Tiziana Margaria

Model-driven development with the jABC

We present the jABC, a framework for model driven application development based on Lightweight Process Coordination. With jABC, users (product developers and system/software designers) easily develop services and applications by composing reusable building-blocks into hierarchical (flow-) graph structures that are executable models of the application. This process is supported by an extensible set of plugins providing additional functionalities, so that the jABC models can be animated, analyzed, simulated, verified, executed and compiled. This way of handling the collaborative design of complex software systems has proven to be effective and adequate for the cooperation of non-programmers and technical people, and it is now being rolled out in the operative practice.

Service-Oriented Computing – ICSOC 2008

Web Scale Computing: The Power of Infrastructure as a Service.- Services in the Long Tail World: Challenges and Opportunities.- Services for Science.- Managing and Internet Service Bus.- Quality-Driven Business Policy Specification and Refinement for Service-Oriented Systems.- Adaptation of Web Service Composition Based on Workflow Patterns.- Protocol-Based Web Service Composition.- Design and Implementation of a Fault Tolerant Job Flow Manager Using Job Flow Patterns and Recovery Policies.- Building Mashups for the Enterprise with SABRE.- Adaptation of Service Protocols Using Process Algebra and On-the-Fly Reduction Techniques.- Automatic Workflow Graph Refactoring and Completion.- Authorization and User Failure Resiliency for WS-BPEL Business Processes.- Reasoning on Semantically Annotated Processes.- Event-Driven Quality of Service Prediction.- Automatic Realization of SOA Deployment Patterns in Distributed Environments.- The LLAMA Middleware Support for Accountable Service-Oriented Architecture.- ubiSOAP: A Service Oriented Middleware for Seamless Networking.- Towards a Service-Oriented Approach for Managing Context in Mobile Environment.- An Autonomic Middleware Solution for Coordinating Multiple QoS Controls.- Transparent Runtime Adaptability for BPEL Processes.- Organizational Constraints to Realizing Business Value from Service Oriented Architectures: An Empirical Study of Financial Service Institutions.- E-Marketplace for Semantic Web Services.- Business Driven SOA Customization.- Sound Multi-party Business Protocols for Service Networks.- Automatic Mash Up of Composite Applications.- Non-desynchronizable Service Choreographies.- A Framework for Semantic Sensor Network Services.- Context-Driven Autonomic Adaptation of SLA.- Determining QoS of WS-BPEL Compositions.- An Initial Approach to Explaining SLA Inconsistencies.- Ontology-Based Compatibility Checking for Web Service Configuration Management.- SOAlive Service Catalog: A Simplified Approach to Describing, Discovering and Composing Situational Enterprise Services.- WorldTravel: A Testbed for Service-Oriented Applications.- TCP???Compose ??? - A TCP-Net Based Algorithm for Efficient Composition of Web Services Using Qualitative Preferences.- A Runtime Quality Architecture for Service-Oriented Systems.- QoS Policies for Business Processes in Service Oriented Architectures.- Deriving Business Service Interfaces in Windows Workflow from UMM Transactions.- From Business Process Models to Web Services Orchestration: The Case of UML 2.0 Activity Diagram to BPEL.- Batch Invocation of Web Services in BPEL Process.- Formation of Service Value Networks for Decentralized Service Provisioning.- Towards Automated WSDL-Based Testing of Web Services.- Automated Service Composition with Adaptive Planning.- A Planning-Based Approach for the Automated Configuration of the Enterprise Service Bus.- Verifying Interaction Protocol Compliance of Service Orchestrations.- Specify Once Test Everywhere: Analyzing Invariants to Augment Service Descriptions for Automated Test Generation.- A Model-Driven Approach to Dynamic and Adaptive Service Brokering Using Modes.- Integrated Security Context Management of Web Components and Services in Federated Identity Environments.- Predicting and Learning Executability of Composite Web Services.- Authorization Policy Based Business Collaboration Reliability Verification.- VGC: Generating Valid Global Communication Models of Composite Services Using Temporal Reasoning.- A Framework for Advanced Modularization and Data Flow in Workflow Systems.- Model Identification for Energy-Aware Management of Web Service Systems.- LASS - License Aware Service Selection: Methodology and Framework.- Integrated and Composable Supervision of BPEL Processes.- Optimised Semantic Reasoning for Pervasive Service Discovery.- COSMA - An Approach for Managing SLAs in Composite Services.- Resource Calculations with Constraints, and Placement of Tenants and Instances for Multi-tenant SaaS Applications.- SPIN: Service Performance Isolation Infrastructure in Multi-tenancy Environment.- Management as a Service for IT Service Management.- SMART: Application of a Method for Migration of Legacy Systems to SOA Environments.- Discovering and Deriving Service Variants from Business Process Specifications.- Market Overview of Enterprise Mashup Tools.- Siena: From PowerPoint to Web App in 5 Minutes.- Exploration of Discovered Process Views in Process Spaceship.- ROME4EU: A Web Service-Based Process-Aware System for Smart Devices.- WS-Engineer 2008.- MetaCDN: Harnessing Storage Clouds for High Performance Content Delivery.- Yowie: Information Extraction in a Service Enabled World.

