Showing papers on "Database-centric architecture published in 2013"

Software Architecture Optimization Methods: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract: Due to significant industrial demands toward software systems with increasing complexity and challenging quality requirements, software architecture design has become an important development activity and the research domain is rapidly evolving. In the last decades, software architecture optimization methods, which aim to automate the search for an optimal architecture design with respect to a (set of) quality attribute(s), have proliferated. However, the reported results are fragmented over different research communities, multiple system domains, and multiple quality attributes. To integrate the existing research results, we have performed a systematic literature review and analyzed the results of 188 research papers from the different research communities. Based on this survey, a taxonomy has been created which is used to classify the existing research. Furthermore, the systematic analysis of the research literature provided in this review aims to help the research community in consolidating the existing research efforts and deriving a research agenda for future developments.

A comparative analysis of software architecture recovery techniques

Abstract: Many automated techniques of varying accuracy have been developed to help recover the architecture of a software system from its implementation. However, rigorously assessing these techniques has been hampered by the lack of architectural “ground truths”. Over the past several years, we have collected a set of eight architectures that have been recovered from open-source systems and independently, carefully verified. In this paper, we use these architectures as ground truths in performing a comparative analysis of six state-of-the-art software architecture recovery techniques. We use a number of metrics to assess each technique for its ability to identify a system's architectural components and overall architectural structure. Our results suggest that two of the techniques routinely outperform the rest, but even the best of the lot has surprisingly low accuracy. Based on the empirical data, we identify several avenues of future research in software architecture recovery.

Architecture Framework and Components for the Big Data Ecosystem

Abstract: Big Data are becoming a new technology focus both in science and in industry and motivate technology shift to data centric architecture and operational models. There is a vital need to define the basic information/semantic models, architecture components and operational models that together comprise a so-called Big Data Ecosystem. This paper discusses a nature of Big Data that may originate from different scientific, industry and social activity domains and proposes improved Big Data definition that includes the following parts: Big Data properties ( also called Big Data 5V: Volume, Velocity, Variety, Value and Veracity), data models and structures, data analytics, infrastructure and security. The paper discusses paradigm change from traditional host or service based to data centric architecture and operational models in Big Data. The Big Data Architecture Framework (BDAF) is proposed to address all aspects of the Big Data Ecosystem and includes the following components: Big Data Infrastructure, Big Data Analytics, Data structures and models, Big Data Lifecycle Management, Big Data Security. The paper analyses requirements to and provides suggestions how the mentioned above components can address the main Big Data challenges. The presented work intends to provide a consolidated view of the Big Data phenomena and related challenges to modern technologies, and initiate wide discussion.

A systematic review of system-of-systems architecture research

Abstract: Context: A system of systems is an assemblage of components which individually may be regarded as systems, and which possesses the additional properties that the constituent systems are operationally independent, and are managerially independent. Much has been published about the field of systems of systems by researchers and practitioners, often with the assertion that the system-of-systems design context necessitates the use of architecture approaches that are somewhat different from system-level architecture. However, no systematic review has been conducted to provide an extensive overview of system of systems architecture research.Objective: This paper presents such a systematic review. The objective of this review is to classify and provide a thematic analysis of the reported results in system of systems architecture.Method: The primary studies for the systematic review were identified using a predefined search strategy followed by an extensive manual selection process.Results: We found the primary studies published in a large number of venues, mostly domain-oriented, with no obvious center of a research community of practice. The field seems to be maturing more slowly than other software technologies: Most reported results described individuals or teams working in apparent isolation to develop solutions to particular system-of-systems architecture problems, with no techniques gaining widespread adoption.Conclusions: A comprehensive research agenda for this field should be developed, and further studies should be performed to determine whether the information system-related problems of system of systems architecture are covered by existing software architecture knowledge, and if not, to develop general methods for system-of-systems architecture.

