Architectural Tactics Research Articles

Test suite assessment of safety-critical systems using safety tactics and fault-based mutation testing

A safety-critical system is a system in which the software malfunctioning could result in death, injury, or damage to the environment. Addressing safety concerns early on at the architecture design level is critical to guide the subsequent life cycle activities to ensure that the eventual system is reliable. A fundamental approach to address safety at the design level is the adoption of architectural tactics. It is crucial for safety-critical systems to correctly implement the constraints as defined by the selected safety tactics. Given the limitations of traditional safety measures, particularly in conducting thorough analyses of safety tactics at the architectural design level, our motivation is to close this gap by integrating safety tactics and fault-based mutation testing. This article proposes a systematic approach for assessing the adequacy of test suites of safety-critical systems based on these architectural safety tactics. Our proposed approach involves the integration of safety tactics and fault-based mutation testing to comprehensively assess the adequacy of test suites in safety-critical systems. At the core of our methodology is the adoption of architectural safety tactics, addressing potential issues at the design level. We leverage fault-based testing, utilizing a dedicated metamodel and domain-specific language (DSL) to model safety views and their relation to the code. We use a case study to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach using fault-injection techniques. Our study shows that this systematic approach is feasible and effective for test suite assessment of safety-critical systems.

Efficiency and Effectiveness: Enterprise Architecture Strategies for Healthcare Service

In a globally evolving health landscape, attaining maximum efficiency and efficacy is of the utmost importance. The present study investigates the utilization of Enterprise Architecture tactics to enhance healthcare services, specifically by streamlining operations and boosting overall effectiveness. Through an examination of organizational processes, patient care, information management, and healthcare delivery, this study sheds light on the transformative potential of EA as a framework. This research investigates the strategic alignment of health systems through the application of EA principles to establish an infrastructure that is both harmonious and interoperable. The present study investigates the significance of digital transformation within the healthcare sector, with a particular focus on the ways in which EA strategies can enable the smooth incorporation of technological advancements to enhance patient outcomes. This study emphasizes the need for patient-specific health systems. It highlights the significance of a patient-centered approach in the context of EA. By conducting an exhaustive examination of the implementation of EA in the healthcare sector, this study intends to provide organizations with direction on how to enhance their service provision. Empirical evidence indicates that by utilizing EA to harmonize business objectives, technological progress, and patient-centric methodologies, significant enhancements in efficiency and efficacy can be achieved, thereby culminating in elevated benchmarks of healthcare provision. In conclusion, the study urges the extensive implementation of EA strategies within health systems, acknowledging its capacity to transform service frameworks and foster a health ecosystem that is more attentive to patients and proactive.

Program Synthesis for Cyber-Resilience

Architectural tactics enable stakeholders to achieve cyber-resilience requirements. They permit systems to react, resist, detect, and recover from cyber incidents. This paper presents an approach to generate source code for architectural tactics typically used in safety and mission-critical systems. Our approach extensively relies on the use of the <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Event-B</small> formal method and the <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">EventB2Java</small> code generation plugin of the Rodin platform. It leverages the modeling of architectural tactics in the <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Event-B</small> formal language and uses a set of <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">EventB2Java</small> transformation rules to generate certified code implementations for the said tactics. Since resilience requirements are statements about a system over time, and because of the fact that the <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Event-B</small> language does not provide (native) support for the writing of temporal specifications, we have implemented a novel Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) extension for <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Event-B</small> . We support several architectural tactics for availability, performance, and security. The generated code is certified in the following sense: discharging proof obligations in Rodin - the platform we use for writing the <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Event-B</small> models - attests to the soundness of the architectural tactics modelled in <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Event-B</small> , and the soundness of the translation encoded by the <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">EventB2Java</small> tool attests to the code correctness. Finally, we demonstrate the usability of our resilience validation approach with the aid of an Autonomous Vehicle System. It further helped us increase our confidence in the soundness of our Event-B LTL extension.

