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The software system design phase has recently received increasing attention due to continuous growth in both the size and complexity of software systems. As a key concept of this phase, software architecture plays an important role in the software extension cycle to the extent that the success of a software project is often determined by the degree of its design efficiency. In addition, software architecture evaluation is a fundamental step toward its subsequent validation. This paper is an attempt to propose an innovative method, based on fuzzy logic, to evaluate software architecture that addresses the inherent problems of existing methods found in the literature. The method can be used... 

Assessment of architectural evolution is a challenge and plays a significant role in system evolution management. Although the evolution rules of the software architecture are defined by some expert engineers or architects, there is no guarantee that applying them will end to the desired change. So, having a reliable assessment technique promotes the overall accuracy and quality of the evolution process. Compliance checking with expert-defined rules is a well-known assessment approach that can be applied in architectural evolution. In this paper, an approach is proposed for compliance checking of evolution processes. To this end, evolution paths and processes are modeled by Reo coordination... 

Software architecture patterns present solutions for software architecture problems and help to document architectural design decisions. Complexity and variability of patterns, and the required expertise for selecting an appropriate pattern, would cause some difficulties in utilizing architectural patterns. Using an ontology for registering architectural patterns is an efficient step in solving those problems. However, the mentioned difficulties make the process of constructing the architectural patterns ontology even more complicated. This paper proposes an approach that considers the construction of the architectural patterns ontology from four perspectives in order to overcome this... 

Emerging cloud workloads in today's modern data centers have large memory footprints that make the processor's caches to be ineffective. Since L1 data cache is in the critical path, high data cache miss rates degrade the performance. To fix the issue in traditional workloads, data prefetchers predict the needed data to hide the memory latency and ultimately improve performance. In this paper, we focus on the L1 data cache to answer the question on why state-of-the-art prefetching methods are inefficient for modern workloads in terms of performance and energy consumption? This is because L1 cache is the most important player affecting the processor performance. Results show that, on the one... 

Software product line (SPL) is an approach used to develop a range of software products with a high degree of similarity. In this approach, a feature model is usually used to keep track of similarities and differences. Over time, as modifications are made to the SPL, inconsistencies with the feature model could arise. The first approach to dealing with these inconsistencies is refactoring. Refactoring consists of small steps which, when accumulated, may lead to large-scale changes in the SPL, resulting in features being added to or eliminated from the SPL. In this paper, we propose a framework for refactoring SPLs, which helps keep SPLs consistent with the feature model. After some... 

Business processes perform a significant role in increasing the success of organizational processes and functionalities. Due to the ever increasing growth in the scale and complexity of processes in line with taking advantage of combinational methods and ideas to optimize workflows and gain higher efficiency, lack of a framework considering both business process semantic and structure for business process modeling is completely sensible. Adding semantic to business process models will result in more comprehensible and automatically-executable processes. Moreover, preparing a suitable structure by making use of software architectural concepts will lead to a major decrease in misunderstanding... 

Model-Driven Development (MDD) is a promising approach to software development, mainly due to the pivotal role of models in its process, and the high potential it provides for automated model/software generation. Since software processes can themselves be considered as software, any technique or approach applied in the context of software development is also of potential use in the development of software development processes. Accordingly, the MDD approach can potentially be applied in the context of Situational Method Engineering (SME) - a branch devoted to the study of developing bespoke software development processes and methods based on the specific characteristics of the development... 

Information systems are expected to satisfy increasingly ambitious requirements, while reducing time-to-market has become a primary objective. This trend has necessitated the advent of development approaches that are better equipped and flexible enough to cope with modern challenges. Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) and Situational Method Engineering (SME) are approaches addressing this requirement: MDA provides promising means for automating the software process, and revitalizes the role of modeling in software development; SME focuses on project-specific methodology construction, mainly through assembling reusable method fragments (process patterns) retrieved from a method base. We provide... 

Nowadays, software product line is an approach to reduce costs of software development, decrease time to market, and increase capabilities of reuse in designing and exploiting software development processes. Moreover, other quality attributes of the project domain should be considered to enhance quality of the product. Meanwhile, taking advantage of software product line makes developers capable of estimating development costs and time to market in a more realistic way. However, old approaches to estimate cost of development and foresee time to market are not suitable enough for software product line. In this paper, some important business parameters and a way to calculate cost and time to... 

The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is meant to facilitate system development by using models for representing both the "problem" and its "solution". In its ideal form, software development based on MDA would follow a development process that begins by producing models of the problem domain at a high level of abstraction, and then proceeds by gradually and automatically transforming them into executable code with the help of tools. However, MDA-based development has encountered several setbacks, the mitigation of which requires detailed scrutiny and analysis. In this research, MDA-based development is analyzed through applying SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis... 

