Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
4KeyRchTops
The following sections document the key research technologies, processes and
methodologies identified by the EternalS project as being relevant to the future
research of Eternal Systems. These are looked at under the headings the software
engineering challenges of managing diversity among multiple systems that are
essentially similar but slightly different, managing the evolution over time of long
lived systems and finally examining machine learning as a means of addressing
some of the key issues found in the aforementioned areas.
4.1 Managing Diversity
Diversity impacts all phases of software development and leads to an increase in
complexity, because variability has to be anticipated in requirements analysis,
design, implementation, and validation stages.
The key methodology supporting software diversity management is Software
Product Line Engineering (SPLE). Software intensive systems in certain domains
may share a large amount of commonalities. Instead of developing each product
individually, SPLE looks at these systems as a whole and develops them by
maximizing the scale of reuse of platforms and mass customization. It is claimed
that SPLE can help reduce both development cost and time to market. A key
distinction of SPLE from other reuse-based approaches is that the various assets
of the product line infrastructure contain variability, which refers to the ability
of an artefact to be configured, customized, extended, or changed for use in a
specific context.
Variability in a product line must be defined, represented, exploited, imple-
mented, and evolved throughout the lifecycle of SPLE, which is called Variability
Management (VM). This has been studied for almost 20 years since the early
1990s. Feature- Oriented Domain Analysis (FODA) method and the Synthesis
approach were two of the first contributions to VM research and practice.
SPLE is a two-stage process which is split into a family engineering and an
application engineering phase. During family engineering, the scope of the prod-
uct line is defined by determining which products should be included in the
product line. Reusable artefacts are then developed and stored in the product
line artefact database. During application engineering, the product line artefacts
are customized and assembled in order to realize a given product configuration.
4.2 Managing the Software Lifecycle
The question on how to build and manage long-lived security-critical systems,
leads to a broad array of challenges, two of which are mentioned below. The
first one refers to the engineering process: how should stakeholders (e.g., end
users, business analysts, requirements analysts, system architects etc.) cope with
the various aspects of change that may come with the evolution of long-living
systems? Current process models have considerable shortcomings: security is
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