Software Architecture Perspective Research Articles

A Process for Monitoring the Impact of Architecture Principles on Sustainability: An Industrial Case Study

Architecture principles affect a software system holistically. Given their alignment with a business strategy, they should be incorporated within the validation process covering aspects of sustainability. However, current research discusses the influence of architecture principles on sustainability in a limited context. Our objective was to introduce a reusable process for monitoring and evaluating the impact of architecture principles on sustainability from a software architecture perspective. We sought to demonstrate the application of such a process in professional practice. A qualitative case study was conducted in the context of a Dutch airport management company. Data collection involved a case analysis and the execution of two rounds of expert interviews. We (i) identified a set of case-related key performance indicators, (ii) utilized commonly accepted measurement tools, and (iii) employed graphical representations in the form of spider charts to monitor the sustainability impacts. The real-world observations were evaluated through a concluding focus group. Our findings indicated that architecture principles were a feasible mechanism with which to address sustainability across all different architecture layers within the enterprise. The experts considered the sustainability analysis valuable in guiding the software architecture process towards sustainability. With the emphasis on principles, we facilitate industry adoption by embedding sustainability in existing mechanisms.

Blockchain-based fine-grained digital twin sharing framework for social manufacturing

The lack of digitalization basis of social manufacturing resources has brought barriers to perform efficient production coordination in social manufacturing network. Digital twin can be a promising carrier for bridging this gap. However, the complexity of digital twin makes small and medium enterprises, and individual resource owners in social manufacturing hard to apply this technology. Benefiting from the convenience of sharing in social communities, this paper presents a blockchain-based fine-grained digital twin sharing framework to accelerate the popularization and iteration of digital twins in social manufacturing. A hybrid design method, called model–view–controller domain-driven design (MVC-DDD), is proposed to decompose and decouple complicated digital twin instances into small granules from software architecture perspective. Then, blockchain is introduced as the underlying infrastructure to innovate the specific sharing mechanisms using zero-knowledge proof for decentralized registering, authorizing, and extracting digital twin granules. Moreover, the sharing incentive mechanism is also explored to ensure the feasibility and sustainability for the whole sharing behaviors. Finally, different types of 3D printers are selected for implementing the referential digital twin architecture for generating the sharable granules. A series of experiments are conducted to show that our sharing mechanism has a good performance in terms of throughput, latency and network bandwidth. Additionally, the incentive mechanism is also analyzed generate the management implications to facilitate the digital twin providers with different scales for sharing.

Integration of Software Architecture in Requirements Elicitation for Rapid Software Development

Software Architecture describes system components and their connections. Requirement elicitation catering the perspective of software architecture is quite challenging and relatively less explored research area for the rapid software development. It has gain growing interest due to reusability of existing modules with less cost and quick developmental time. Software architecture in the context of requirement engineering is an abstraction of software system performing a particular task with the help of group of executable architectural components. In this paper, systematic literature review is adapted as a methodology to explore software architectural elements that provides better performance and simplicity in requirement engineering. We analyzed, reviewed and listed the strategies, tools & techniques along with state-of-the-art mechanisms, pros and cons and application areas. Architectural components that are already implemented in the requirement elicitation process for effective software architectural design are briefly analyzed. Purpose of the paper is to explore and discuss the elements that make software architecture more integral and flexible for traceability of requirements. Another purpose is to identify relation between the software requirements and architecture along with exploring the components to bridge gap between requirements and architecture by critically evaluating industrially and academically proposed methods, tools and frameworks. We also highlighted the open research challenges of Software architecture in requirement elicitation for better software development. In the later section, a resource bank is created acting as a valuable model that encompasses targeted relevant groups, sub-groups with latest software architecture tools & techniques, methods and framework sources to facilitate effective requirement engineering.

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:<?brk?> (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.

A software architecture perspective about Moodle flexibility for supporting empirical research of teaching theories.

Moodle represents a great contribution to the educational world since it provides an evolving platform for Virtual Learning Management Systems (VLMS) that became a standard de facto for most of the educational institutions around the world. Through the pedagogical functions provided, it collects in the many globally spread out databases a huge amount of information regarding the activities that teachers and students perform during the learning process. This reality makes Moodle a natural choice for conducting experimental research by Artificial Intelligence researchers interested in theories for improving learning and teaching; particularly those related with the controversial learning styles concept. Roughly defined, a learning style intends to be a model of the way and media an apprentice acquires knowledge and hence the way a teacher should present that knowledge to the apprentice matching his/her learning style. Independently of the many controversies (be these scientific, psychological or even ethical) about the soundness and real outcomes that such ideas can bring to improve learning, it’s a worthy intriguing research area for many researchers pursuing the ideal automated teacher: the teachbot dream. Behind this goal we have developed Middle, a Moodle plug-in able to infer the learning style of each student taking a course using an advanced version of a Bayesian network model that we previously tested. Middle intends support personalized teaching based on the Felder-Silverman’s ILS model and has been evaluated through controlled experiments and pilot test in high schools and university courses. Such experiments showed promising results that shed some light on learning styles modeling and its potential outcomes. During the experience we found strong limitations in the Moodle design regarding its supposed flexibility to incorporate new functionalities. From a strict software architecture point of view, we found that such flexibility is far from being enough to easier the implementation of the dynamic computational behavior required to support a teachbot. This made our effort much harder than expected, perhaps because of the illusion induced by the widespread use of Moodle. In this article we present our results and experiences extending Moddle with intelligent behavior from a software architecture point of view, focusing on the lessons learnt in such extension. Our experience indicates that this simplicity is far from being so and hence it is worth to share the limitations and how we overcome them.

