Mansour Zand

A survey of current object-oriented databases

Object-oriented concepts form a good basis for the data models required for next-generation database applications such as CAD/CAE/CASE/CAM systems, knowledge-based systems, multimedia, etc. Many object-oriented databases are available commercially or are being developed by industry or academic research facilities. This paper attempts to compare some of these products using fourteen criteria. The selected criteria are major factors required for the successful design of an object-oriented database system. They are grouped into five different categories. The result of the survey is summarized in a table.

Software reuse: current status and trends

In the past decade, software reuse gradually has started to come into the mainstream of research and practice as a viable subfield of software engineering. There have been many papers and articles in the technical, professional, as well as trade publications dealing with the issues and prospects, the pros and cons, and the incentives and impediments of software reuse. The main themes addressed in these publications have been the investigation of reusability from the perspectives of management, cost, and human factors, as well as from the technical perspectives. Because of the significant outstanding problems, it is expected that active interest in reuse will continue at a healthy pace from both the research angle and the practice angle. It is evident from the published literature that reasonable progress has been made in the purely technical areas of software reuse. However, there has not been as much progress in the other related areas necessitated by the diverse ramifications and implications of software reuse practice. software reuse is the dearth of adequate work in the non-technical issues. Most of the up-to-date work by reuse researchers/practitioners is presented in technical workshops on software reuse. This potential isolation is one of the basic problems behind the lack of adequate progress in practical non-technical issues. To remedy the situation, participation and collaboration of experts in fields such as organizational structure, management, human behavior, and economics is needed. These experts can assist in detailed impact studies on the economics of reuse and considerations of human behavior, and strategy setting and planning that would eventually lead to the reorganization of the software departments and the software development process. One can cite as precedent the Japanese success, the European promising start, and the reported progress in some of the U.S. government organizations, which could not have been achieved without institution-wide planning.

Aspectual Support for Specifying Requirements in Software Product Lines

We present an aspect-oriented requirements specification system for software product lines. We encapsulate nonfunctional concerns as a set of advices for transforming parameterized requirements to product-specific requirements. We apply our system to the Health Watcher case study to demonstrate our approach. We sort out system requirements, exception handling requirements (alternate flows) and non-functional requirements and represent them as aspects in our framework. We have implemented a prototype transformation tool which takes these aspects along with the basic functional requirements as input and produces a requirements document with all applicable aspects woven in.

Ontology-based product line modeling and generation

Software product line engineering defines a family of related software products. Every software product line engineering method has two essential elements, a set of models representing the product family, and a process for instantiating product members from those models. In this paper, we investigate the use of ontologies to model product lines. We also show how product members can be instantiated from an ontology-based model. We discuss our early experiences using ontologies to specify a family of workflows for a large insurance company.

Reuse R&D: gap between theory and practice

We have made tremendous progress in understanding the critical technology, methods, processes, and organizational factors that lead to effective reuse. Research into new methods and technologies continues unabated. However, far too few software organizations and schools consider systematic reuse as a key part of their programs. Recent developments such as CBSE and 00 patterns do not incorporate key learning from the reuse community. Why does reuse technology transfer seems to be so slow and ineffective? How might we improve the situation?

Reuse research and development: is it on the right track?

In today marketplace, the competitive software developing shop is the one that can reduce produce delivery time, increase diversity of the product enhance interoperability, and conform to standardization of components. In the past decade, software reuse gradually has started coming into the main stream of research and practice as a viable subfield of software engineering. Reuse practice has a great potential, more than many other on-going activities in software to improve software development process. However,there is not ss much progressas was expected. There have been many papers and articles in technical, professional, as well as trade publications dealing with the issues and prospects, the pros and cons, and the incentives and impediments of soflware reuse.

ERTSAL: a prototype of a domain-specific aspect language for analysis of embedded real-time systems

A primary characteristic of Embedded Real-Time Systems (ERTS) is the fact that they are resource constrained. Such constraints present unique challenges to the embedded systems programmer who must develop software satisfying a given set of functional requirements while simultaneously addressing the limitations of available resources and dependability concerns. This paper describes ERTSAL -- a domain-specific aspect language suitable for use by embedded systems software developers that is comprised of domain specific instructions for use in the monitoring, evaluating, and debugging of ERTS. ERTSAL abstractions shield developers from the intricacies of AspectC++ and the idiosyncrasies of an underlying RTOS. The semantics of ERTSAL is defined in terms of AspectC++. ERTSAL aspects are automatically transformed to corresponding AspectC++ aspects using the transformation system HATS.

Construction of Ontology-Based Software Repositories by Text Mining

Software document repositories store artifacts produced in the course of developing software products. But most repositories are simply archives of documents. It is not unusual to find projects where different software artifacts are scattered in unrelated repositories with varying levels of granularity and without a centralized management system. This makes the information available in existing repositories difficult to reuse. In this paper, a methodology for constructing an ontology-based repository of reusable knowledge is presented. The information in the repository is extracted from specification documents using text mining. Ontologies are used to guide the extraction process and organize the extracted information. The methodology is being used to develop a repository of recurring and crosscutting aspects in software specification documents.

An interconnection language for reuse at the template/module level

Abstract Reuse is becoming a potent trend in software development and a major way to boost software productivity. To put reusable software units together, one has to be able to find them with minimal effort in the first place. The effort needed to access, understand, and customize the code must be less than the effort required to create new code. A simple library of components cannot provide sufficient methods to facilitate the selection and interconnection of the reusable modules. The context of this work is the ROPCO (reuse of persistent code and object code) environment and the primary candidates for reuse are the modules and templates. The objective of this article is to present the design of an interconnection language which can be incorporated with other ROPCO components to facilitate the selection, customization, and interconnection of reusable modules in the ROPCO software development environment. This language helps to define the interface specifications of the components and find the best module(s)/template(s) meeting the desired specification. The detailed algorithms of the operations that are necessary at the user level to support the reuse of available components are given and described in detail with a view toward verification.

Making aspect-orientation accessible through syntax-based language composition

A generic syntax-based approach is presented by which a fixed set of aspect-oriented features belonging to an aspect language family LA can be applied to a domain-specific language (DSL). The approach centres on the construction of a grammar in which a predefined and fixed set of abstract join points and join point environments are linked with their concrete counterparts within the DSL. This connection enables the behaviour of static weaving to be expressed in a generic manner. The resulting framework is one in which aspect orientation is accessible to non-experts across a wide spectrum of abstractions.