Microservice Security Metrics for Secure Communication, Identity Management, and Observability

Microservice architectures are increasingly being used to develop application systems. Despite many guidelines and best practices being published, architecting microservice systems for security is challenging. Reasons are the size and complexity of microservice systems, their polyglot nature, and the demand for the continuous evolution of these systems. In this context, to manually validate that security architecture tactics are employed as intended throughout the system is a time-consuming and error-prone task. In this article, we present an approach to avoid such manual validation before each continuous evolution step in a microservice system, which we demonstrate using three widely used categories of security tactics: secure communication, identity management, and observability. Our approach is based on a review of existing security guidelines, the gray literature, and the scientific literature, from which we derived Architectural Design Decisions (ADDs) with the found security tactics as decision options. In our approach, we propose novel detectors to detect these decision options automatically and formally defined metrics to measure the conformance of a system to the different options of the ADDs. We apply the approach to a case study data set of 10 open source microservice systems, plus another 20 variants of these systems, for which we manually inspected the source code for security tactics. We demonstrate and assess the validity and appropriateness of our metrics by performing an assessment of their conformance to the ADDs in our systems’ dataset through statistical methods.

Architectural tactics in software architecture: A systematic mapping study

Architectural tactics are a key abstraction of software architecture, and support the systematic design and analysis of software architectures to satisfy quality attributes. Since originally proposed in 2003, architectural tactics have been extended and adapted to address additional quality attributes and newer kinds of systems, making quite hard for researchers and practitioners to master this growing body of specialized knowledge. This paper presents the design, execution and results of a systematic mapping study of architectural tactics in software architecture literature. The study found 552 studies in well-known digital libraries, of which 79 were selected and 12 more were added with snowballing, giving a total of 91 primary studies. Key findings are: (i) little rigor has been used to characterize and define architectural tactics; (ii) most architectural tactics proposed in the literature do not conform to the original definition; and (iii) there is little industrial evidence about the use of architectural tactics. This study organizes and summarizes the scientific literature to date about architectural tactics, identifies research opportunities, and argues for the need of more systematic definition and description of tactics.Editor’s note: Open Science material was validated by the Journal of Systems and Software Open Science Board.

Architectural Tactics in Software Architecture: A Systematic Mapping Study - Study protocol

Architectural Tactics in Software Architecture: A Systematic Mapping Study - Study protocol

Architectural Tactics in Software Architecture: A Systematic Mapping Study - Study protocol

Architectural Tactics in Software Architecture: A Systematic Mapping Study - Study protocol

Architectural Tactics in Software Architecture: A Systematic Mapping Study - Study protocol

Architectural Tactics in Software Architecture: A Systematic Mapping Study - Study protocol

A survey of software architectural change detection and categorization techniques

Software architecture is defined as the structural construction, design decisions implementation, evolution and knowledge sharing mechanisms of a system. Software architecture documentation help architects with decision making, guide developers during implementation, and preserve architectural decisions so that future caretakers are able to better understand an architect’s solution. Many modern-day software development teams are focusing more on architectural consistency of software design to better cope with the cost-time-efforts, continuous integration, software glitches, security backdoors, regulatory inspections, human values, and so on. Therefore, in order to better reflect the software design challenges, the development teams review the architectural design either on a regular basis or after completing certain milestones or releases. However, many studies have focused on architectural change detection and classification as the essential steps for reviewing design, discovering architectural tactics and knowledge, analyzing software stability, tracing and auditing software development history, recovering design decisions, generating design summary, and so on.In this paper, we survey state-of-the-art architectural change detection and categorization techniques and identify future research directions. To the best of our knowledge, our survey is the first comprehensive report on this area. However, in this survey, we compare available techniques using various quality attributes relevant to software architecture for different implementation levels and types. Moreover, our analysis shows that there is a lack of lightweight techniques (in terms of human intervention, algorithmic complexity, and frequency of usage) feasible to process hundreds and thousands of change revisions of a project. We also realize that rigorous focuses are required for capturing the design decision associativity of the architectural change detection techniques for practical use in the design review process. However, our survey on architectural change classification shows that existing automatic change classification techniques are not promising enough to use for real-world scenarios and reliable post analysis of causes of architectural change is not possible without manual intervention. There is also a lack of empirical data to construct an architectural change taxonomy, and further exploration in this direction would add much value to architectural change management.