Obtaining ground-truth software architectures

Abstract: Undocumented evolution of a software system and its underlying architecture drives the need for the architecture's recovery from the system's implementation-level artifacts. While a number of recovery techniques have been proposed, they suffer from known inaccuracies. Furthermore, these techniques are difficult to evaluate due to a lack of “ground-truth” architectures that are known to be accurate. To address this problem, we argue for establishing a suite of ground-truth architectures, using a recovery framework proposed in our recent work. This framework considers domain-, application-, and context-specific information about a system, and addresses an inherent obstacle in establishing a ground-truth architecture - the limited availability of engineers who are closely familiar with the system in question. In this paper, we present our experience in recovering the ground-truth architectures of four open-source systems. We discuss the primary insights gained in the process, analyze the characteristics of the obtained ground-truth architectures, and reflect on the involvement of the systems' engineers in a limited but critical fashion. Our findings suggest the practical feasibility of obtaining ground-truth architectures for large systems and encourage future efforts directed at establishing a large scale repository of such architectures.

The Twin Peaks of Requirements and Architecture

Abstract: Quality concerns, often referred to as nonfunctional requirements, service-level agreements, quality attributes, performance constraints, or architecturally significant requirements, describe system-level attributes such as security, performance, reliability, and maintainability. In conjunction with functional requirements, these quality concerns drive and constrain a system's architectural design and often introduce significant trade-offs that must be carefully considered and balanced. The dependencies that exist between requirements and architecture have been referred to as the twin peaks of requirements and architecture. The guest editors of this special issue describe this unique situation.

A new framework to integrate wireless sensor networks with cloud computing

Abstract: Wireless sensors networks have several applications of their own. These applications can further enhanced by integrating a local wireless sensor network to internet, which can be used in real time applications where the results of sensors are stored on the cloud. We propose an architecture that integrates a wireless sensor network to the internet using cloud technology. The resultant system is proved to be reliable, available and extensible. In this paper a new framework is proposed for WSN integration with Cloud computing model, existing WSN will be connected to the proposed framework. Three deployment layer are used to serve user request (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) either from the library which is made from data collected from data centric DC by WSN periodically. The integration controller unit of the proposed framework integrates the sensor network and cloud computing technology which offers reliability, availability and extensibility.

A data‐centric capability‐focused approach for system‐of‐systems architecture modeling and analysis

Abstract: A data-centric, capability-focused approach is proposed to facilitate the architecture modeling and analysis of challenging system-of-systems (SoS). This approach abstracts essential information from the underlying complexity with the architecture modeling in a data-centric and semantically consistent fashion, and allows early understanding and exploration of the logical, behavioral, and performance characteristics to achieve the desired capabilities. More specifically, a high-level data meta-model, depicting the semantic relationships of constituent architectural data elements, is first presented to guide the architectural data modeling, which is aligned well with the US Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) Meta-model (DM2). Then, the development of architectural descriptions and the construction of executable models are studied based on the core architectural data elements. Additionally, architecture analysis using static and executable models are discussed, including static analysis, dynamic analysis, and experimental analysis. The feasibility of the foregoing approach is demonstrated with an illustrative example. ©2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 16:

An Empirical Investigation on the Design of Process Architectures

Abstract: Large-scale enterprises struggle with an effective alignment of busi- ness processes and IT services with business strategy. While process models play an important role for bridging between strategy and IT, there is a need to systematically organize the huge number of models. Process architecture de- fines an overarching structure for the organization of processes. However, there is a notable research gap on how process architectures are designed in practice. In this paper we address this problem by integrating insights and approaches from practice. We use Grounded Theory to analyze eleven in-depth interviews we conducted. Further, we present findings from studying documents provided by the interviewees. Our contribution is a conceptual framework about process architecture design, along with a classification of process architecture arche- types found in practice. Our results have strong implications since they demon- strate that process architecture design is more complex and context-dependent than assumed.

Automated planning for software architecture evolution

Abstract: In previous research, we have developed a theoretical framework to help software architects make better decisions when planning software evolution. Our approach is based on representation and analysis of candidate evolution paths--sequences of transitional architectures leading from the current system to a desired target architecture. One problem with this kind of approach is that it imposes a heavy burden on the software architect, who must explicitly define and model these candidate paths. In this paper, we show how automated planning techniques can be used to support automatic generation of evolution paths, relieving this burden on the architect. We illustrate our approach by applying it to a data migration scenario, showing how this architecture evolution problem can be translated into a planning problem and solved using existing automated planning tools.

