Social science research contains a wealth of knowledge for people seeking to understand collaboration processes. The authors argue that public managers should look inside the “black box” of collaboration processes. Inside, they will find a complex construct of five variable dimensions: governance, administration, organizational autonomy, mutuality, and norms. Public managers must know these five dimensions and manage them intentionally in order to collaborate effectively.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/4096567.pdf

Collaboration Processes: Inside the Black Box

This paper briefly summarizes software reuse research, discusses major research contributions and unsolved problems, provides pointers to key publications, and introduces four papers selected from The Eighth International Conference on Software Reuse (ICSR8).

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Software reuse research: status and future

Software architectures have high costs for change, are complex, and erode during evolution We believe these problems are partially due to knowledge vaporization Currently, almost all the knowledge and information about the design decisions the architecture is based on are implicitly embedded in the architecture, but lack a first-class representation Consequently, knowledge about these design decisions disappears into the architecture, which leads to the aforementioned problems In this paper, a new perspective on software architecture is presented, which views software architecture as a composition of a set of explicit design decisions This perspective makes architectural design decisions an explicit part of a software architecture Consequently, knowledge vaporization is reduced, thereby alleviating some of the fundamental problems of software architecture

/pdf/software-architecture-as-a-set-of-architectural-design-ngxsdugb1o.pdf

Software Architecture as a Set of Architectural Design Decisions

Component-based software structuring principles are now commonplace at the application level; but componentization is far less established when it comes to building low-level systems software. Although there have been pioneering efforts in applying componentization to systems-building, these efforts have tended to target specific application domains (e.g., embedded systems, operating systems, communications systems, programmable networking environments, or middleware platforms). They also tend to be targeted at specific deployment environments (e.g., standard personal computer (PC) environments, network processors, or microcontrollers). The disadvantage of this narrow targeting is that it fails to maximize the genericity and abstraction potential of the component approach. In this article, we argue for the benefits and feasibility of a generic yet tailorable approach to component-based systems-building that offers a uniform programming model that is applicable in a wide range of systems-oriented target domains and deployment environments. The component model, called OpenCom, is supported by a reflective runtime architecture that is itself built from components. After describing OpenCom and evaluating its performance and overhead characteristics, we present and evaluate two case studies of systems we have built using OpenCom technology, thus illustrating its benefits and its general applicability.

https://ftaiani.ouvaton.org/ressources/TOCS.pdf

A generic component model for building systems software

To maintain and understand large applications, it is important to know their architecture. The first problem is that unlike classes and packages, architecture is not explicitly represented in the code. The second problem is that successful applications evolve over time, so their architecture inevitably drifts. Reconstructing the architecture and checking whether it is still valid is therefore an important aid. While there is a plethora of approaches and techniques supporting architecture reconstruction, there is no comprehensive software architecture reconstruction state of the art and it is often difficult to compare the approaches. This paper presents a state of the art in software architecture reconstruction approaches.

/pdf/software-architecture-reconstruction-a-process-oriented-7l4j2qqyzy.pdf

Software Architecture Reconstruction: A Process-Oriented Taxonomy

Most consumer electronics today contain embedded software. In the early days, developing CE software presented relatively minor challenges, but in the past several years three significant problems have arisen: size and complexity of the software in individual products; the increasing diversity of products and their software; and the need for decreased development time. The question of handling diversity and complexity in embedded software at an increasing production speed becomes an urgent one. The authors present their belief that the answer lies not in hiring more software engineers. They are not readily available, and even if they were, experience shows that larger projects induce larger lead times and often result in greater complexity. Instead, they believe that the answer lies in the use and reuse of software components that work within an explicit software architecture. The Koala model, a component-oriented approach detailed in this article, is their way of handling the diversity of software in consumer electronics. Used for embedded software in TV sets, it allows late binding of reusable components with no additional overhead.

/pdf/the-koala-component-model-for-consumer-electronics-software-2vr48y3wrv.pdf

The Koala component model for consumer electronics software

This paper reports on our experience with a relational approach to support the analysis of existing software architectures. The analysis options provide for visualization and view calculation. The approach has been applied for reverse engineering. It is also possible to check concrete designs against architecture-related rules. The paper surveys the theory, the tools and some of the applications developed so far. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A relational approach to support software architecture analysis

Consumer products are becoming increasingly software intensive. The software complexity of individual products grows, while the diversity of products increases and the lead time must decrease. Software reuse is the answer to this, not only within a family but also between families of consumer products. We have devised an approach based upon a software component technology to enable reuse. This paper describes that approach, and it zooms in on two important aspects of component-based development. One aspect concerns the prediction of system properties from properties of components, which we illustrate using thread synchronization as example. The other aspect concerns branching of our software in our configuration management systems, where our analysis leads to the discovery that we may be constantly rewriting our own code and to the definition of the turn-over factor to quantify this. We end this paper with a brief validation of our approach.

R. van Ommering

Papers

The Koala component model for consumer electronics software

A relational approach to support software architecture analysis

Software reuse in product populations

Relation partition algebra — mathematical aspects of uses and part-of relations

Abstract derivation of transitive closure algorithms