Evaluating architectures and choosing the correct one is a critical issue in software engineering domain, in accordance with extremely extension of architecturedriven designs. In the first years of defining architecture styles, some special quality attributes were introduced as their basic attributes. After a moment, by utilizing them in practice, some results were obtained confirming some of attributes; some others meanwhile were not witnessed. As software architecture construction process is dependent on and addressed by both usage conditions and quality attributes, in this paper a framework has been proposed to provide an environment and a platform that can cover evaluation of... 

Dealing with crosscutting requirements in software development usually makes the process more complex. Modeling and analyzing of these requirements in the software architecture facilitate detecting architectural risks early. Distributed systems have more complexity and so these facilities are much useful in development of such systems. Aspect oriented Architectural Description Languages(ADL) have emerged to represent solutions for discussed problems; nevertheless, imposing radical changes to existing architectural modeling methods is not easily acceptable by architects. Software architecture analysis methods, furthermore, intend to verify that the quality requirements have been addressed... 

Several e-business frameworks are developed to define standards for information sharing within and between companies. These frameworks only standardize structure of messages and aren't able to define semantics. It leads to slow and costly dynamic Business-to-Business (B2B) integration. The use of Semantic Web Senice (SWS) technologies has been suggested to enable more dynamic B2B integration of heterogeneous systems and partners. We present a semantic B2B mediator based on the WSMX -a SWS execution environment, to tackle heterogeneities in B2B services. We particularly show how WSMX can be made to support the RosettaNet e-business framework and how it can add dynamics to B2B interactions by... 

E-business requires interoperability of information systems and, therefore, standardization of information sharing. Several XML-based e-business frameworks are developed to define standards for information sharing within and between companies. These frameworks only standardize structure of messages and aren't able to define semantics. The use of Semantic Web Service (SWS) technologies has been suggested to enable more dynamic B2B integration of heterogeneous systems and partners. We present a semantic B2B mediator based on the WSMX -a SWS execution environment, to tackle heterogeneities in RosettaNet messages. We develop a rich RosettaNet ontology and use the axiomatized knowledge and rules... 

Due to the extreme use of method engineering and increasing attention to construct methods customized for a specific project, domain, organization or a generic method compatible with the team characteristics and needs, existence of suitable and formalized frameworks and guidelines is one of the challenges method engineers are encountered. In this area, considering method construction as the goal of method engineering brings to the mind the software development process in which the product is a method adapting the method users' needs. This paper, with a new approach of applying software architecture in method engineering and making use of architecture styles, tries to take advantage of... 

Much effort has been put in defining methods, techniques, and tools for software architecture reconstruction (SAR) Software Architecture Transformation (SAT), and Software Architecture-based Development, but much less attention has been paid to what lies at the heart of architecture-based development, software architectural styles. We argue that architecture-based software development could be much more productive if centered around the concept of software architecture styles, hence the need for style recovery in the process of software architecture reconstruction. The reason behind this is generally. Furthermore, with the coherence architectural styles can bring to the process of automated... 

Due to the enlargement and complexity of software systems and the need for maintenance and update, success of systems depends strongly on their architecture. Software architecture has been a key element in software development process in two past decades. Therefore, choosing the correct architecture is a critical issue in software engineering domain, with respect to the extremely extension of architecturedriven designs. Moreover, software architecture selection is a multi-criteria decision-making problem in which different goals and objectives should be considered. In this paper, a Decision Support System (DSS) has been designed which provides software architects with more precise and... 

Model-Driven Development (MDD) has become a familiar software engineering term in recent years, thanks to the profound influence of the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). Yet MDD, like MDA itself, defines a general framework, and as such is a generic approach rather than a concrete development methodology. Methodology support for MDA has been rather slow in coming, yet even though several MDA-based methodologies have emerged, they have not been objectively analyzed yet. The need remains for a critical appraisal of these methodologies, mainly aimed at identifying their achievements, and the shortcomings that should be addressed. We provide a review of several prominent MDA-based methodologies,... 

The continuing process of software systems enlargement in size and complexity becomes system design extremely important for software production. In this way, the role of software architecture is significantly important in software development. It serves as an evaluation and implementation plan for software development and software evaluation. Consequently, choosing the correct architecture is a critical issue in software engineering domain. Moreover, software architecture selection is a multicriteria decision-making problem in which different goals and objectives must be taken into consideration. In this paper, more precise and suitable decisions in selection of architecture styles have been... 

This paper proposes a software framework for dynamic-reconfigurable protocol stack. The framework presents mechanisms andan algorithm/or all required phases for reconfiguration of a running protocol component that include freezing the component in a safe state, changing the component, and state transfer to a new component. Considering that every running protocol component communicates with at least one peer component in another system, we perform the reconfiguration with respect to the peer component. © 2007 IEEE