The Electronic Tool Integration platform: concepts and design

The Electronic Tool Integration platform (ETI) associated with STTT is designed for the interactive experimentation with and coordination of heterogeneous tools. ETI users are supported by an advanced, personalized Online Service guiding experimentation, coordination, and simple browsing of the available tool repository according to their degree of experience. In particular, this allows even newcomers to orient themselves in the wealth of existing tools and to identify the most appropriate collection of tools to solve their own application-specific tasks.

Agile IT: Thinking in User-Centric Models

We advocate a new teaching direction for modern CS curricula: extreme model-driven development (XMDD), a new development paradigm designed to continuously involve the customer/application expert throughout the whole systems’ life cycle. Based on the ‘One-Thing Approach’, which works by successively enriching and refining one single artifact, system development becomes in essence a user-centric orchestration of intuitive service functionality. XMDD differs radically from classical software development, which, in our opinion is no longer adequate for the bulk of application programming – in particular when it comes to heterogeneous, cross organizational systems which must adapt to rapidly changing market requirements. Thus there is a need for new curricula addressing this model-driven, lightweight, and cooperative development paradigm that puts the user process in the center of the development and the application expert in control of the process evolution.

LearnLib: a framework for extrapolating behavioral models

In this paper, we present the LearnLib, a library of tools for automata learning, which is explicitly designed for the systematic experimental analysis of the profile of available learning algorithms and corresponding optimizations. Its modular structure allows users to configure their own tailored learning scenarios, which exploit specific properties of their envisioned applications. As has been shown earlier, exploiting application-specific structural features enables optimizations that may lead to performance gains of several orders of magnitude, a necessary precondition to make automata learning applicable to realistic scenarios.

Service Engineering: Linking Business and IT

Summary form only given. Service-oriented design has long driven the development of the telecommunications infrastructure and applications, especially intelligent network services. Applying the same principles of domain specificity, virtualization, loose coupling, and seamless vertical integration to business processes has the potential to lead to a new generation of personalized, secure, and highly available Web services

Dynamic testing via automata learning

This paper presents dynamic testing, a method that exploits automata learning to systematically test (black box) systems almost without prerequisites. Based on interface descriptions and optional sample test cases, our method successively explores the system under test (SUT), in order to extrapolate a behavioural model. This is in turn used to steer the further exploration process. Due to the applied learning technique, our method is optimal in the sense that the extrapolated models are most concise (i.e. state minimal) in consistently representing all the information gathered during the exploration. Using the LearnLib, our framework for automata learning, our method can be elegantly combined with numerous optimisations of the learning procedure, with various choices of model structures, and with the option of dynamically/interactively enlarging the alphabet underlying the learning process. The latter is important in the Web context, where totally new situations may arise when following links. All these features are illustrated using as a case study the web application Mantis, a bug tracking system widely used in practice. In addition, we present another case study that demonstrates the scalability of the approach. We show how the dynamic testing procedure works and how behavioural models arise that concisely summarize the current testing effort. It turns out that these models reveal the system structure from a user perspective. Besides steering the automatic exploration process, they are ideal for user guidance and to support analyses to improve the system understanding, as they reveal the system structure from a user perspective.

Lightweight coarse-grained coordination: a scalable system-level approach

In this paper, our solution to the problem of modelling functionally complex communication systems at the application level, based on lightweight coordination, is extended to seamlessly capture system-level testing as well. This extension could be realized simply by self-application: the bulk of the work for integrating system-level testing into our development environment, the ABC, concerned domain modelling, which can be done using the ABC. Therefore, the extension of the ABC to cover system-level testing was merely an application development on the basis of the ABC, illustrated here in the domain of Computer Telephony Integration. Here the adoption of a coarse-grained approach to test design, which is central to the scalability of the overall testing environment, is the enabling aspect for system-level test automation. Together with our lightweight coordination approach this induces an understandable modelling paradigm of system-wide test cases that is adequate for the needs and requirements of industrial test engineers. In particular, it enables test engineers to graphically design complex test cases that, in addition, can even be automatically checked for their intended purposes via model checking.

Service-Orientation: Conquering Complexity with XMDD

We advocate a new direction for mastering complexity in service-oriented design of complex applications: eXtreme Model-Driven Development (XMDD). It is a new application development paradigm that is extreme in that it is designed to involve the customer/application expert continuously throughout the whole systems’ life cycle, and it is model-driven because it is based on the ‘One-Thing Approach’, which works by successively enriching and refining one single artifact that is a rich model. With XMDD, system development becomes in essence a pathway to user-centric orchestration of intuitive service functionality. XMDD differs radically from classical software development, which in our opinion, is no longer adequate for the bulk of application programming, because the profile of todays’s applications has changed and demands agility and a leaner development style. This need is particularly evident when it comes to heterogeneous, cross-organizational systems, which must adapt to rapidly changing market requirements. XMDD addresses the needs via a model-driven, lightweight, and cooperative development paradigm that puts the user process at the center of development and the application expert in control of the process evolution.

Next generation learnlib

The Next Generation LearnLib (NGLL) is a framework for model-based construction of dedicated learning solutions on the basis of extensible component libraries, which comprise various methods and tools to deal with realistic systems including test harnesses, reset mechanisms and abstraction/refinement techniques. Its construction style allows application experts to control, adapt, and evaluate complex learning processes with minimal programming expertise.