Mining Architecture Tactics and Quality Attributes knowledge in Stack Overflow

Context:Architecture Tactics (ATs) are architectural building blocks that provide general architectural solutions for addressing Quality Attributes (QAs) issues. Mining and analysing QA–AT knowledge can help the software architecture community better understand architecture design. However, manually capturing and mining this knowledge is labour-intensive and difficult. Objective:Using Stack Overflow (SO) as our source, our main goals are to effectively mine such knowledge; and to have some sense of how developers use ATs with respect to QA concerns from related discussions. Methods:We applied a semi-automatic dictionary-based mining approach to extract the QA–AT posts in SO. With the mined QA–AT posts, we identified the relationships between ATs and QAs. Results:Our approach allows us to mine QA–AT knowledge accurately with an F-measure of 0.865 and Performance of 82.2%. Using this mining approach, we are able to discover architectural synonyms of QAs and ATs used by designers, from which we discover how developers apply ATs to address quality requirements. Conclusions:We make two contributions in this work: First, we demonstrated a semi-automatic approach to mine ATs and QAs from SO posts; Second, we identified little-known design relationships between QAs and ATs and grouped architectural design considerations to aid architects make architecture tactics design decisions.

Architecting Internet of Things Systems with Blockchain

Blockchain offers a distributed ledger to record data collected from Internet of Thing (IoT) devices as immutable and tamper-proof transactions and securely shared among authorized participants in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network. Despite the growing interest in using blockchain for securing IoT systems, there is a general lack of systematic research and comprehensive review of the design issues on the integration of blockchain and IoT from the software architecture perspective. This article presents a catalog of architectural tactics for the design of IoT systems supported by blockchain as a result of a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on IoT and blockchain to extract the commonly reported quality attributes, design decisions, and relevant architectural tactics for the architectural design of this category of systems. Our findings are threefold:&lt;?brk?&gt; (i) identification of security, scalability, performance, and interoperability as the commonly reported quality attributes; (ii) a catalog of twelve architectural tactics for the design of IoT systems supported by blockchain; and (iii) gaps in research that include tradeoffs among quality attributes and identified tactics. These tactics might provide architects and designers with different options when searching for an optimal architectural design that meets the quality attributes of interest and constraints of a system.

Constructing the Electronic Countermeasures System Architecture Based on Case-Based Reasoning and Bayesian Inference

In order to promote the quality of electronic countermeasures system architecture, this paper present a methodology for constructing the electronic countermeasures system architecture based on case-based reasoning and Bayesian inference. The methodology described history cases by CPN model, established the largest similarity case and feasibility space by combining the CPN color set and k-means algorithm, and then proposed the optimizing orderings of variables of Bayesian by the LFS (Legal Firing Sequence) of CPN model and maximum information entropy, learned the Bayesian networks structure by K2 algorithm using the result of orderings of variables. At last, this paper concluded the electronic countermeasures system architecture tactics and discussed the way of reasoning for constructing the electronic countermeasures system architecture.

Designing privacy-friendly data repositories: a framework for a blockchain that follows the GDPR