JVoiceXML as a modality component in the W3C multimodal architecture

Abstract: Research regarding multimodal interaction led to a multitude of proposals for suitable software architectures. With all architectures describing multimodal systems differently, interoperability is severely hindered. The W3C MMI architecture is a proposed recommendation for a common architecture. In this article, we describe our experiences integrating JVoiceXML into the W3C MMI architecture and identify general limitations with regard to the available design space.

JITTAC: a just-in-time tool for architectural consistency

Abstract: Architectural drift is a widely cited problem in software engineering, where the implementation of a software system diverges from the designed architecture over time causing architecture inconsistencies. Previous work suggests that this architectural drift is, in part, due to programmers' lack of architecture awareness as they develop code. JITTAC is a tool that uses a real-time Reflexion Modeling approach to inform programmers of the architectural consequences of their programming actions as, and often just before, they perform them. Thus, it provides developers with Just-In-Time architectural awareness towards promoting consistency between the as-designed architecture and the as-implemented system. JITTAC also allows programmers to give real-time feedback on introduced inconsistencies to the architect. This facilitates programmer-driven architectural change, when validated by the architect, and allows for more timely team-awareness of the actual architectural consistency of the system. Thus, it is anticipated that the tool will decrease architectural inconsistency over time and improve both developers' and architect's knowledge of their software's architecture. The JITTAC demo is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNqhp40PDD4.

A framework for software reference architecture analysis and review

Abstract: Tight time-to-market needs pushes software companies and IT con- sulting firms to continuously look for techniques to improve their IT services in general, and the design of software architectures in particular. The use of soft- ware reference architectures allows IT consulting firms reusing architectural knowledge and components in a systematic way. In return, IT consulting firms face the need to analyze the return on investment in software reference architec- tures for organizations, and to review these reference architectures in order to ensure their quality and incremental improvement. Little support exists to help IT consulting firms to face these challenges. In this paper we present an empiri- cal framework aimed to support the analysis and review of software reference architectures and their use in IT projects by harvesting relevant evidence from the wide spectrum of involved stakeholders. Such a framework comes from an action research approach held in everis, an IT consulting firm. We report the issues found so far.

Checking Conformance with Reference Architectures: A Case Study

Abstract: Reference architecture can help in enterprise architecture management to develop and operate standardized and maintainable software landscapes. Similar to the software architectures of single systems, however, they are threatened by architecture erosion, i.e. the continuous divergence between intended architectures and their actual realizations. Architecture erosion has negative effects on the maintainability of software systems and on other quality attributes. In this paper, we report on the application of a rule-based architecture conformance checking approach in an industrial case study in which we investigate an industrial reference architecture for the German public administration. The reference architecture and its constraints for implementations are formalized as architecture rules enabling automatic conformance checking tool support. The results from the case study show that the approach is capable of checking reference architecture conformance in realistic settings and helps to avoid software architecture erosion.

CCN-TV: A Data-centric Approach to Real-Time Video Services

Abstract: Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a promising data-centric architecture, based on in-network caching, name-driven routing, and receiver-initiated sessions, which can greatly enhance the way Internet resources are currently used, making support for a broader set of users with increasing traffic demands possible. The CCN vision is, currently, attracting the attention of many researchers across the world, since it has all the potential to become ready to the market, to be gradually deployed in the Internet of today, and to facilitate a graceful transition from a host-centric networking rationale to a more effective data-centric working behaviour. At the same time, several issues have to be investigated before CCN can be safely deployed at the Internet scale. They include routing, congestion control, caching operations, name-space planning, and application design. With reference to application-related facets, it is worth noticing that the demand for TV services is growing at an exponential rate over time, thus requiring a very careful analysis of their performance in CCN architectures. To this end, in the present contribution we deploy a CCN-TV system, capable of delivering real-time streaming TV services, and we evaluate its performance through a simulation campaign based on real-world topologies.

