1.
The GENESIS platform, its distribution, and web services - Rank, Stephen; Nutter, David; Lavery, Janet; Boldyreff, Cornelia
The GENESIS project is developing an Open Source platform that supports co-operation and communication among software engineers belonging to distributed development teams involved in modeling, controlling, and measuring software development and maintenance processes. The GENESIS platform is made up of three main elements: a distributed workflow management system, a resource management system, and an artefact management system (OSCAR, developed at Durham). The platform is designed to be non-invasive and have a low barrier to entry (in terms of the effort required to begin using the system). This is accomplished, as far as possible, by adapting the platform to the workflow...
2.
Using automated source code analysis for software evolution - Burd, Liz; Rank, Stephen
Software maintenance is one of the most expensive and time-consuming phases in the software life-cycle. The size and complexity of commercial applications probably present the greatest difficulty that maintainers face when making changes to their applications. As a result of the corresponding loss of understanding, business knowledge encapsulated within the system becomes fragmented, and any changes made as a result of new business initiatives become difficult to implement and hence may mean a loss of business opportunities.
This paper outlines an approach to regaining understanding of software which has been used in the Release project at Durham University. This approach...
4.
Communication and conflict issues in collaborative software research projects - Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen
The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OS-
CAR) was developed under the auspices of the GENESIS
project to store data produced during the software development process. Significant problems were encountered during the course of the project in both the development itself and management of the project. The reasons for and potential solutions to these problems are examined with the intention of developing a set of guidelines to enable participants in other collaborative projects to avoid these pitfalls.
We wish to make it clear that we attach no opprobrium
to any of the participants in the GENESIS project as many of the issues we...
5.
Support for Collaborative Component-Based Software Engineering - Rank, Stephen; Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Kyaw, Phyo; Lavery, Janet
Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software...
6.
Environments to support collaborative software engineering - Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen; Smith, Mike; Wilcox, Pauline; Dewar, Rick; Weiss, Dawid; Ritrovato, Pierluigi
With increasing globalisation of software production, widespread use of
software components, and the need to maintain software systems over long
periods of time, there has been a recognition that better support
for collaborative working is needed by software engineers.
In this paper, two approaches to developing
improved system support for collaborative software engineering are
described: GENESIS and OPHELIA.
As both projects are moving towards industrial trials and eventual publicreleases of their systems, this exercise of comparing and
contrasting our approaches has provided the basis for future
collaboration between our projects particularly in carrying out
comparative studies of our approaches in practical use.
7.
A reflective architecture to support dynamic software evolution - Rank, Stephen
This thesis presents work which is concerned with the run-time
evolution of component-based software systems. In particular, the
main result of the research presented here is a framework which is
used to model and control the architecture of a software system. This
framework allows the run-time manipulation of the components which
make up a software system. The framework makes the architecture of
software systems visible, and allows interaction with it, using a
reflective meta-object protocol.
The motivating objectives of this work are providing a framework to
support architectural flexibility, higher-level intervention, safe
changes, and architectural visibility in software systems.
The framework's behaviour and structure was motivated by a set of
case-studies which...
8.
An artefact repository to support distributed software engineering - Nutter, David; Boldyreff, Cornelia; Rank, Stephen
The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OSCAR)
system is a component of the GENESIS platform designed to
non-invasively inter-operate with work-flow management systems, development tools and existing repository systems to support a distributed software engineering team working collaboratively. Every artefact possesses a collection of associated meta-data, both standard and domain-specific presented as an XML document. Within OSCAR, artefacts are made aware of changes to related artefacts using notifications, allowing them to modify their own meta-data actively in contrast to other software repositories where users must perform all and any modifications, however trivial.
This recording of events, including user interactions provides a complete picture...
9.
Adaptive reuse of Libre software systems for supporting on-line collaboration - Adams, Paul; Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen
In this paper, the adaptive reuse of Plone; an open source content management system is described. In one instance, Plone has been used as the backbone of a collaboration and communication support infrastructure within a large research project. In the other, Plone has been used as the main web-presence of a specialist group of the British Computer Society. This paper analyses the benefits and problems of reusing Plone to support collaboration. Based on this reuse experience, a more systematic approach to supporting Plone reuse is proposed. This approach takes into account the special case of reuse support relevant to open...
10.
