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Software Product Lines

Australasian Software Engineering Conference Coming to Adelaide

After several months of deliberations and discussions, I’m glad to announce that finally Australasian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC) will be coming to Adelaide in late September this year; the exact dates are September 28 to October 1 2015. ASWEC will be coming to Adelaide after almost 18 years and we are really looking forward to hosting. A ASWEC2015 flyer can be downed and distributed. We have secured excellent keynote speakers and a series of invited speakers from industry and academia. We plan on building a non-conventioal and interesting program, which will not be heavily dependant upon scientific research findings; rather we are going to hugely engage industry and government agencies, particular local, educators at high schools and tertiary educational institutes, and several special interests groups.Read More »Australasian Software Engineering Conference Coming to Adelaide

Architectural Solution for Providing Tools as a Service

A couple of years ago, we pitched the idea of Tools as Services  as it had become clear that Cloud Computing based infrastructures will be widely leveraged for providing all sorts of services for businesses. We conceived and started a project to design, build, and evaluate an infrastructure that can materialize our idea of providing engineering (i.e., Software Engineering) tools as services rather than getting the engineering tools deployed on individual machines or a centralized server. We argued that an increasing number of individuals and organizations will need an easy and on demand access to tools for performing specific activities (e.g., Requirements modeling or Software testing). We have been making steadily and continuous progress towards our first main goals in this regard: designing an infrastructure for providing tools as a service. At this stage, we have designed an architectural solution for building and leveraging a cloud-based infrastructure to provide Tools as a Service. Apart from well known software architecture design principles, processes, and architectural patterns, our architectural solutions, described in this poster, exploits well known semantic technologies, Ontologies for providing solutions to tools integration challenges.Read More »Architectural Solution for Providing Tools as a Service

A Practice Oriented Guide on Agile Architecting!

Whilst it has widely been recognised that agile and architecture-centric approaches need to be integrating for developing large scale software intensive systems, there has not been much work on providing a good source of guidance based on multiple perspectives for successfully integrate architecture-centric approaches in agile methods. A few years ago, a few colleagues and I started working on an edited book, which has just been completed/published after all the ups-and-downs that usually characterise these kinds of undertakings. I’m very glad to share that the book, Agile Software Architecture: Aligning Agile Processes and Software Architecture, is available for purchase. For interested readers, here is the Table of Content.

The key goal of this book is to provide practitioners and researchers interested in combining agile and architectural approaches with a comprehensive and reliable body of knowledge about the challenges involved in integrating architecture-centric approaches with agile approaches and the solutions to address those challenges. This book is expected to provide a read with detailed guidance on whether or not and how agile and architectural cultures can be made to co-exist depending upon the contextual factors.  This book also provides useful leads for future research in both architecture and agile in order to bridge such gaps by developing appropriate approaches, strategies, and tools for supporting effective and efficient integration of agile and architecture-centric approaches.

Read More »A Practice Oriented Guide on Agile Architecting!

Architecting Product Lines for Cloud Infrastructure!

It was a privilege to convince Dr. Dirk Muthig to visit ITU, Copenhagen and share his recent work at the Lufthansa Systems’ business unit “Airline Solutions. Dirk has been a thought leader and practical implementer in the area of software product lines for many years. It was the second time, he agreed to visit us and give a guest lecture in the software architecture course. He had given a lecture on software architecture in practice back in 2010 which was the first time I was teaching software architecture at ITU Copenhagen after my move to Denmark. The attendees of the lecture really appreciated the amount of knowledge and insights he offered. This time around he chose to speak about his recent work on architecting product lines for hybrid cloud infrastructure. It was very informative and thought provoking lecture whose title and abstract are below. Dirk has kindly shared the lecture slides  for this blog. Read More »Architecting Product Lines for Cloud Infrastructure!

Empirical research in software architecture

Empirical research is quite difficult undertaking; doing empirical research becomes even more difficult when the studied objects are likely to be described at a higher level of abstract like software architecture. That is an obvious reasons that we don’t see much empirical research, even not very rigorous one, carried out to assess the effectiveness and efficiencies of the methods, techniques, and tools developed to support the software architecture process over the last 20 years. However, there is an increasing realization that anecdotal claims are not sufficient for making claims about the goodness of our research outputs; rather, we need to provide systematically gathered evidence rather than anecdotes or rhetoric to promote the use of a particular method or tool that purports to support any of the software engineering activity. Patricia, Arie, I decided to put together a special issue the topic of empirical research in software architecture: opportunities, challenges, and approaches. We approaches the empirical software engineering journal for this special issue. It is great feeling of satisfaction and pleasure that we have finalized the special issue with four high quality papers. There were several people involved in this process that lasted more than two years and we are greatly thankful to all of them. The articles included in the special issue are:Read More »Empirical research in software architecture

Walt Scacchi will be relating OSS development and GSE

Walt Scacchi from UCL Irvine will be one of the keynote speakers at the 6th International Software Engineering Conference. We were very glad to receive his positive response to our invitation for giving a keynote at the premier event of the global software engineering community. Now we are quite excited about what he is going to talk about the relationship between open source software development and global software engineering. This is going to be very interesting talk for anyone interested in global software engineering as Walt is world renowned researchers on OSS development paradigm and it would be quite insightful to listen to his views about how OSS and GSE are related and what both software development paradigms can offer to each others in terms of challenges, solutions, and lesson learned. The title of his talk is:

Free/Open Source Software Development as an Approach to Global Software Engineering

The abstract of his talk is: Read More »Walt Scacchi will be relating OSS development and GSE

Evaluation of Variability Management Approaches

Variability Management (VM) was not a topic of my research interest until I assumed the leadership of two projects in the area of software product lines when I moved to Ireland a few years ago. During my initial observation of the area, I noticed that VM is one of the most researched areas in software product lines. Of course, one reason is that VM is one of the most important activities of software product-line engineering (SPLE). I noticed that software product line community had allocated huge amount of effort to develop various approaches to dealing with variability related challenges during the last two decade. Several dozens of VM approaches have been reported. However, most of the reported approaches appeared to have not been evaluated to support the claims made about those approaches. Hence, we decided to review the status of evaluation of reported VM approaches and to synthesize the available evidence about the effects of the reported approaches. Read More »Evaluation of Variability Management Approaches