Lucas Bueno Ruas de Oliveira

The state of the art and future perspectives in systems of systems software architectures

Currently, software systems have become increasingly large and complex, often resulted by the integration of several operationally independent systems, resulting in a new class of systems: the Systems of Systems (SoS). In another perspective, software architectures play a major role in determining system quality, since they form the backbone of any successful software-intensive system. Attention given to the software architectures of SoS is also certainly fundamental to the success of such systems. However, it is observed that there is a lack of works that present a wide and, at the same time, a detailed panorama about how SoS architectures have been treated. In this scenario, the main contribution of this paper is to present the state of the art on software architectures of SoS, mainly regarding their development, representation, evaluation, and evolution. This work also contributes with future research topics on SoS architectures that should be still investigated. Besides that, we intend this paper opens new perspectives of research in the software architecture area, intending to contribute to the success of SoS.

Reference models and reference architectures based on service-oriented architecture: a systematic review

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has received increasing attention by providing low coupling, reuse, productivity, and a better understanding of the business domain. However, there are challenges in creating quality solutions using services. Based on SOA, reference models and reference architectures have been proposed to support the understanding, development, and standardization in the development of service-oriented systems. Considering the relevance of SOA, as well as the lack of a complete panorama about these models and architectures, this paper aims at presenting a detailed view about the establishment and use of these models and architectures. For this, we conducted a systematic review. As main results, we observed a recent increase in the number of work regarding reference models and reference architectures based on SOA, including for different domains. Furthermore, based on the presented view, we identified interesting and important perspectives for future research.

Investigating the Model-Driven Development for Systems-of-Systems

Software-intensive systems have become increasingly large and complex and new techniques and methodologies are necessary to deal with such complexity. Model-Driven Development (MDD) has been used to deal with complex scenarios, since software models, despite details, facilitate the visualization of the whole. Moreover, MDD has been widely recognized as a way to assure quality, reducing time and effort, and making possible the automatic transformation of models to generate source code. In this direction, software-intensive Systems-of-Systems (SoS) is a class of software systems that have emerged over the iminence of large systems which have a high-level of complexity. Considering the success of MDD in other areas, we decided to investigate how MDD has been used in the context of SoS. This paper presents results of a Systematic Literature Review conducted to scrutinize and bring to light the state of the art in the field of MDD for SoS. Besides that, we discuss future research directions and perspectives, aiming at contributing to the development of SoS.

An investigation into the development of service-oriented robotic systems

Robotics has emerged as one of the most prominent research areas in the last years. To cope with the great variety of robots application areas, as well as the heterogeneity of the robots, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been adopted to develop robotic systems, i.e., the software systems that manage the robots. Nevertheless, there is a lack of studies that provide an updated, fair overview of the development of Service-Oriented Robotic Systems (SORS), i.e., software systems composed by services. The main contribution of this paper is to present a detailed, analytical panorama of SORS, their implementation technologies, and software engineering guidelines that support development of such systems. For this, we have applied steps of the systematic review technique. As main results, we have observed that, in spite of relevant contributions already found in this area, it is still necessary considerable efforts to consolidate the research in SORS. Furthermore, we intend that this work makes also possible to identify important research topics for future research.

A service-oriented reference architecture for software testing tools

Software testing is recognized as a fundamental activity for assuring software quality. Aiming at supporting this activity, a diversity of testing tools has been developed, including tools based on SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture). In another perspective, reference architectures have played a significant role in aggregating knowledge of a given domain, contributing to the success in the development of systems for that domain. However, there exists no reference architecture for the testing domain that contribute to the development of testing tools based on SOA. Thus, the main contribution of this paper is to present a service-oriented reference architecture, named RefTEST-SOA (Reference Architecture for Software Testing Tools based on SOA), that comprises knowledge and experience about how to structure testing tools organized as services and pursues a better integration, scalability, and reuse provided by SOA to such tools. Results of our case studies have showed that RefTEST-SOA is a viable and reusable element to the development of service-oriented testing tools.