PurposeThe paper posits that a solution for businesses to use privacy-friendly data repositories for its customers’ data is to change from the traditional centralized repository to a trusted, decentralized data repository. Blockchain is a technology that provides such a data repository. However, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) assumed a centralized data repository, and it is commonly argued that blockchain technology is not usable. This paper aims to posit a framework for adopting a blockchain that follows the GDPR.Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses the Levy and Ellis’ narrative review of literature methodology, which is based on constructivist theory posited by Lincoln and Guba. Using five information systems and computer science databases, the researchers searched for studies using the keywords GDPR and blockchain, using a forward and backward search technique. The search identified a corpus of 416 candidate studies, from which the researchers applied pre-established criteria to select 39 studies. The researchers mined this corpus for concepts, which they clustered into themes. Using the accepted computer science practice of privacy by design, the researchers combined the clustered themes into the paper’s posited framework.FindingsThe paper posits a framework that provides architectural tactics for designing a blockchain that follows GDPR to enhance privacy. The framework explicitly addresses the challenges of GDPR compliance using the unimagined decentralized storage of personal data. The framework addresses the blockchain–GDPR tension by establishing trust between a business and its customers vis-à-vis storing customers’ data. The trust is established through blockchain’s capability of providing the customer with private keys and control over their data, e.g. processing and access.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper provides a framework that demonstrates that blockchain technology can be designed for use in GDPR compliant solutions. In using the framework, a blockchain-based solution provides the ability to audit and monitor privacy measures, demonstrates a legal justification for processing activities, incorporates a data privacy policy, provides a map for data processing and ensures security and privacy awareness among all actors. The research is limited to a focus on blockchain–GDPR compliance; however, future research is needed to investigate the use of the framework in specific domains.Practical implicationsThe paper posits a framework that identifies the strategies and tactics necessary for GDPR compliance. Practitioners need to compliment the framework with rigorous privacy risk management, i.e. conducting a privacy risk analysis, identifying strategies and tactics to address such risks and preparing a privacy impact assessment that enhances accountability and transparency of a blockchain.Originality/valueWith the increasingly strategic use of data by businesses and the contravening growth of data privacy regulation, alternative technologies could provide businesses with a means to nurture trust with its customers regarding collected data. However, it is commonly assumed that the decentralized approach of blockchain technology cannot be applied to this business need. This paper posits a framework that enables a blockchain to be designed that follows the GDPR; thereby, providing an alternative for businesses to collect customers’ data while ensuring the customers’ trust.

Tales of the vulnerability of African black women in transit spaces

This visual project uses original surrealist collage-making as a critical architectural tactic to capture and expose the vulnerability of black female bodies in spaces of urban–rural transit. The surrealist images act as an allegorical tool to comment critique and question the very ‘real’ experiences and vulnerabilities black African women face as they transit between urban and rural landscapes today. My images move beyond the limited methods provided by traditional architectural knowledge to explore alternative spatial imaginaries of everyday issues of vulnerability and safety and to reveal some of the nuanced gendered dynamics black women experience in transit spaces. By drawing attention to how women linger and navigate through such spaces, my work seeks to provoke questions regarding the potential for more progressive and imaginative urban futures in the way urban transit and public space is designed.

Architectural Considerations for Blockchain Based Systems for Financial Transactions

Systems supporting financial dealings at an enterprise scale must be able to handle large volumes of transactions in a secure manner while maintaining high level of operational availability. These systems must also have the flexibility to interface with many third-party applications with ease. In this paper we explore these architectural considerations for systems supporting financial transactions using the blockchain technology. We identify the strengths of this technology in achieving the qualities associated with these architectural considerations and suggest architectural tactics that can be used to overcome its weaknesses. A reference architecture is presented along with a prototype that implements this architecture using Iroha, a commercially available financial ledger for blockchain systems.

A tale of three systems: Case studies on the application of architectural tactics for cyber-foraging

Cyber-foraging is a technique to enable mobile devices to extend their computing power and storage by offloading computation or data to more powerful servers located in the cloud or in single-hop proximity. In previous work, we developed a set of reusable architectural tactics for cyber-foraging systems. We define architectural tactics as design decisions that influence the achievement of a system quality. In this article we present the results of three case studies to validate the application of the tactics to promote their intended functional and non-functional requirements. The first two case studies focus on the identification of architectural tactics in existing cyber-foraging systems. The third case study focuses on the development of a new cyber-foraging system using the architectural tactics. The results of the case studies are an initial demonstration of the validity of the tactics, and the potential for taking a tactics-driven approach to fulfill functional and non-functional requirements for cyber-foraging systems.

Architectural Tactics for Big Data Cybersecurity Analytics Systems: A Review

ContextBig Data Cybersecurity Analytics (BDCA) systems leverage big data technologies for analyzing security events data to protect organizational networks, computers, and data from cyber attacks. ObjectiveWe aimed at identifying the most frequently reported quality attributes and architectural tactics for BDCA systems. MethodWe used Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method for reviewing 74 papers. ResultOur findings are twofold: (i) identification of 12 most frequently reported quality attributes for BDCA systems; and (ii) identification and codification of 17 architectural tactics for addressing the identified quality attributes. The identified tactics include six performance tactics, four accuracy tactics, two scalability tactics, three reliability tactics, and one security and usability tactic each. ConclusionOur study reveals that in the context of BDCA (a) performance, accuracy and scalability are the most important quality concerns (b) data analytics is the most critical architectural component (c) despite the significance of interoperability, modifiability, adaptability, generality, stealthiness, and privacy assurance, these quality attributes lack explicit architectural support (d) empirical investigation is required to evaluate the impact of the codified tactics and explore the quality trade-offs and dependencies among the tactics and (e) the reported tactics need to be modelled using a standardized modelling language such as UML.