An evaluation framework to drive future evolution of a research prototype - Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen; Boldyreff, Cornelia
The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OSCAR) requires
evaluation to confirm its suitability as a development environment
for distributed software engineers. The evaluation will take note of
several factors including usability of OSCAR as a stand-alone system,
scalability and maintainability of the system and novel features not
provided by existing artefact management systems. Additionally, the
evaluation design attempts to address some of the omissions (due to
time constraints) from the industrial partner evaluations.
This evaluation is intended to be a prelude to the evaluation of the
awareness support being added to OSCAR; thus establishing a baseline
to which the...
11.
Architectural requirements for an open source component and artefact repository system within GENESIS - Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen
When software is being created by distributed teams of software
engineers, it is necessary to manage the
work-flow, processes, and artefacts which are involved in the
engineering process. The GENESIS project aims to address some of the
technical issues involved by providing a software system to support
distributed development. One of the parts of the system will be known
as OSCAR, a repository for managing distributed artefacts. Artefacts
can be process models, software components, design documents, or any
other kind of entity associated with the software engineering
process. OSCAR will be designed as a light-weight distributed system,
managing the storage and access to a distributed repository of
artefacts.
This paper presents and...
12.
Supporting collaborative Grid application development within the e-Science community - Nutter, David; Boldyreff, Cornelia; Rank, Stephen; Kyaw, Phyo
Collaboration by use of common artifacts is at the core of e-science. A recent enabling technology is the Grid, which ties together heterogeneous computation and data resources through the use of middleware, linking the techniques and resources to infer higher-level knowledge. This article presents results from research and development of Grid technology for semantic interoperability between scientific artifacts on the web. The research employs the 'industry-as-laboratory' approach to software development. This means development of theory and models through successive implementations, their deployment in pilot studies and subsequent evaluation studies. The research is exemplified through the case of the OSCAR project,...
13.
An open source collaboration infrastructure for Calibre - Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen; Boldyreff, Cornelia
The study of Free and Open Source (Libre) software and the benefits provided by its processes and products to collaborative software development has been somewhat ad hoc. Each project wishing to use tools and techniques drawn from Libre software conducts its own research, thus duplicating effort, consequently there is a lack of established community practice on which new projects can draw. Long-standing intuitive theories of Libre development lack empirical validation. The long-term goal is to provide a resource to guide the evolution of Libre-software projects, from inception to maturity. The CALIBRE project is a co-ordination action aiming to address these...
14.
Software, architecture, and participatory design - Rank, Stephen; O'Coill, Carl; Boldyreff, Cornelia; Doughty, Mark
Much work in software architecture has been inspired by work in physical architecture, in particular Alexander's work on `design patterns'. By contrast, Alexander's work is little-used in town planning and architecture. In this paper, we examine some of the reasons that this is so, describe some parallels and differences between the fields of physical and software architecture, and identify areas in which future collaboration may be fruitful. The notion of `participatory design' is important in software engineering and in urban regeneration, but the participatory mechanisms in each field are quite different.
16.
Using open source tools to support collaboration within CALIBRE - Adams, Paul; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen; Boldyreff, Cornelia
Abstract – This paper describes the deployment of Plone, an
Open-Source content management system, to support the
activities of CALIBRE, an EU-funded coordination action
integrating research into Libre software. The criteria by
which Plone was selected are described, and the goodness of
fit to these criteria is analysed.
As a coordination action, CALIBRE involves 12 partners
with different requirements and characteristics. The
CALIBRE Working Environment (CWE) must therefore
support a variety of users with different levels of technical expertise and expectations.
Implementation of the support infrastructure for CALIBRE
is ongoing, and has provided some interesting insights into the benefits of the use of libre software. Although Plone has not been explicitly...
17.
Supporting collaboration within the eScience community - Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen
Collaboration is a core activity at the heart of large-scale co-
operative scientific experimentation. In order to support the
emergence of Grid-based scientific collaboration, new models of
e-Science working methods are needed.
Scientific collaboration involves production and manipulation of
various artefacts. Based on work done in the software
engineering field, this paper proposes models and tools which
will support the representation and production of such artefacts.
It is necessary to provide facilities to classify, organise, acquire,
process, share, and reuse artefacts generated during collaborative
working. The concept of a "design space" will be used to
organise scientific design and the composition of experiments,
and methods such as self-organising maps will be used...
18.
The experience of OSCAR - Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen
Evolutionary development of a large software component by a small team within a larger research project has
many problems in common with industrial software development
as well as giving rise to its own unique problems.
We reflect on these problems based on our experience
developing OSCAR within the GENESIS project. Key issues
are identified and possible ways to overcome or ameliorate
these problems are suggested.
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