A Collaborative Approach to Teaching Software Architecture

Teaching software architecture is hard. The topic is abstract and is best understood by experiencing it, which requires proper scale to fully grasp its complexity. Furthermore, students need to practice both technical and social skills to become good software architects. To overcome these teaching challenges, we developed the Collaborative...

Tracking known security vulnerabilities in proprietary software systems

Towards a catalog format for software metrics

In the past two decades both the industry and the research community have proposed hundreds of metrics to track software projects, evaluate quality or estimate effort. Unfortunately, it is not always clear which metric works best in a particular context. Even worse, for some metrics there is little evidence whether the metric measures the...

Quantifying the encapsulation of implemented software architectures

A Light-weight Sanity Check for Implemented Architectures

Architecture evaluations offer many benefits, including the early detection of problems and a better understanding of the possibilities of a system. Although many methods are available to evaluate an architecture, studies have shown that the adoption of architecture evaluations in industry is low. A reason for this lack of adoption is that there...

Metric-based Evaluation of Implemented Software Architectures

Software systems make up an important part of our daily lives. Just like all man- made objects, the possibilities of a software system are constrained by the choices made during its creation. The complete set of these choices can be referred to as the software architecture of a system. Since the software architecture of a system has a large...

Quantifying the Encapsulation of Implemented Software Architectures

In the evaluation of implemented software architectures, metrics can be used to provide an indication of the degree of encapsulation within a system and to serve as a basis for an informed discussion about how well-suited the system is for expected changes. Current literature shows that over 40 different architecture-level metrics are available...

Extracting Dynamic Dependencies between Web Services Using Vector Clocks

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enables organizations to react to requirement changes in an agile manner and to foster the reuse of existing services. However, the dynamic nature of service oriented systems and their agility bear the challenge of properly understanding such systems. In particular, understanding the dependencies among...

Dependency Profiles for Software Architecture Evaluations

In this paper we introduce the concept of a -dependency profile-, a system level metric aimed at quantifying the level of encapsulation and independence within a system. We verify that these profiles are suitable to be used in an evaluation context by inspecting the dependency profiles for a repository of almost 100 systems. Furthermore we...

Quantifying the Analyzability of Software Architectures

The decomposition of a software system into components is a major decision in any software architecture, having a strong influence on many of its quality aspects. A system’s analyzability, in particular, is influenced by its decomposition into components. But into how many components should a system be decomposed to achieve optimal analyzability...

A cognitive model for software architecture complexity

Evaluating the complexity of the architecture of a softwaresystem is a difficult task. Many aspects have to be considered to come to a balanced assessment. Several architecture evaluation methods have been proposed, but very few define a quality model to be used during the evaluation process. In addition, those methods that do introduce a...

Criteria for the evaluation of implemented architectures

Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM), 2009, IEEE Computer Society. Software architecture evaluation methods aim at identifying potential maintainability problems for a given architecture. Several of these methods exist, which typically prescribe the structure of the evaluation...

Grammar Engineering Support for Precedence Rule Recovery and Compatibility Checking

A wide range of parser generators are used to generate parsers for programming languages. The grammar formalisms that come with parser generators provide different approaches for defining operator precedence. Some generators (e.g. YACC) support precedence declarations, others require the grammar to be unambiguous, thus encoding the precedence...

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