Abstract
The embedded systems domain has grown exponentially over the past years. The industry is forced by the market to rapidly improve and release new products to beat the competition. Frenetic development rhythms thus shape this domain and give rise to several new challenges for software design and development. One of them is dealing with trade-offs between run-time and design-time quality attributes. To study practices, processes and tools concerning the management of run-time and design-time quality attributes as well as the trade-offs among them from the perspective of embedded systems software engineers. An exploratory case study with two qualitative data collection steps, namely interviews and a focus group, involving six different companies from the embedded systems domain with a total of twenty participants. The interviewed subjects showed a preference for run-time over design-time qualities. Trade-offs between design-time and run-time qualities are very common, but they are often implicit, due to the lack of adequate monitoring tools and practices. Practitioners prefer to deal with trade-offs in the most lightweight way possible, by applying ad-hoc practices, thus avoiding any overhead incurred. Finally, practitioners have elaborated on how they envision the ideal tool support for dealing with trade-offs. Although it is notoriously difficult to deal with trade-offs, constantly monitoring the quality attributes of interest with automated tools is key in making explicit and prudent trade-offs and mitigating the risk of incurring technical debt.
Highlights
Over the past years, embedded systems (ES) have experienced exponential growth, both in terms of size and complexity as well as the number of domains where they are applied
The following findings emerged from their analyses: (a) Correctness negatively affects Performance since solving bugs usually introduces inefficiencies in the source code that affect performance, and (b) increasing Performance negatively affects Reusability since solutions that improve performance have a negative impact on quality metrics like cohesion, coupling and size
By analysing and understanding how the industry deals with trade-offs on a day-byday basis, it is possible to propose solutions that support the industry in addressing this complicated problem
Summary
Over the past years, embedded systems (ES) have experienced exponential growth, both in terms of size and complexity as well as the number of domains where they are applied. The management of trade-offs is still an unexplored area: there are no tools available, but, to the best of our knowledge, there is no evidence regarding the specific needs of the embedded systems industry on performing quality attributes trade-offs. Concerning the second pilot, the interview allowed us to improve the time required to ask the interviewee all the questions and it did not result in any change to the protocol. Design-time quality attributes determine the ease of managing the system artefacts during the software development lifecycle and the sustainability of the system over time (e.g. Maintainability, Reusability, Testability) We adopted such a dichotomy in order to focus our efforts on the trade-offs between the quality attributes across the two categories rather than within them
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