We got a paper accepted at the Springer Journal on Empirical Software Engineering: “Corporate organizations sometimes offer similar software products in certain domains due to former company mergers or due to the complexity of the organization. The functional overlap of such products is an opportunity for future systematic reuse to reduce software development and maintenance costs. We report on our experiences and lessons learned from conducting the domain analysis in four application cases with large-scale software products. We learned that the outcome of a domain analysis was often a smaller integration scenario instead of an SPL and that business case calculations were less relevant for the stakeholders and managers from the business units.”
Happy to report that our paper entitled “Customizing Domain Analysis for assessing the Reuse Potential of Industrial Software Systems” received the Best Paper Award of the Industry Track of SPLC 2014, the 18th International Software Product Line Conference in Florence, Italy. We have applied domain analysis on a number of device engineering tools and enterprise information systems from ABB and have reported several lessons learned.
We got a paper accepted at IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering: “During the last decade, researchers have proposed a number of model transformations enabling performance predictions. This paper provides an in-depth comparison and quantitative evaluation of representative model transformations to, e.g., Queueing Petri Nets and Layered Queueing Networks. The semantic gaps between typical source model abstractions and the different analysis techniques are revealed. The accuracy and efficiency of each transformation are evaluated by considering four case studies representing systems of different size and complexity. The presented results and insights gained from the evaluation help software architects and performance engineers to select the appropriate transformation for a given context.”
A paper on our documentation framework for architecture decisions has been recognized as one of WICSA 2014‘s best papers in Sydney. The implementation of the framework as an add-in to Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect was done in a collaboration of the University of Groningen and ABB.
We got a paper accepted at IEEE CLOUD 2014: “We benchmarked three open source timeseries databases (OpenTSDB, KairosDB and Databus) on cloud infrastructures with up to 36 nodes with workloads from realistic industrial applications. We found that at least KairosDB fulfills our initial hypotheses concerning scalability and reliability.”
The latest issue of the magazine “IEEE Software” features our article on architecture sustainability: “At ABB, we’re measuring and tracking the architecture sustainability of a large-scale, distributed industrial control system currently under development that’s based on Microsoft technologies and includes a layered architecture. A former version of the system grew to several million LOC and suffered from architecture erosion and high maintenance costs. We adopted a multiperspective approach called Morphosis to avoid such a situation from occurring again. Morphosis focuses on requirements, architecture design, and source code. It includes evolution scenario analysis, scoring of technology choices, architecture compliance checks, and tracking of architecture-level code metrics. This article reports our experiences with tracking selected sustainability measurements over the course of two years.”
Our summary report from the 2012 GI-Dagstuhl Seminar “Multicore SW Performance Engineering” has appeared in ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review: “In the era of multicore and manycore processors, a systematic more and more crucial to the success of modern software systems. This article argues for more software performance engineering research specically for multicore and manycore systems, which will have a profound impact on software engineering practices.”
Research Directions for Multicore Software Performance Engineering
We got a paper accepted at the Industry Track of the 17th International Software Product Line Conference (SPLC2013) to be held August 26th-30th in Tokyo, Japan: In the paper, we describe how we applied existing domain analysis approaches for software product line engineering and tailored them to include a feature analysis as well as architecture evaluation. We report our experiences from applying the approach in two subdomains of industrial automation.
Architecture maps reconstructed from several industrial software systems during a domain analysis.
Paper accepted at ICPE 2013: We introduce a novel model transformation from Use Case Maps (UCM) to the Palladio Component Model (PCM), which enables performance modeling based on an intuitive notation for complex information flows. The resulting models can be solved using existing simulators or analytical solvers. We validated the correctness of the transformation with three case study models, and performed a user study. The results showed a performance prediction deviation of less than 10 percent compared to a reference model in most cases.
Our article on reliability prediction with the Palladio Component Model finally appeared in the November/December issue of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.