Mari Matinlassi

Quality-Driven Software Architecture Model Transformation

In order to achieve productive software development with high quality software products, skilled people and effective tools are needed. The concept of qualitydriven software architecture model transformation (QAMT) is concerned with the latter, tools. The ultimate goal of QAMT is to multiply the productivity of individual software modellers with advanced modelling tools. Advanced modelling tools can be used to do most of the work on behalf of the developer. However, QAMT is not a tool, but rather a technique for transforming architecture.

Viewpoints of DSP software and service architectures

The software architecture of a future mobile telecommunication system consists of three main parts: system infrastructure services, middleware services and application services. Infrastructure services provide access technologies and networking services for the middleware services that again provide richer capabilities for wireless applications through mobile Internet. Architecture describes the organization of software systems, components, their internal relationships and connections to the environment. Reusing architectural structures benefits companies, because the architecture is a pivotal part of any system, and a costly one to construct. Architecture is documented and reused through architectural views that describe identified stakeholders and concerns, e.g. the purpose of a system, and the feasibility of constructing, deploying, evolving and maintaining it. Views conform to special viewpoints defined for the domain. This paper describes the viewpoints selected for developing the architecture of middleware services and digital signal processing software and provides a general framework for comparing viewpoints. Comparison and analysis of the defined viewpoints show that domain and system size are the dominant issues to be considered when architectural viewpoints are being selected.

Practical Evaluation of Software Product Family Architectures

Faster time to market and decreased development and maintenance costs are goals most companies are trying to reach. Product family engineering (PFE) provides a means of achieving these goals. Product family architecture (PFA) is the key issue in family engineering. However, companies have to decide how to adopt PFE and how to develop their software PFA. This paper introduces the basic issues essential to PFA development, explores three different approaches to applying PFAs in industrial settings, and, finally, presents the evaluation results through an evaluation model of software product families.

Open source based tools for sharing and reuse of software architectural knowledge

Sharing and reuse of software architectural knowledge (SHARK) has become an emerging topic of discussion and research in the field of software architecture development. SHARK is efficient with tool support, particularly so when that support is appropriate. However, there seems to be little guidance for selecting a suitable SHARK tool for use in an organization. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we present an evaluation framework that can be used for presenting an overview of SHARK tool features or comparing their differences. Secondly, we use the presented framework to evaluate three publicly available SHARK tools. The evaluated tools are the following: WebOfPatterns, Stylebase for Eclipse and PAKME.

Evaluating the portability and maintainability of software product family architecture: terminal software case study

This paper introduces a case study of a driver terminal product family. The terminals are used for fare collection in public transportation. The case study applies the QADA architectural design and analysis method in documenting and evaluating the portability and maintainability of existing architecture. During this case study it was found out how to improve the architectural descriptions of the QADA method for better quality evaluation support. In addition, evaluation revealed risky points of architecture that were improved with separation, compression and abstraction.

The WISE Approach to Architect Wireless Services

The Internet is quickly evolving towards the wireless Internet that will be based upon wirelines and devices from the traditional Internet, and will reuse some of its techniques and protocols. However, the wireless Internet will not be a simple add-on to the wireline Internet. From the technical point of view, new challenging problems arise from the handling of mobility, handsets with reduced screens and varying bandwidth. As a result, developing and operating new mobile services will be a challenging software engineering problem. The WISE (Wireless Internet Service Engineering) Project aims at producing integrated methods and tools to engineer services on the wireless Internet. In particular, this paper introduces the WISE approach to service engineering, describes how it is applied to a real world Pilot service and reports initial feedback from project partners when applying the approach.

Evaluating the Integrability of COTS Components — Software Product Family Viewpoint

COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) components are increasingly used in product family-based software engineering. Within product families, components are assembled using a disciplined process and a common product family architecture. However, the black-box nature of COTS components and insufficient component documentation make the integration of components difficult. Successful component integration requires that the component match the functional, quality, and system requirements and interoperate with other components of the systems family. Ensuring component integrability is an important task, especially within product families, where the ineffective use of COTS components can cause extensive and long-term problems. This chapter discusses the characteristics of architecture, components, and product families that affect the integrability of COTS components, as well as the evaluation techniques that an integrator can use in the assessment of the integration capability of COTS components.

Quality Session Report

This is a report of a working session on quality in the Working International Conference on Software Architecture, 2005