John C. Grundy

Inconsistency management for multiple-view software development environments

Developers need tool support to help manage the wide range of inconsistencies that occur during software development. Such tools need to provide developers with ways to define, detect, record, present, interact with, monitor and resolve complex inconsistencies between different views of software artifacts, different developers and different phases of software development. This paper describes our experience with building complex multiple-view software development tools that support diverse inconsistency management facilities. We describe software architectures that we have developed and user interface techniques that are used in our multiple-view development tools, and we discuss the effectiveness of our approaches compared to other architectural and HCI techniques.

Aspect-oriented requirements engineering for component-based software systems

Developing requirements for software components, and ensuring these requirements are met by component designs, is very challenging, as very often application domain and stakeholders are not fully known during component development. The author introduces a new methodology, aspect-oriented component engineering, that addresses some difficult issues of component requirements engineering by analysing and characterising components based on different aspects of the overall application a component addresses. He gives an overview of the aspect-oriented component requirements engineering process, focus on component requirements analysis specification and reasoning, and briefly discuss tool support.

A generic approach to supporting diagram differencing and merging for collaborative design

Differentiation tools enable team members to compare two or more text files, e.g. code or documentation, after change. Although a number of general-purpose differentiation tools exist for comparing text documents very few tools exist for comparing diagrams. We describe a new approach for realising visual differentiation in CASE tools via a set of plug-in components. We have added diagram version control, visual differentiation and merging support as component-based plug-ins to the Pounamu meta-CASE tool. The approach is generic across a wide variety of diagram types and has also been deployed with an Eclipse diagramming plug-in. We describe our approachs architecture, key design and implementation issues, illustrate feasibility of our approach via implementation of it as plug-in components and evaluate its effectiveness.

CloudSec: A security monitoring appliance for Virtual Machines in the IaaS cloud model

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing model has become a compelling computing solution with a proven ability to reduce costs and improve resource efficiency. Virtualization has a key role in supporting the IaaS model. However, virtualization also makes it a target for potent rootkits because of the loss of control problem over the hosted Virtual Machines (VMs). This makes traditional in-guest security solutions, relying on operating system kernel trustworthiness, no longer an effective solution to secure the virtual infrastructure of the IaaS model. In this paper, we explore briefly the security problem of the IaaS cloud computing model, and present CloudSec, a new virtualization-aware monitoring appliance that provides active, transparent and real-time security monitoring for hosted VMs in the IaaS model. CloudSec utilizes virtual machine introspection techniques to provide fine-grained inspection of VMs physical memory without installing any monitoring code inside the VM. It actively reconstructs and monitors the dynamically changing kernel data structures instances, as a prior step to enable providing protection for kernel data structures. We have implemented a proof-of-concept prototype using VMsafe libraries on a VMware ESX platform. We have evaluated the system monitoring accuracy and the performance overhead of CloudSec.

Serendipity: Integrated Environment Support for ProcessModelling, Enactment and Work Coordination

Large cooperative work systems require work coordination, context awareness and process modelling and enactment mechanisms to be effective. Support for process modelling and work coordination in such systems also needs to support informal aspects of work which are difficult to codify. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) facilities, such as inter-person communication and collaborative editing, also need to be well-integrated into both process-modelling tools and tools used to perform work. Serendipity is an environment which provides high-level, visual process modelling and event-handling languages, and diverse CSCW capabilities, and which can be integrated with a range of tools to coordinate cooperative work. This paper describes Serendipitys visual languages, support environment, architecture, and implementation, together with experience using the environment and integrating it with other environments.

Realistic load testing of Web applications

We present a new approach for performing load testing of Web applications by simulating realistic user behaviour with stochastic form-oriented analysis models. Realism in the simulation of user behaviour is necessary in order to achieve valid testing results. In contrast to many other user models, Web site navigation and time delay are modelled stochastically. The models can be constructed from sample data and can take into account effects of session history on user behaviour and the existence of different categories of users. The approach is implemented in an existing architecture modelling and performance evaluation tool and is integrated with existing methods for forward and reverse engineering

A decentralized architecture for software process modeling and enactment

Many development teams, especially distributed teams, require process support to adequately coordinate their complex, distributed work practices. Process modeling and enactment tools have been developed to meet this requirement. The authors discuss the Serendipity-II process management environment which supports distributed process modeling and enactment for distributed software development projects. Serendipity-II is based on a decentralized architecture and uses Internet communication facilities.

A 3D metaphor for software production visualization

Software development is difficult because software is complex, the software production process is complex and understanding of software systems is a challenge. We propose a 3D visual approach to depict software production cost related program information to support software maintenance. The information helps us to reduce software maintenance costs, to plan the use of personnel wisely, to appoint experts efficiently and to detect system problems early.

Pounamu: A Meta-Yool for Multi-View Visual Language Environment Construction

We describe a meta tool for specification and generation of multiple view visual tools. The tool permits rapid specification of visual notational elements, the tool information model, visual editors, the relationship between notational and model elements, and behaviour. Tools are generated on the fly and can be used for modelling immediately. Changes to the meta tool specification are immediately reflected in tool instances

NetPay: An off-line, decentralized micro-payment system for thin-client applications

Micro-payment systems have become popular in recent times as the desire to support low-value, high-volume transactions of text, music, clip-art, video and other media has increased. We describe NetPay, a micro-payment system characterized by de-centralized, off-line processing, customer anonymity and relatively high performance and security using one-way hashing functions for encryption. We describe the motivation for NetPay and its basic protocol, describe a software architecture and two NetPay prototypes we have developed, and report the results of several evaluations of these prototypes.