/pdf/arguing-safety-a-systematic-approach-to-managing-safety-1m8tx85i6w.pdf

Arguing Safety - A Systematic Approach to Managing Safety Cases

This paper proposes a four-tiered framework for classifying and understanding the myriad of information systems development methodologies that have been proposed in the literature. The framework is divided into four levels: paradigms, approaches, methodologies, and techniques. This paper primarily focuses on the two intermediate levels: approaches and methodologies. The principal contribution of the framework is in providing a new kind of "deep structure" for better understanding the intellectual core of methodologies and approaches and their interrelationships. It achieves this goal by articulating a parsimonious set of foundational features that are shared by subsets of methodologies and approaches. To illustrate how the framework's deep structure provides a better understanding of methodologies' intellectual core, it is applied to eleven examples. The paper also introduces and illustrates a procedure for "accommodating" and "assimilating" new information systems development methodologies in addition to the eleven already discussed. This procedure provides the framework with the necessary flexibility for handling the continuing proliferation of new methodologies.

A Dynamic Framework for Classifying Information Systems Development Methodologies and Approaches

Many future software systems will be distributed across a network, extensively providing different kinds of services for their users. These systems must be highly reliable and provide services when required. Reliability and availability must be engineered into software from the onset of its development, and potential problems must be detected in the early stages, when it is easier and less expensive to implement modifications. The software architecture design phase is the first stage of software development in which it is possible to evaluate how well the quality requirements are being met. For this reason, a method is needed for analyzing software architecture with respect to reliability and availability. In this paper, we define a framework for comparing reliability and availability analysis methods from the viewpoint of software architecture. Our contribution is the comparison of the existing analysis methods and techniques that can be used for reliability and availability prediction at the architectural level. The objective is to discover which methods are suitable for the reliability and availability prediction of today’s complex systems, what are the shortcomings of the methods, and which research activities need to be conducted in order to overcome these identified shortcomings. The comparison reveals that none of the existing methods entirely fulfill the requirements that are defined in the framework. The comparison framework also defines the characteristics required of new reliability and availability analysis methods. Additionally, the framework is a valuable tool for selecting the best suitable method for architecture analysis. Furthermore, the framework can be extended and used for other evaluation methods as well.

Survey of reliability and availability prediction methods from the viewpoint of software architecture

Software engineering community has proposed several methods to evaluate software architectures with respect to desired quality attributes such as maintainability, performance, and so on. There is, however, little effort on systematically comparing such methods to discover similarities and differences between existing approaches. In this paper, we compare four well known scenario-based SA evaluation methods using an evaluation framework. The framework considers each method from the point of view of method context, stakeholders, structure, and reliability. The comparison reveals that most of the studied methods are structurally similar but there are a number of differences among their activities and techniques. Therefore, some methods overlap, which guides us to identify five common activities that can form a generic process model.

https://ulir.ul.ie/bitstream/handle/10344/2197/2004_Al%20Babar%20&%20Gorton.pdf?sequence=2

Comparison of scenario-based software architecture evaluation methods

Product line architectures (PLAs) have been under continuous attention in the software research community during the past few years. Although several methods have been established to create PLAs there are not available studies comparing PLA methods. Five methods are known to answer the needs of software product lines: COPA, FAST, FORM, KobrA and QADA. In this paper, an evaluation framework is introduced for comparing PLA design methods. The framework considers the methods from the points of view of method context, user, structure and validation. Comparison revealed distinguishable ideologies between the methods. Therefore, methods do not overlap even though they all are PLA design methods. All the methods have been validated on various domains. The most common domains are telecommunication infrastructure and information domains. Some of the methods apply software standards; at least OMG's MDA for method structures, UML for language and IEEE Std-1471-2000 for viewpoint definitions.

http://www.neone.fi/research/Comparison_of_Software_Product_Line_Architecture_Design_Methods.pdf

Comparison of software product line architecture design methods: COPA, FAST, FORM, KobrA and QADA

(1996). Understanding and Evaluating Methodologies: NIMSAD, A Systemic Framework. Journal of the Operational Research Society: Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 594-595.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fjors.1996.67.pdf

Nimal Jayaratna

Papers

Understanding and Evaluating Methodologies: NIMSAD, a Systematic Framework