Review of Architectural Patterns and Tactics for Microservices in Academic and Industrial Literature

Microservices are an emerging trend for development of service-oriented software. This approach proposes to build each application as a collection of small services running on separate process and inter-communicating with lightweight mechanisms. Systematic development of microservices is hampered by the lack of a catalog of emerging recurrent architectural solutions (architectural patterns) and design decisions (architectural tactics). This article describes a systematic review of academic and industrial literature regarding architectural patterns and architectural tactics for microservices. The review yield 44 architectural patterns in academic sources and 74 in industrial ones, as well as a few architectural tactics originally proposed to address related problems. Most architectural patterns and tactics are associated to one of just five quality attributes: scalability, flexibility, testability, performance, and elasticity. Also, most microservices in academic (but not industrial) literature are related to DevOps and IoT. The findings lead to propose a new taxonomy of microservice architectural patterns.

Empirical validation of cyber-foraging architectural tactics for surrogate provisioning

BackgroundCyber-foraging architectural tactics are used to build mobile applications that leverage proximate, intermediate cloud surrogates for computation offload and data staging. Compared to direct access to cloud resources, the use of intermediate surrogates improves system qualities such as response time, energy efficiency, and resilience. However, the state-of-the-art mostly focuses on introducing new architectural tactics rather than quantitatively comparing the existing tactics, which can help software architects and software engineers with new insights on each tactic. AimOur work aims at empirically evaluating the architectural tactics for surrogate provisioning, specifically with respect to resilience and energy efficiency. MethodWe follow a systematic experimentation framework to collect relevant data on Static Surrogate Provisioning and Dynamic Surrogate Provisioning tactics. Our experimentation approach can be reused for validation of other cyber-foraging tactics. We perform statistical analysis to support our hypotheses, as compared to baseline measurements with no cyber-foraging tactics deployed. ResultsOur findings show that Static Surrogate Provisioning tactics provide higher resilience than Dynamic Surrogate Provisioning tactics for runtime environmental changes. Both surrogate provisioning tactics perform with no significant difference with respect to their energy efficiency. We observe that the overhead of the runtime optimization algorithm is similar for both tactic types. ConclusionsThe presented quantitative evidence on the impact of different tactics empowers software architects and software engineers with the ability to make more conscious design decisions. This contribution, as a starting point, emphasizes the use of quantifiable metrics to make better-informed trade-offs between desired quality attributes. Our next step is to focus on the impact of runtime programmable infrastructure on the quality of cyber-foraging systems.

Enhancing Call-Level Interfaces with Thread-Safe Local Memory Structures

Database applications are being increasingly under pressure to respond effectively to ever more demanding performance requirements. Software architects can resort to several well-known architectural tactics to minimize the possibility of coming across with any performance bottleneck. The usage of call-level interfaces (CLIs) is a strategy aimed at reducing the overhead of business components. CLIs are low-level APIs that provide a high-performance environment to execute standard SQL statements on relational and also on some NoSQL database (DB) servers. In spite of these valuable features, CLIs are not thread-safe when distinct threads need to share datasets retrieved through Select statements from databases. Thus, even in situations where two or more threads could share a dataset, there is no other possibility than providing each thread with its own dataset, this way leading to an increased need of computational resources. To overcome this drawback, in this paper we propose a new natively thread-safe architecture. The implementation herein presented is based on a thread-safe updatable local memory structure (LMS) where the data retrieved from databases is kept. A proof of concept based on Java Database Connectivity type 4 (JDBC) for SQL Server 2008 is presented and also a performance assessment.