Research Track Session

The structure of component and connector (C&C) models, which are used in many application domains of software engineering, consists of components at different containment levels, their typed input and output ports, and the connectors between them. C&C views, which we have presented at FSE'13, can be used to specify structural properties of C&C models in an expressive and intuitive way. In this work we address the verification of a C&C model against a C&C view and present efficient (polynomial) algorithms to decide satisfaction. A unique feature of our work, not present in existing approaches to checking structural properties of C&C models, is the generation of witnesses for satisfaction/non-satisfaction and of short natural-language texts, which serve to explain and formally justify the verification results and point the engineer to its causes. A prototype tool and an evaluation over four example systems with multiple views, performance and scalability experiments, as well as a user study of the usefulness of the witnesses for engineers, demonstrate the contribution of our work to the state-of-the-art in component and connector modeling and analysis

System designers today are focusing less on point solutions for complex systems and more on design spaces, often with a focus on understanding tradeoffs among non-functional properties across such spaces. This shift places a premium on the efficient comparative evaluation of non-functional properties of designs in such spaces. While static analysis of designs will sometimes suffice, often one must run designs dynamically, under comparable loads, to determine properties and tradeoffs. Yet variant designs often present variant interfaces, requiring that common loads be specialized to many interfaces. The main contributions of this paper are a mathematical framework, architecture, and tool for specification-driven synthesis of design spaces and common loads specialized to individual designs for dynamic tradeoff analysis of non-functional properties in large design spaces. To test our approach we used it to run an experiment to test the validity of static metrics for object-relational database mappings, requiring design space and load synthesis for, and dynamic analysis of, hundreds of database designs.>

Software product lines and model transformations are two techniques used in industry for managing the development of highly complex software. Product line approaches simplify the handling of software variants while model transformations automate software manipulations such as refactoring, optimization, code generation, etc. While these techniques are well understood independently, combining them to get the benefit of both poses a challenge because most model transformations apply to individual models while model-level product lines represent sets of models. In this paper, we address this challenge by providing an approach for automatically ``lifting'' model transformations so that they can be applied to product lines. We illustrate our approach using a case study and evaluate it through a set of experiments.

Goal oriented methods have been successfully employed for eliciting and elaborating software requirements. When goals are assigned to an agent, they have to be operationalised: the agent’s operations have to be refined, by equipping them with appropriate enabling and triggering conditions, so that the goals are fulfilled. Goal operationalisation generally demands a significant effort of the engineer. Although there exist approaches that tackle this problem, they are either informal or at most semi automated, requiring the engineer to assist in the process. In this paper, we present an approach for goal operationalisation that automatically computes required preconditions and required triggering conditions for operations, so that the resulting operations establish the goals. The process is iterative, is able to deal with safety goals and particular kinds of liveness goals, and is based on the use of interpolation and SAT solving.