An Analysis Method for Error Propagation Reachability of Component-Based Software

Component-based software (CBS) is widely used in various industries and fields. One important characteristic of CBS is that when some error occurs in a component, the error will be transmitted to other components as the inter-component state propagates, the error propagation will form and the error propagation may cause the software system to malfunction or fail. From the perspective of software architecture (SA), an analysis process for error propagation accessibility of CBS and a generation algorithm for error propagation reachability graph event/state-based of CBS were established. In this algorithm, firstly, the elementary events are sorted by identifying the internal timing sequence of the components in the directed graph of SA, and the state groups that cannot be reached at the same time between the components are obtained; secondly, the Cartesian product of the reachable states between the components is established and all the reachable state groups of CBS are obtained; at last, the error propagation reachability graph of CBS is obtained according to the event connection table. The algorithm has laid a technical foundation for the analysis on CBS errors and reliability.

We’re doing it live: A multi-method empirical study on continuous experimentation

ContextContinuous experimentation guides development activities based on data collected on a subset of online users on a new experimental version of the software. It includes practices such as canary releases, gradual rollouts, dark launches, or A/B testing. ObjectiveUnfortunately, our knowledge of continuous experimentation is currently primarily based on well-known and outspoken industrial leaders. To assess the actual state of practice in continuous experimentation, we conducted a mixed-method empirical study. MethodIn our empirical study consisting of four steps, we interviewed 31 developers or release engineers, and performed a survey that attracted 187 complete responses. We analyzed the resulting data using statistical analysis and open coding. ResultsOur results lead to several conclusions: (1) from a software architecture perspective, continuous experimentation is especially enabled by architectures that foster independently deployable services, such as microservices-based architectures; (2) from a developer perspective, experiments require extensive monitoring and analytics to discover runtime problems, consequently leading to developer on call policies and influencing the role and skill sets required by developers; and (3) from a process perspective, many organizations conduct experiments based on intuition rather than clear guidelines and robust statistics. ConclusionOur findings show that more principled and structured approaches for release decision making are needed, striving for highly automated, systematic, and data- and hypothesis-driven deployment and experimentation.

Improved e-Advising Model Using Data Mining: A Software Architecture Perspective

Improved e-Advising Model Using Data Mining: A Software Architecture Perspective

Considering emergency and disaster management systems from a software architecture perspective

The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has been advocated for addressing the obstacles and improving decision-making for emergency and disaster management. A number of ICT support systems and frameworks, both conceptual and application-based, have evolved to support the highly time and collaboration intensive task of emergency and disaster management. A number of the existing systems, ongoing research projects, supporting systems and concepts were surveyed and classified based on their use in the four stages of comprehensive emergency management (CEM). They were further classified into monitoring, live and simulation systems. Each stage of CEM, along with the purpose of the software system, will have specific quality attribute requirements. Studying these diverse systems and concepts, we highlight vital qualitative concerns for emergency and disaster management software systems. We examine these concerns from a software architectural perspective and suggest ways to address and incorporate them into future research and deployment endeavours.

A regulatory architecture for a digital enterprise

We are witnessing the birth of the digital enterprise, in which many of the enterprise operations will be performed by independent software programs or by programs acting on behalf of humans. Although this automation proved to be efficient for many enterprises, the digital infrastructure can become difficult to manage in the presence of large, distributed systems composed of heterogenous agents. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA for short) is becoming a de-facto standard paradigm for the design of the new generation of enterprise systems. It expresses a perspective of software architecture that defines the use of loosely coupled software services to support the requirements of the business processes and software users. In such an environment, resources are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation. It is the conventional wisdom—to which we subscribe—that open enterprise systems can be tamed, thus made more manageable and more secure, by regulating the interaction between their disparate actors (software components, and people); that is, by subjecting such interactions to explicitly stated and enforced constraints, often called policies. The effectiveness of the current approaches is limited due to their failure to address several needs inherent in modern enterprises. We identified the following requirements that a regulatory mechanism has to offer support for: (i) the required expressive of policies, (ii) the multiplicity of enterprise policies, and their inherently hierarchical organization, and (iii) the scalability of the formulation of policies and of their enforcement. The objectives of this thesis are to design a comprehensive regulatory mechanism for enterprise systems, which meets the challenges outlined above and to construct a prototype of this mechanism. We call this mechanism ARM, for A Regulatory Mechanism, (noting that one of the dictionary definition of the word arm'' is power or authority'' as in long arm of the law''). The implementation of ARM will employ the distributed coordination and control mechanism called Law-Governed Interaction (LGI). This mechanism already features some of the capabilities required to meet our challenges, including its high expressive power, and decentralized enforcement of policies (called laws under LGI).

Towards a component framework for architecture-based self-adaptive applications

Self-adaptive software is an efficient way to cope with highly dynamic nature of the environment where it is situated. In this paper, from the perspective of software architecture, we propose a component framework for supporting the architecture-based design and development of self-adaptive applications. It captures some key elements of the research on software architecture and provides more flexible facilities to decouple interacting components. Based on that, a prototype is implemented to demonstrate its feasibility, and at last a case study is presented to illustrate our framework.

The Past, Present, and Future for Software Architecture

It's been 10 years since David Garlan and Mary Shaw wrote their seminal book Software Architecture Perspective on an Emerging Discipline, since Maarten Boasson edited a special issue of IEEE Software on software architecture, and since the first International Software Architecture Workshop took place. What has happened over these 10 years? What have we learned? Where do we look for information? What's the community around this discipline? And where are we going from here?This article is part of a focus section on software architecture.