A method for jointly drawing up the functional and design architectures of complex systems during the preliminary system-definition phase

Abstract: In systems engineering, determining a system's architecture is a crucial part of the preliminary system-definition phase because this architecture greatly impacts the quality of the system, the way the subsequent phases of the design process are organised and the overall performance of this process. Consequently, systems architects need methods for defining the couplings of modules (or sub-systems) and for estimating the impact of allocation decisions on candidate system architectures. This paper presents a method that helps simultaneously define the functional and design architectures of complex systems. Starting from an allocation matrix, or domain mapping matrix, which represents the couplings between the elements of two domains (functions vs. components), the method generates a sesign structure matrix (DSM) for each domain. A clustering algorithm is then applied to each DSM in order to generate a rearranged architecture. This method can be used in the synthesis process to provide architectural output ...

A Reference Architecture Based on Reflection for Self-Adaptive Software

Abstract: Self-adaptive Software (SaS) presents specific characteristics compared to traditional ones, as it makes possible adaptations to be incorporated at runtime. These adaptations, when manually performed, normally become an onerous, error-prone activity. In this scenario, automated approaches have been proposed to support such adaptations; however, the development of SaS is not a trivial task. In parallel, reference architectures are reusable artifacts that aggregate the knowledge of architectures of software systems in specific domains. They have facilitated the development, standardization, and evolution of systems of those domains. In spite of their relevance, in the SaS domain, reference architectures that could support a more systematic development of SaS are not found yet. Considering this context, the main contribution of this paper is to present a reference architecture based on reflection for SaS, named RA4SaS (Reference Architecture for SaS). Its main purpose is to support the development of SaS that presents adaptations at runtime. To show the viability of this reference architecture, a case study is presented. As result, it has been observed that RA4SaS has presented good perspective to efficiently contribute to the area of SaS.

Complementing model-driven development for the detection of software architecture erosion

Abstract: Detecting software architecture erosion is an important task during the development and maintenance of software systems. Even in model-driven approaches in which consistency between artifacts can partially be established by construction and consistency issues have been intensively investigated, the intended architecture and its realization may diverge with negative effects on software quality. In this article, we describe an approach to flexible architecture erosion detection for model-driven development approaches. Consistency constraints expressed by architectural aspects called architectural rules are specified as formulas on a common ontology, and models are mapped to instances of that ontology. A knowledge representation and reasoning system is then utilized to check whether these architectural rules are satisfied for a given set of models. We describe three case studies in which this approach has been used to detect architecture erosion flexibly and argue that the negative effects of architecture erosion can be minimized effectively.

Proposal of Data-Centric Network for Mobile and Dynamic Machine-to-Machine Communication

Abstract: SUMMARY Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication is expected to grow in networks of the future, where massive numbers of low cost, low function M2M terminals communicate in many-to-many manner in an extremely mobile and dynamic environment. We propose a network architecture called Data-centric Network (DCN) where communication is done using a data identifier (ID) and the dynamic data registered by mobile terminals can be retrieved by specifying the data ID. DCN mitigates the problems of prior arts, which are large size of routing table and transaction load of name resolution service. DCN introduces concept of route attraction and aggregation in which the related routes are attracted to an aggregation point and aggregated to reduce routing table size, and route optimization in which optimized routes are established routes to reduce access transaction load to the aggregation points. These allow the proposed architecture to deal with ever increasing number of data and terminals with frequent mobility and changes in data.

Co-evolution of component-based architecture-model and object-oriented source code

Abstract: With the evolution of software systems, architecture model and system implementation tend to drift apart. While suitable architecture model supports architects and developers in better understanding the software system, the missing synchronization to source code of the underlying implementation can result in outdated architecture models. In this paper, we address two challenges in today's architecture-driven software development: architecture drift and architecture erosion. We introduce a co-evolution approach of a component-based architecture model and object-oriented source code. Our novel approach supports software architects and software developers by introducing a tight and continuous synchronization of a component-based architecture model and the source code. To get architecture evolution under control, our co-evolution approach maps architecture changes done via the source code to the architecture model and vice versa. This explicit support of changes and refactorings at architecture-level prevents unintended architecture violations. In order to evaluate our approach, we plan different case studies whose layout is designed in the evaluation section.

