect on software stability. In fact, there is a growing variety of concern assessment mechanisms to support the quantification of concern properties in software artefacts. They range from metrics that compute basic concern characteristics – such as concern tangling and scattering – to patterns that represent recurring concern structures. However, the vast majority of concern assessment mechanisms has not been empirically validated yet. This paper presents a comparative study on the efficacy of a family of concern metrics and patterns to support architectural stability analysis. The correlation of concern properties and architecture instabilities is determined by quantifying the Spearman Correlation indicator. This study relies on several releases of two evolving software systems, where the architectural instabilities have been previously and independently documented.

ArchSPL-MDD: An ADL-Based Model-Driven Strategy for Automatic Variability Management

Model-driven strategies have been used in the development of software product lines (SPLs) to facilitate product customization and to generate the source code of the derived products through variability management. In this context, the architecture description of the SPL is essential to make it clear how the architecture realizes the feature model and to represent both domain and application engineering architectural artifacts. Moreover, it is important to establish the association between the architectural specification and the artifacts involved in the SPL development process towards code generation. In this paper, we present Arch SPL-MDD, a model-driven strategy to support explicit modeling and automatic management of variabilities in SPLs. Arch SPL-MDD is associated to a generic process with systematic activities aimed to generate customized source code from the product configuration. Furthermore, the proposed strategy uses the Light PL-ACME architecture description language to support the architectural specification of the SPL, which is input of model transformations towards automatically generating SPL products. To evaluate the efficiency and applicability of Arch SPL-MDD, we conducted a controlled experiment by using Ginga For All, an SPL for the Ginga digital TV middleware.

A lightweight language for software product lines architecture description

The architecture description of a software product line (SPL) is essential to make it clear how the architecture realizes the feature model and to represent both the domain and application engineering architectural artefacts. However, most architecture description languages (ADLs) for SPL have limited support regarding variability management and they do not express the relationship between features and the architecture, besides the lack of tools for graphical and textual modelling and a non-clear separation between the domain and application engineering activities. In order to overcome these deficiencies, this paper presents LightPL-ACME, an ADL whose main goal is to be a simple, lightweight language for the SPL architecture description, and enable the association between the architectural specification and the artefacts involved in the SPL development process, including the relationship with the feature model and the representation of both domain and application engineering elements.

Evolving Oryx into an aspect-oriented business process modelling tool

A key issue in business process modelling (BPM) is to manage the complexity in order to design a comprehensible process. This paper builds upon the idea of the aspect-oriented business process modelling (AO-BPM), a proposal to enhance the modularity of business process models. The paper focuses the development of an AO-BPM tool, CrossOryx, which aims to enable the use of the AO-BPM perspective. This perspective is divided into two parts: 1) core process: containing the model which represents essential business process elements; 2) aspect elements: that contains elements that are transversal to the core process. CrossOryx extends Oryx and includes new elements to model crosscutting concerns and to compose them with the core process. It offers different visualisations, each one showing a different perspective of the BPM - the core perspective, the crosscutting perspective, and the AO-BPM perspective that represents the weaving of the core and the crosscutting

MARISA-DP -- from architecture to design: an MDD approach

In general, aspect-oriented approaches associated to different activities in the software development process are independent and the new models and artifacts are not aligned or inserted in a coherent process. The model-driven development, where several models and the correspondence among them are rigorously specified, can support the integration among AO approaches that handle different activities of the software process. This paper presents MARISA-DP, a model based development approach to integrate aspect-oriented architecture and detailed project, aligning their models and artifacts. The proposed approach is part of a rigorous and coherent process where each activity has AO models (and corresponding metamodels) and a set of transformations among the models. To illustrate the viability of the proposed approach, this paper presents a mapping between AspectualACME, an aspect-oriented architectural description language, and aSideML, a modeling language to aspect-oriented detailed project. This mapping is formalized using ATL transformation rules.