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Software Engineering

Architecting for Continuous Delivery and Deployment

Continuous Software Engineering has been gaining signifiant momentum in terms of widespread adoption among large and small Software houses. This paradigm shift is based on the promise of early, frequent delivery and deployment of software features and continuous feedback on the usefulness and adoption of the features. One of the key challenging area of practice for continuous software engineering is architecting – Software development teams are expected to adopt new conceptualisation and designing approaches and design decision making processes – for example, moving from monolithic to micro services. Given the significant challenges of architectural issues in DevOps, it is important to build and share evidence-based body of knowledge about practices and processes for architectural support in Continuous Software Engineering. We have undertaken a significant research program on this topic and one of our comprehensive pieces of of work has just been accepted in a premier Software Engineering journal with the title of, An Empirical Study of Architecting for Continuous Delivery and Deployment, following is the abstract copied from the paper for the readers of this blog. The paper’s pre-print copies will be available soon. Read More »Architecting for Continuous Delivery and Deployment

Our New Work on Self-Adaptive Security for large-scale Open Environments

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

A 360 Review on Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment

The increasing amount of literature on Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CDE), and Continuous Deployment (CD) has stimulated the need and desire of secondary studies. Recently, there have been several reviews published on CI, CDE, and CD, mostly in Software Engineering journal. Whilst these reviews have made important contributions to the body of knowledge about CI, CDE, CD, there was no significant effort to perform an integrated review of these three practices areas, which are so much intertwined that it is critically important that the key pieces of work on these topics are reviewed in an integrated fashion. Such an integrated review is expected to provide the researchers and practitioners with a 360 degree view on the approaches, tools, and challenges in these areas. We have tried to address this need through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR), Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment: A Systematic Review on Approaches, Tools, Challenges, which has been recently published in IEEE Access. We are really excited to have this work done as it would fill important gaps left by other secondary studies on these important topics. Our review also critically comparing the existing reviews and our work that is an important part of progressing the state of the art in an emerging area. I’m copying/pasting the abstract for the readers’ interests as a teaser leading to a full read of the article. We also welcome comments.

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An Approach to Designing and Evaluating Web of Things (WoT) Systems

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:

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The Role of Site Visits in Software Engineering Teams

A large number of Software Engineering teams are virtual, which are characterised by various types of distances such geographical, culture, temporal, and knowledge. Such distances can cause a number of small and big challenges that lead sub-optimal development teams or event project failures. Software engineering researchers and practitioners have been researching and debating the cost and benefits of site visits for enabling software development teams to spend time together in order to get to know each other professionally and personally. It is argued that such visits result in establishing and growing trust that is important for successful teams. However, software development managers always find it hard to make a strong enough case for investing such visits. We have carried out a longitudinal case study focused on the socio-ethnical dynamics and potential benefits of site visits in terms of enhanced trust and cooperation among team members who came from entirely different regions, culture, region, and socio-economic background. Our study has found very useful insights for software development managers and researchers. We are sharing the details of our study through the pre-print copy of our paper, whose abstract is provided here.

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