Wolfgang Eixelsberger

Software architecture recovery of a program family

The concept of software architecture has gained a lot of attention and has found its way into the software development process in industry. Software architecture recovery focuses on the recovery of architectural information from existing systems. This paper presents a framework for recovering the software architecture of a program family. Based on the available system information architectural properties such as safety or system control are recovered using different reverse engineering methods and tools in combination with architectural descriptions. We describe our architecture recovery process and discuss the recovery of system structure as one example of the case study. The framework was developed while working on the recovery of the family architecture of a train control system.

Recovery of Architectural Structure: A Case Study

Industrial software development is often an evolutionary process. Software products are developed for one specific customer and later on refined for other customers with different requirements in terms of a product family. Refinements happen at the implementation level (algorithms and data structures) and on the architectural level (the overall system structure). Recovery of architectural information is necessary to build up a complete and unambiguous description of the architecture of a system. In this paper, we describe an approach for the recovery of architectural structure that focuses on component and connector identification. We describe different strategies to define components and connectors of the system. The examples given in the paper were developed out of an industrial case study, a real-time Train Control System. The recovered architectural description allows reasoning about the quality of the system architecture: The description of the architectural structure revealed hardware-dependent components that in case of a hardware change would have to be changed completely. Therefore, our investigations showed that such a recovery of architectural structure is important to reduce future efforts in the development and maintenance of product lines.

Software architecture recovery of embedded software

The complexity of embedded software systems has increased substantially in the last years. The concept of software architecture provides methods and notations to handle the increased size and complexity. These concepts provide a higher level of abstraction than common analysis and design methods. The architecture of existing legacy systems is of high interest for the development of successors of such systems. However, architectural information of legacy systems is often not available. The architecture recovery process we discuss is research work within the ESPRIT project ARES (Architectural Reasoning for Embedded Systems). 1

Describing software architectures by system structure and properties

To support architecture based development, different modeling notations and languages, so called architecture description languages (ADLs), have been designed. To be of help in the development process, software architectures must be described in a complete and consistent manner but without being overloaded with information provided to the system stakeholders. Current architecture description languages provide information about software architectures in a domain independent way. This may lead to inappropriate and incomplete descriptions of software architectures. We introduce a flexible and extensible language called Architecture Structure Description Language (ASDL) developed for describing structural aspects of software architectures and their properties. We thereby focus on the domain of embedded real time systems that have to meet certain timing and safety constraints. The language was developed in an architecture recovery process of a real world Train Control System (TCS) and has been used to describe and reason about TCSs architecture.

Recovery of a reference architecture: a case study

1. ABSTRACT This paper presents experiences made while recovering the reference architecture of a system family. The case study is a subsystem of a train control system. The train control system is an embedded, real-time system that forms a family of systems. The architecture recovery approach and architectural representation is briefly described. The main topic of this position paper is the commonality analysis process that identifies and recovers the reference architecture of the system family. The two steps of the process are described together with implications. Since the recovery of the reference architecture facilitates the forward engineering process the mismatch between as-is-architecture and asshould-be-architecture is of special interest and described at the end of the paper. 1.1

Challenges and experiences in managing major software evolution endeavours such as Euro conversion or Y2000 compliance

The year 2000 issue and the introduction of the Euro cause substantial software maintenance challenges. The importance of those events for the survival of organizations and the degree of impact on organizations existing software systems require the application of a mixture of already well known but also additional approaches and techniques. In this paper we are going to point out the major issues and possible approaches for their solution based on our experiences and observations from several industrial projects.

Der exportorientierte Internetauftritt

Im Laufe der letzten Jahre hat sich das Internet stark gewandelt. Multimediale, interaktive und von Nutzern generierte Inhalte werden immer wichtiger. Durch die rasante Entwicklung am Mobilfunkmarkt und die Verfugbarkeit immer leistungsfahigerer mobiler Endgerate gewinnt auch die mobile Nutzung des Internets immer mehr an Bedeutung. Die erweiterten Moglichkeiten des Internets ergeben gerade auch fur kleine und mittelgrose Unternehmen viele neue Chancen fur den Auf- und Ausbau des Geschafts auf internationalen Markten, fur die Neukundenakquisition ebenso wie fur die Bedienung sehr spezialisierter Nischenmarkte. Die Prasenz im Internet alleine ist dabei aber meist nicht ausreichend. Fur einen effektiven internationalen und exportorientierten Internetauftritt sind einige wesentliche Erfolgsfaktoren zu beachten.

Die E-Business-Strategie für den Export

Durch die Moglichkeit, das global verfugbare Internet fur die Bewerbung und den Vertrieb von Produkten und Dienstleistungen zu nutzen, sinken in vielen Markten auch die Markteintrittsschwellen fur Mitbewerber aus dem Ausland, was zu groserem Wettbewerb im Heimmarkt fuhren kann. Andererseits bietet die Geschaftsplattform Internet aber gerade auch kleineren und mittelstandischen Unternehmen (KMU) die Moglichkeit, relativ kostengunstig neue Auslandsmarkte zu bearbeiten. Um die Erfolgschancen des Exportgeschaftes uber das Internet zu starken, empfiehlt sich eine strategische Vorgangsweise, wie sie in diesem Kapitel vorgestellt wird.

Internationales Marketing und Kundengewinnung über das Internet

Das internationale E-Marketing kann zu Zwecken der Kundengewinnung und des Ausbaus von Geschaftsbeziehungen mit Kunden genutzt werden. Es geht dabei aber auch um die Markenfuhrung, also um das Bild, welches man vom eigenen Unternehmen und seinen Angeboten bei den Kunden oder potenziellen Kunden erzeugen will.

Internetbasierter Vertrieb in Auslandsmärkten

Das Internet kann fur viele Unternehmen einen zusatzlichen Vertriebskanal darstellen, manchmal (insbesondere fur kleinere Unternehmen) sogar den einzigen, uber den man Kunden im Ausland bedienen kann. Die beiden wesentlichen Vertriebskanale stellen dabei Webshops und Online-Marktplatze dar. In jedem Fall sind fur die Nutzung des Internets als Vertriebskanal Uberlegungen anzustellen, wie die grenzuberschreitende Zahlungsabwicklung, die physische Warenlieferung und die operative Abwicklung des Exportgeschafts erfolgen sollen.