[서평]「Software Engineering : A Practitioner's Approach, 4^(th) Edition」

Context: Software evolvability describes a software system's ability to easily accommodate future changes. It is a fundamental characteristic for making strategic decisions, and increasing economic value of software. For long-lived systems, there is a need to address evolvability explicitly during the entire software lifecycle in order to prolong the productive lifetime of software systems. For this reason, many research studies have been proposed in this area both by researchers and industry practitioners. These studies comprise a spectrum of particular techniques and practices, covering various activities in software lifecycle. However, no systematic review has been conducted previously to provide an extensive overview of software architecture evolvability research. Objective: In this work, we present such a systematic review of architecting for software evolvability. The objective of this review is to obtain an overview of the existing approaches in analyzing and improving software evolvability at architectural level, and investigate impacts on research and practice. Method: The identification of the primary studies in this review was based on a pre-defined search strategy and a multi-step selection process. Results: Based on research topics in these studies, we have identified five main categories of themes: (i) techniques supporting quality consideration during software architecture design, (ii) architectural quality evaluation, (iii) economic valuation, (iv) architectural knowledge management, and (v) modeling techniques. A comprehensive overview of these categories and related studies is presented. Conclusion: The findings of this review also reveal suggestions for further research and practice, such as (i) it is necessary to establish a theoretical foundation for software evolution research due to the fact that the expertise in this area is still built on the basis of case studies instead of generalized knowledge; (ii) it is necessary to combine appropriate techniques to address the multifaceted perspectives of software evolvability due to the fact that each technique has its specific focus and context for which it is appropriate in the entire software lifecycle.

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A systematic review of software architecture evolution research

Business Process Management (BPM) includes methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. It can be considered as an extension of classical Workflow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. Although the practical relevance of BPM is undisputed, a clear definition of BPM and related acronyms such as BAM, BPA, and STP are missing. Moreover, a clear scientific foundation is missing. In this paper, we try to demystify the acronyms in this domain, describe the state-of-the-art technology, and argue that BPM could benefit from formal methods/languages (cf. Petri nets, process algebras, etc.).

Business Process Management: A Survey

Provided is a method, system, and program for enabling analysis of proposed changes to program statements in a source code file. A data structure is generated indicating a plurality of program statements affected by one of a plurality of selected program statements to change, wherein the data structure indicates a hierarchical relationship of the effect of program statements on one another resulting from changes to the selected program statements. The data structure is provided to a software development tool to enable a programmer to display information on the hierarchical relationship of the affect of the program statements on one another resulting from changes to the selected program statements.

Method, system, and program for utilizing impact analysis metadata of program statements in a development environment

Change impact analysis is required for constantly evolving systems to support the comprehension, implementation, and evaluation of changes. A lot of research effort has been spent on this subject over the last twenty years, and many approaches were published likewise. However, there has not been an extensive attempt made to summarize and review published approaches as a base for further research in the area. Therefore, we present the results of a comprehensive investigation of software change impact analysis, which is based on a literature review and a taxonomy for impact analysis. The contribution of this review is threefold. First, approaches proposed for impact analysis are explained regarding their motivation and methodology. They are further classified according to the criteria of the taxonomy to enable the comparison and evaluation of approaches proposed in literature. We perform an evaluation of our taxonomy regarding the coverage of its classification criteria in studied literature, which is the second contribution. Last, we address and discuss yet unsolved problems, research areas, and challenges of impact analysis, which were discovered by our review to illustrate possible directions for further research.

A review of software change impact analysis

The emergence of BPMN as a standard notation to express the business processes is based on its simplicity of notations and its exhaustive expressiveness. Nevertheless the lack of formal semantics in the BPMN can cause syntactic and structural errors. The former requires less effort to be checked, while the later usually requires attention to prove some properties, like deadlock-freedom and livelock-freedom. In this paper, we address the issue of detecting the structural errors with an approach based on model checking. It verifies the soundness of business process model and helps the business modelers to avoid the deadlocks, livelocks, and multiple terminations errors.

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Using model checking to control the structural errors in BPMN models

In this paper, we propose a formal model and a platform for software change management. The model is based on graphs rewriting, and deals with both multi-language source codes and heterogeneous database schemas. These are represented by software components linked by meaningful relationships. The change impact analysis is done, using a knowledge-based system, that includes impact propagation rules preserving the software consistency. This is implemented by an integrated platform including a multilanguage parsing tool, and a soft-ware change management module.

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A change propagation model and platform for multi-database applications

The authors propose a formal model and a platform to deal with distributed multi-language software analysis. These provide a graph representation of the software codes (source codes and byte-codes), a change propagation process based on graph rewriting, and an automatic profiling tool to measure the contribution of any component to the global performance of the software. The program codes are structured by a multi-graph in which the nodes represent the software components linked by edges representing the meaningful relationships. The software components and their relationships are extracted from the byte-code files, using the mocha decompiler tool, and from the source codes files, using the Javacc tool. Javacc allows one to generate parsers, based on grammar specification files, which include features to produce an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) representation of the software components. Furthermore, a graph of the software components is constructed on the top of the XML files, providing program analysis. This is implemented by an integrated platform including the mocha decompiler, a multi-language parsing tool, a software change management module, and a profiling tool.

Analysis and manipulation of distributed multi-language software code

This paper deals with the change impact analysis for software architectures evolution. Some approaches have been proposed for integrating the evolution issue at the architectural level. However, none of these studies the impact assessment between the software architecture and its related source code. To deal with that, we propose a model, called ASCM (Architectural Software Components Model), on which we define our change propagation process. Our model describes the common elements defined in an architecture description, independently of architecture description languages (ADLs). The change propagation process is based on a knowledge-based system, in which the model instances are stored. When a modification is applied on these, propagation rules are fired to simulate the impact on software architecture and on its source code. This is done using a platform developed on the top of Eclipse Environment.

A knowledge-based system for change impact analysis on software architecture

Change management is a critical task to control the side effects of a modification during the business process evolution. The evolution of business processes is an essential activity for the companies to better fulfill the requirements of their customers and different stakeholders. In this respect, the enterprises should adopt an effective mechanism in order to achieve the flexible business process models. It is important to identify and highlight the ripple effects of a change for minimizing their impact on other parts or entities of the system and associated services. This paper proposes a dependency-centric approach for change impact analysis. We attempt to demonstrate the change impact propagation in business process models by detecting and analyzing the interdependencies among all parts of business processes along with associated services. It can support the maintenance and evolution of business process models. The major objective is to help the modelers and business experts to assess the associated risk of intended changes and estimate the effort required for their accomplishments.

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Henri Basson

Papers

Using model checking to control the structural errors in BPMN models

A change propagation model and platform for multi-database applications

Analysis and manipulation of distributed multi-language software code

A knowledge-based system for change impact analysis on software architecture

Analyzing the ripple effects of change in business process models