Architecture and Agility: Married, Divorced, or Just Good Friends?

Abstract: Does agile development need architecture? Does architecture need agile development? These two questions are debated time and again, frequently with great passion but quite often more polarized than open minded. In this edition of the column, the authors try to offer a more evenhanded perspective on this debate. Instead of posing and discussing culturally biased assumptions, they consider a more open and neutral question: what is the relationship between architecture and process?

Supporting Variability Management in Architecture Design and Implementation

Abstract: Variability management and architecture design and implementation are mostly separate activities. Existing variability management approaches focus on documenting the variable properties of a product line and on deriving products as members of the product line. Their support for architecture modeling is limited to capabilities needed for product derivation. Existing architecture design and implementation tools, on the other hand, support different architectural and implementation views on a software system but lack support for variability tracing and modeling during development and design. To close this gap, we present an approach for integrated variability management during software architecture design and implementation. The approach is an extension of LISA, a model and toolkit for architecture management and analysis. Variability modeling is provided by an additional view on a single consistent architecture model leading to a tight integration of variability and architecture modeling and implementation. Architects and developers are thus constantly aware of the variants they are working on and their implications on architecture design and implementation.

Data architectures for an organizational memory information system

Abstract: A framework is developed that supports the theoretical design of an organizational memory information system (OMIS). The framework provides guidance for managing the processing capabilities of an organization by matching knowledge location, flexibility, and processing requirements with data architecture. This framework is tested using three different sets of data attributes and data architectures from 147 business professionals that have experience in IS development. We find that trade-offs exist between the amount of knowledge embedded in the data architecture and the flexibility of data architectures. This trade-off is contingent on the characteristics of the set of tasks that the data architecture is being designed to support. Further, the match is important to consider in the design of OMIS database architecture.

Ultimate architecture enforcement: custom checks enforced at code-commit time

Abstract: Creating a software architecture is a critical task in the development of software systems. However, the architecture discussed and carefully created is often not entirely followed in the implementation. Unless the architecture is communicated effectively to all developers, divergence between the intended architecture (created by the architect) and the actual architecture (found in the source code) tends to gradually increase. Static analysis tools, which are often used to check coding conventions and best practices, can help. However, the common use of static analysis tools for architecture enforcement has two limitations. One is the fact that design rules specific to a software architecture are not known and hence not enforced by the tool. The other limitation is more of a practical issue: static analysis tools are often integrated to the IDE or to a continuous integration environment; they report violations but the developers may choose to ignore them. This paper reports a successful experience where we addressed these two limitations for a large codebase comprising over 50 Java applications. Using a free open source tool called checkstyle and its Java API, we implemented custom checks for design constraints specified by the architecture of our software systems. In addition, we created a script that executes automatically on the Subversion software configuration management server prior to any code commit operation. This script runs the custom checks and denies the commit operation in case a violation is found. When that happens, the developer gets a clear error message explaining the problem. The architecture team is also notified and can proactively contact the developer to address any lack of understanding of the architecture. This experience report provides technical details of our architecture enforcement approach and recommendations to employ this or similar solutions more effectively.

An integrated executable architecture framework for System of Systems development

Abstract: This paper presents a framework for integrated executable architectures, which is the integration of architecture modelling tools and simulation tools. This framework allows the use of executable architectures during the conceptual analysis and design phases in order to address system complexity at an early stage of the development. The proposed concept of integrated executable architecture enables a dynamic combination of the formerly separated and static areas of business processes, system design and resource modelling. It provides time-based, dynamic visualisation of system behaviour by combining business process simulation, system simulation and synthetic environments. This allows an early understanding of emergent behaviour, time-dependent behaviour and performance estimation of the architecture.