Ralf Reussner

Specification and evaluation of safety properties in a component-based software engineering process

Over the past years, component-based software engineering has become an established paradigm in the area of complex software intensive systems. However, many techniques for analyzing these systems for critical properties currently do not make use of the component orientation. In particular, safety analysis of component-based systems is an open field of research. In this chapter we investigate the problems arising and define a set of requirements that apply when adapting the analysis of safety properties to a component-based software engineering process. Based on these requirements some important component-oriented safety evaluation approaches are examined and compared.

Classifying Software Component Interoperability Errors to Support Component Adaption

This paper discusses various classifications of component interoperability errors. These classifications aim at supporting the automation of component adaptation. The use of software components will only demonstrate beneficial, if the costs for component deployment (i.e., acquisition and composition) are considerably lower than those for custom component development. One of the main reasons for the moderate progress in component-based software engineering are the high costs for component deployment. These costs are mainly caused by adapting components to bridge interoperability errors between unfitting components. One way to lower the costs of component deployment is to support component adaptation by tools, i.e., for interoperability checks of (semi-)automated adaptor generation. This automation of component adaptation requires a deep understanding of component interoperability errors. In particular, one has to differentiate between different classes of interoperability errors, as different errors require different adaptors for resolving. Therefore, the presented classification of component interoperability errors supports the automation of component adaptation by aiding automated interoperability problem detection and semi-automated adaptor generation. The experience gained from already implemented solutions for a specific class of interoperability errors provides hints for the solution of similar problems of the same class.

Preface: proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE 2010), Prague, Czech Republic, 23-25 June 2010

Component-Based Embedded Systems.- Reliability Analysis of Component-Based Systems with Multiple Failure Modes.- Comparison of Component Frameworks for Real-Time Embedded Systems.- A Three-Tier Approach for Composition of Real-Time Embedded Software Stacks.- Bridging the Semantic Gap between Abstract Models of Embedded Systems.- Component-Based Adaptive Systems.- Reliable Dynamic Reconfigurations in a Reflective Component Model.- Reactive Model-Based Control of Reconfiguration in the Fractal Component-Based Model.- Enabling on Demand Deployment of Middleware Services in Componentized Middleware.- A Self-healing Component Sandbox for Untrustworthy Third Party Code Execution.- Component Interfaces, Contracts and Adapters of Component-Based Systems.- Component Contracts in Eclipse - A Case Study.- Automated Creation and Assessment of Component Adapters with Test Cases.- An Empirical Study of the Component Dependency Resolution Search Space.- Composition and (De)-composition of Component-Based Systems.- Component Composition Using Feature Models.- Restructuring Object-Oriented Applications into Component-Oriented Applications by Using Consistency with Execution Traces.- (Behavioural) Design Patterns as Composition Operators.

Managing Product Line Variability by Patterns

Software product lines have a demonstrated potential for cost-effective development of software families. Product lines have to support and coordinate variabilities between the different members of the product family. However, it is also known that the management of these variabilities and the concurrent evolution of product line architecture and single products are still challenging tasks [1]. This organizational overhead often prevents small and medium enterprizes with limited software development staff from adopting product lines. This paper introduces three classes of product line variability and discusses their impacts to product line architectures. In particular, we discuss the management of these variabilities, by introducing a pattern-based product line architecture and an associated pattern language for statistical analysis software.

Practical problems of programming in the large (PPPL)

Practical Problems of Programming in the Large are those issues that IT industry experiences today when working on large software systems or when integrating software within entire organisations. Relevant and current topics include Software Architecture, Component Software, Middleware platforms, Model-Driven-Architecture, but also Enterprise Application Integration, and others. The workshop had practitioners and researchers concerned with technology transfer presenting their views on problems currently seen as most pressing in the above areas. In addition, the discussions were focussed by an “Example of a problem of programming in the large” concerning the step-wise re-engineering a complex legacy information system. Participants discussed how they would approach this exemplary problem, identified key challenges and compared their solution strategies. In the afternoon, general problems of transferring academic research results into practice were discussed. The invited talk of Dave Thomas discussed current problematic trends in software engineering research, such as the concentration on general purpose programming languages for developing domain-specific enterprise software. Finally, we discussed specific needs for a software engineering education from industrial perspective.