It was a great pleasure to visit the Secure Systems Group at the Aalto University of Finland. I was hosted by Professor N. Asokan, the leader of the group and a leading authority on different… Read More »Building and Leveraging Design Spaces for Architecting Contemporary Software Systems
We are continuously progressing on the plan for strengthening our capabilities in Cyber Security. To achieve this goal, we have been not only building internal capabilities but also forming and leveraging strategic collaborations. Out of one of our recent collaborations, with Giannis and Rami, in the areas of Cyber Security has resulted a high quality piece of work that has been accepted in a highly profile journal, ACM Computing Survey. The abstract of this paper is below and can provide some useful insights to the potential readers of this work. We are hoping that this piece of work will lead to systematic classification and comparison of architectural level Cyber Security Solutions and develop and evaluate new techniques, approaches, and tools for designing and evaluating security centric large scale distributed systems. Below is the abstract from the paper.Read More »Our New Work on Self-Adaptive Security for large-scale Open Environments
Continuous Software Engineering has gained significant attraction in the software development industry. One of the key areas of Continuous Software Engineering is Development and Operation (DevOps) – according to which development and operations teams are… Read More »Security Support in Continuous Deployment Pipeline
Internet of Things (IoT) have emerged a popular technology that underpinning several innovative products and services. Internet of Everything (IoE) or Web of Things (WoT) are real or virtual networks of things (or services) that can be meaningfully quarried or combined in order to build and provide different types of services. Recently, we have a book chapter, Using Reference Architecture for Design and Evaluation of Web of Things Systems, has been included a newly published book, Managing the Web of Things: Linking the Real World to the Web, edited by Michael Sheng, Yongrui Qin, Lina Yao, and Boualem Benatallah. The abstract of our book chapter is below as it may interest to some of the readers. The book chapter provides a methodological approach and technical details about applying a reference architectures to support the design and evaluation of Web of Things Systems. The research involved students from a software architecture course offered at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The abstract of the chapter is below:
Read More »An Approach to Designing and Evaluating Web of Things (WoT) Systems
We have been developing and maturing a state of the art infrastructure for providing tools as a service. Our work has resulted in a reference architecture provides meta-models, Ontologies, quality attributes, and implementation of an instantiated cloud-based infrastructure for providing tools as a service. Recently, we have published a compressive piece of work in a journal article, titled, A Reference Architecture for provisioning of Tools as a Service: Meta-model, Ontologies and Design Elements, in the journal of Future Generation of Computer Systems. We believe that this piece of work has a great potential for further extension and development for providing tools as a service in multiple engineering domains. The theoretical foundations and practical design techniques developed for this particular piece of work have significant contribution to the body of knowledge on reference architectures for tools as a service. The following abstract of the paper can provide some details about the paper for stimulating the interests of the relevant readers. We are quite keen to receive enquiries for the infrastructure use and collaboration on extending and modifying the infrastructure.Read More »A Reference Architecture for provisioning of Tools as a Service
We have been expanding our research on engineering systems with/for Cloud based infrastructures. One of the key challenges of engineering cloud-based systems is designing and evaluating appropriate architectures. Being a relatively new area, knowledge about designing and evaluating cloud-based systems is scarce and but growing. We observed the need of systematically identifying and synthesizing the knowledge about the architectural challenges and solutions for cloud-based systems. For this goal, we used systematic literature review, a well known method of Evidence Based Software Engineering.
I am very glad to share that after several months rigours and tireless efforts, we have published our work in a premier Software Engineering journal, Software: Practice and Experience. The paper can be found on this link and the abstract of the paper is below:Read More »Systemization of Knowledge about Architecting Cloud-Based Systems
Big Data applications are playing critical role for all sorts of organisations. Whilst data scientist is considered a critical role for big data applications, the role of software architect has become even more critical as appropriate design and careful implementation are the key to successful big data applications for supporting organisational decisions and business processes. since this breed of applications are relatively new, the knowledge and experience for designing and evolving architectures for big data applications are in high demand. It is important that organisations build specific knowledge and competency in designing and evaluating software architectures for big data applications – this is one of the key areas where we have been focusing on R&D efforts for sometime now. We have started disseminating our work through different channels for seeking the application of our work through industrial partnerships. Recently, I gave a short talk on designing and evolving architectures for big data applications (Talk’s presentation) during the Adelaide Big Data Meet up called, Big Data Development. Read More »Designing and Evolving Architectures for Big Data Applications
A few years ago we started an exciting and challenging project to design and implement a reference architecture for providing Tools as a Service (TaaS). That project was aimed at developing and evaluating an infrastructure that can host and provision tools for supporting engineering efforts in general and software engineering in particular. There is no doubt that the project turned out to be more challenging than we anticipated but I’m glad that one phase of that project has been successfully completed through Aufeef Chuahan’s PhD project. It is a great pleasure to state that Aufeef has successfully completed and submitted his PhD thesis for assessment – its a big achievement for him. We will be making the reference architecture and its implementation public very soon.Read More »Reference Architecture for Cloud-Based Tools as a Service Workspace Completed
We have recently started a collaborative project with the Software Systems Research Group of National ICT Australia in Sydney. The project is aimed at understanding and addressing new challenges for designing architectures of complex systems that would be following the Continuous deployment (CD) and DevOps paradigm. CD and DevOps have emerged as an auspicious software development movements, which try to establish a strong connection between development and operations teams. Adopting and supporting CD/DevOps for industrial organizations involves a large number of challenges because organizational processes, practices, and tool support may not be ready to support the highly complex and challenging nature of DevOps. Like many others, we have found that the most pressing challenges which the organizations may encounter is how software applications should be architected to support CD/DevOps practices such as Continuous Delivery, Continuous Testing, Continuous Monitoring and Optimization and Continuous Deployment. Read More »Collaborative Project with NICTA on Architecting for DevOps Starts
Big Data systems (i.e., data-intensive applications) have become one of the key priority areas for all sorts of organizations (i.e., private or public). Big Data is usually characterized by huge amount of diverse set of data that cannot be easily (or timely) processed using the conventional data processing approaches and technologies. For example, the data coming from 9100 tweets per second or the data emitted from the jet engines of the aircraft of the 2500 flights that cross Atlantic every day. Data to Decisions (D2D), a new initiative under the Cooperative Research Centres Program, is aimed at inventing new and innovative techniques and technologies for supporting several functions of Big Data systems such as data capture and storage, data transmission, data curation, data analysis, and data visualization. One of the first projects of D2D CRC is designing a Reference Architecture (RA) for Defence Big Data Systems. Whilst there are already several dozens of references architectures for big data systems, one can question the needs of such an effort.Read More »D2D CRC Project on Reference Architecture for Defence Big Data Systems