Silvio Gonnet

TracED: A tool for capturing and tracing engineering design processes

The design of products or production processes in many engineering disciplines such as chemical, or software engineering, involves many creative and sometimes unstructured activities, with an opportunistic control flow. During these design processes, several models are generated, which have different levels of abstraction of the object being designed. Given the difficulties in dealing with this complexity using an improvised way, there is an urgent need for tools that support the capture and tracing of this process. In this proposal, TracED, a computational environment to support the capture and tracing of engineering design process is presented. It allows defining a particular engineering design domain and supporting the capture of how products under development are transformed along an engineering design process. Particularly, in this work, we consider software architectures design domain. As in any complex process, the support of computational tools is required for enabling its capture.

Modeling and simulation of software architecture in discrete event system specification for quality evaluation

Software quality is an important issue in software engineering. The evaluation of software architecture is crucial to achieve quality scenarios, which reduces development and maintenance costs. This work presents a discrete event simulation environment for the software architecture assessment considering both functional and quality aspects. Discrete event system specification (DEVS) formalism and the underlying framework are used to specify the simulation elements. DEVS is based on the system theory and follows the engineering and object-oriented fundamentals to construct complex dynamic systems. The proposed environment is built in a modular and hierarchical way that provides scalability and reusability advantages. Although the proposal is focused on three quality attributes and a few metrics, this approach enables the definition of new elements and metrics related to other quality attributes that can be visible at runtime. A traditional architecture illustrates the proposal, where preliminary computational experiments for this real software system and concrete quality scenarios demonstrate the feasibility of the integrated simulation environment for the software architecture evaluation. In addition, a discussion shows how the results could help architects make design decisions to improve software quality during development.

A model to represent architectural design rationale

When developing a software system, its architecture must be considered so that it can be understood, updated, and improved. In general, considering the architectural artefacts is not enough. The reasons, assumptions and justifications bore in mind by the architects during the architecture design stage must be also known. Nevertheless, not all aspects analysed during the design process can be identified, especially all those alternatives that were evaluated and rejected. In the present contribution, a model to represent the rationale generated by architects during the architectural design is proposed so that it can last over time and it can be retrieved, analysed and reused whenever necessary. The model includes concepts representing architectural artefacts, reasons, assumptions, and decisions and reasoning elements status.

Knowledge representation of the software architecture design process based on situation calculus

Software architecture design is an interactive, complex, decision-making process. Such a design process involves the exploration, evaluation, and composition of design alternatives. Increasingly, new computer-aided tools are available to help designers in these complex activities. However, these tools do not know how design is actually done, in other words, by means of which design activities the final artefact was obtained. In fact, the architectural design knowledge exclusively rests in the mind of designers, and there is an urgent need to move it, as much as possible, to a computer-supported environment that enables the capture of this type of knowledge. This contribution addresses this need by introducing a model for capturing how products under development are generated and transformed along the software architecture design process. The proposed model follows an operational perspective, where architectural design decisions are modelled by means of sequences of operations that are applied on the design products. Situation calculus is used to formally express the existence of an object in a given state of a design process. In addition, this formalism allows us expressing without ambiguities when an operation can be performed in a specific state of the design process.

A framework to represent, capture, and trace ontology development processes

Abstract This article presents OntoTracED, a comprehensive framework to represent, capture and trace ontology development processes. It has three components: (i) a conceptual model that defines the framework foundations, (ii) an ontological engineering domain model (OEDM), which specifies and describes design objects, as well as those operations that are particular to a specific ontology development methodology, and (iii) a computational support environment, named TracED(aaS). This contribution first offers an overview of the ontology development process characteristics and then describes the main features of each OntoTracED component. The framework capabilities are illustrated by means of a case study addressing the use of TracED(aaS) throughout the development of an ontology of industrial interest. It is shown that this proposal makes a strong contribution in the ontological engineering field since the whole ontology development process, its history, rationale, and all the intermediate products can be captured in an integrated fashion.

An ontology to document a quality scheme specification of a software product

Pressmans (2010) definition of software quality is the conformance to explicitly stated functional and performance requirements, explicitly documented development standards, and implicit characteristics that are expected of all professionally developed software. The achievement of quality is a complex activity that is related with the process quality and product quality. However, still, it is not clear how product quality should apply in the development process. Frequently, the development team does not know what characteristics influence a specific entity and how these characteristics compose the quality of the product. This lack of knowledge reflects the need to define some document that serve as a valid quality specification that should be evaluated along the development process. This contribution addresses this need by introducing an ontology for document a quality scheme based on the product quality model of ISO/IEC 25010. The proposal follows this model with aims to clarify the properties that are normally present in a product and its meaning. The ontology incorporates the metric concept to represent the way in which quality should be measure. The ontology was implemented using Protege, and it was evaluated using a set of metrics that estimate the required structural characteristics.

Building simulation models to evaluate web application architectures

Software quality has become a critical issue in software engineering because affects systems development costs, delivery schedules, and user satisfaction. In specific software products, an early quality evaluation can be done by using simulation techniques over the architectural design. However, not all architectural designs can be transformed into simulation models. This paper presents a set of simulation models based on standard architectural components that helps to compose web architectures simulation models in order to analyze its behavior. It also includes the definition and modeling of different types of mechanisms that help to simulate consumers behavior. These mechanisms allow generating the inputs required to the quality evaluation (that is, software requirements) and could be used in other situations. All simulation models proposed were formalized using Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS). In this context, this work gives the foundations needed to make a future evaluation of specific quality attributes for web applications.

New requirements prioritization based on customer historical profiles

Prioritization of new requirements to implement in software is a key point for maintenance and preservation of quality, observing business rules and standards of the company. The tools for prioritization, based on probed and recognized techniques require pre-qualify each requirement. If the company has several requests from customers of a product, increase the factors that affect it. The tools do not include these aspects of the complex task of qualifying. This research started with a survey of the methods of prioritization and selection of new requirements used by software development companies in the area of Rosario; and culminated with the definition of a methodology for prioritization of new requirements. These involves the analysis and evaluation of all the factors and consequences of implementing the selected requirements in the software product. The methodology includes the financial criteria and business rules of the company, and other quality values defined by its managers.

Toward an Integrated Quality Evaluation of Web Applications with DEVS

The increasing dynamic and complexity of Web systems turns quality evaluation at any stage of the development into a key issue for the project success in software development areas or organizations. This paper presents a novel approach to evaluate Web applications (WebApps) from their architectures, also considering their functionalities. Discrete EVents System Specification (DEVS) is proposed for behavior and structure analysis based on a set of quality criteria that serve as guidelines for development and evolution of these Web systems. Three quality attributes are considered in this version of the approach: performance, reliability, and availability, but the main advantages are potential scalability and adaptability that respond to the features of these systems.

Product feasibility verification in software product line

Nowadays, the software product lines (SPLs) are one of the production paradigm to improve the performance of the software companies. Nevertheless, SPLs have some complexity issues like the verification of product feasibility that have to be address. SPLs frequently use Orthogonal Variability Models (OVMs) to express variability in their portfolio of products. In our approach we use Petri Nets to represent and analyze OVMs and we focus on the decisions regarding with the inclusion and exclusion of variation points and variants. This approach offers a more comprehensive knowledge about the activities sequence necessary to build a product in a SPLs context. We adopt an event/condition perspective to model the dependencies using Petri nets formalism. The Petri nets bring us the capability to simulate the dynamic behavior of systems and to use many properties of them to avoid the product feasibility problems aforementioned.