Evaluation and assessment of effects on exploring mutation testing in programming courses

Mutation analysis is a testing strategy that consists of using supporting tools to seed artificial faults in the original code of a software under test, generating faulty programs (“mutants”) that are supposed to produce incorrect outputs. Novice programmers suffer of a wide range of deficits due to defective training processes. We argue that the incorporation of experiences on mutation testing in programming courses adds valuable knowledge to the learning process. In this paper we evaluate the effects of using mutation testing to improve the learning process of students in programming courses. We present results of experiments and analysis involving undergraduate students. These experiments are the continuation of a previous work in which we raise empirical evidences that the adequate incorporation of mutation testing in programming courses contributes to form an effective environment that fosters learning. To do so, we provide a mutation testing tool to promote the practice of mutation testing by novice programmers. Through practical experiences and several analysis survey we measured the effects of using the mutation testing criterion to teach programming. In addition, we collected the opinion of senior students who already knew mutation testing concepts about their opinion on the usage of mutation concepts to teach novice programmers. Our findings reveal that the effective use of mutation analysis concepts contributes to the learning process, making students see the code as a product under development that is the result of a careful manual coding process which they need for measuring and predicting the effect of each command. The main contributions discussed in this paper are: (1) presenting results of an empirical analysis involving undergraduate students, thus giving us preliminary evidence on the effects of the novel practice; (2) exposing possible practices to explore mutation testing in programming classes, highlighting the limitations and strengths of such strategy; and (3) a mutation testing tool for educational purposes.

ArchSORS: A Software Process for Designing Software Architectures of Service-Oriented Robotic Systems

Robotics has experienced an increasing evolution and interest from the society in recent years. Robots are no longer produced exclusively to perform repetitive tasks in factories, they have been designed to collaborate with humans in several important application domains. Robotic systems that control these robots are, therefore, becoming larger, more complex and difficult to develop. In this scenario, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been investigated as a promising architectural style for the design of robotic systems in a flexible, reusable and productive way. Although a considerable amount of Service-Oriented Robotic Systems (SORS) has already been developed and used, most of them have been designed in an ad hoc manner. The little attention and limited support devoted to the design of SORS software architectures may not only hamper the benefits of SOA adoption but also reduce the overall quality of robotic systems, which are often used in safety-critical contexts. This paper presents Architectural Design of Service-Oriented Robotic System (ArchSORS), a process that supports a systematic design of SORS software architectures. Experimental results show that ArchSORS can lead to software architectures of higher quality, contributing to the robotics area and, as a consequence, to the areas that have benefited from the use of robots.

An Experience Report on Update of Systematic Literature Reviews.

Context: In order to preserve the value of Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs), they should be frequently updated including new studies produced after the conduction of the reviews. However, most of SLRs are outdated and there is a lack of works that support the conduction of SLRs updates. Objective: The main goal of this paper is to report our experience in updating two of our SLRs. Method: To update these two SLRs, we used automated techniques based on VTM (Visual Text Mining) to guarantee the presence of relevant studies. Results: From our experience, some factors to satisfactorily update SLRs were identified: (i) to adopt software tools to support the updating process; (ii) to provide as much as possible information of previous SLR; (iii) to involve researchers from previous SLR; and (iv) to reuse protocol from preliminar SLR. Conclusions: Reported lessons learned can be used as a basis of knowledge to guide researchers when updating their SLRs. Keywords—Systematic literature review, update, VTM

Exploring together software architecture and software testing: A systematic mapping

Context: Software architecture and software testing have widely contributed to improve the quality of software systems, but they have been sometimes investigated in separated ways. Besides, there is a lack of work that presents an overview on how they can be combined to promote the advantages of each other. Objective: The main contribution of this paper is to characterize the state of the art on how software architecture and software testing have been explored in a complementary way. Method: For this, we conducted a systematic mapping. Results: We identified 27 studies. All of these studies have explored the use of information related to software architecture to support the testing activity. The identified approaches have covered the integration, unit, and regression phases. Moreover, functional and structural techniques were also considered. Conclusion: We observe that there is still a range of open research topics to be explored, in particular, development of new supporting tools also applied in the software industry, what could result in high-quality software systems.

Towards a Formal Description of Reference Architectures for Embedded Systems

Reference architectures systematize and standardize the development of software systems and, hence, contribute for the reuse of design expertise on a specific domain. An adequate architectural description for reference architectures is essential for their effective use and dissemination. Nonetheless, previous studies have pointed out that the architecture description of reference architectures often presents only informal, textual descriptions, which are ambiguity prone. The main purpose of this study is to discuss directions for a precise, comprehensive description which can support the specification, analysis, and realization of reference architectures. To do so, we investigate which and how formal methods could be introduced for describing reference architectures. Considering that components can be used for realizing reference architectures, we also investigate how they could be expressed in such a formal description. In particular, we focus on embedded systems due to the sophistication required for systems in this domain. With this study, we intend to contribute to the reference architecture community with directions for promoting a formal, precise architectural description.