Session:Evaluation--Paper Preview

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A Framework for Measuring Architecting Effort and Its Application in Medical Imaging Systems Development

Eelco Rommes - Philips Research
Andre Postma - Philips Medical Systems
Pierre America - Philips Research

The amount of architecting effort is a factor in a soft-ware development project†$(1s (Befficiency. Before steps can be taken to optimize this factor, its current position must be know. We have measured the amount of architecting done in two industrial cases relating to the development of medical imaging systems.We discuss these cases and some of the problems that we encountered.

Predicting Architectural Styles from Component Specifications

Sutirtha Bhattacharya - Intel Corporation
Dewayne Perry - University of Texas at Austin

Software Product Lines (SPL), Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE) and Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) components provide a rich supporting base for creating software architectures. Further, they promise significant improvements in the quality of software configurations that can be composed from pre-built components. Software architectural styles provide a way for achieving a desired coherence for such component-based architectures. This is because the different architectural styles enforce different quality attributes for a system. If the architectural style of an emergent system could be predicted in advance, a System Integrator could make necessary changes to ensure that the quality attributes dictated by the system requirements were satisfied before the actual system was deployed and tested. In this paper we propose a model for predicting architectural styles based on use cases that need to be met by a system configuration. Moreover, our technique can be used to determine stylistic conformance and hence indicate the presence or absence of architectural drift.

The Usefulness of Architecturally Significant Information Extracted from Patterns for Architecture Evaluation

Antony Tang - Swinburne University of Technology
Muhammad Ali Babar - National ICT Australia Ltd. and University of NSW
Ian Gorton - National ICT Australia Ltd. and University of NSW
Jun Han - Swinburne University of Technology

Introducing Ambient Calculus in Mobile Aspect-Oriented Software Architectures

Nour Ali - Polytechnic University of Valencia
Jennifer Pérez - Polytechnic University of Valencia
Isidro Ramos - Polytechnic University of Valencia
Jose A. Carsi - Polytechnic University of Valencia

Currently most software systems have a distributed nature. As a result, it is important to take into account distribution and mobility from the architectural stage of the development process instead of only delaying their considerations to the implementation stage. This paper presents an approach that allows the specification of distribution and mobility in software architectures. The approach is called PRISMA. PRISMA integrates aspect-oriented software development and component based software development. This work focuses on the novel introduction of the primitives of a process algebra called Ambient Calculus to PRISMA. As a result, PRISMA is presented as a model that is able to specify the distribution and mobility of the architectural elements in a formal and precise way.

Towards a Set of Application Independent Clustering Criteria within an Architecture Recovery Approach

Aline Vasconcelos - Cefet Campos
Claudia Werner - Coppe Ufrj

Architecture recovery is usually supported by a set of tools that implement techniques, such as concept analysis, clustering, data mining and pattern matching for abstracting low-level source code elements into higher-level architectural elements. However, the decision making in this process usually depends on a previously defined high-level model of the system architecture or on criteria that are application dependent. In this paper we present a set of application independent clustering criteria to support architectural elements definition. These criteria help the user in his decision making and can be reused in many different contexts.

Static Evaluation of Software Architectures - A Short Summary

Jens Knodel - Fraunhofer IESE
Mikael Lindvall - Fraunhofer Center Maryland
Dirk Muthig - Fraunhofer IESE

The software architecture is one of the most crucial artifacts within the lifecycle of a software system. Decisions made at the architectural level directly enable, facilitate, hamper, or interfere with the achievement of business goals as well as meeting functional and quality requirements. Software architectures are also essential for the success of product line engineering. In this work, we summarize how, from our practical experience, static architecture evaluation contributes to architecture development. We also describe the different purposes of architectural evaluations."

Extending SPQR to Architectural Analysis by Semi-Automated Training

Jason Smith - Univ. of North Carolina
David Stotts - Univ. of North Carolina

We present an overview of SPQR, the System for Pattern Query and Recognition, a toolkit that detects instances of known design patterns directly from object-oriented source code in an automated and flexible manner. Based on our previous work in rho-calculus and Pattern/Object Markup Language (POML), SPQR is retargetable to most OO languages, and system design notations. We discuss how this approach may be applied to architectural concerns by leveraging SPQR's training mode.