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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... 

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... 

In the last two decades, a number of architecture-based software development notations, methods, techniques, and tools were formulated. Of particular interest to the software architecture researchers and practitioners were the notations and languages for modeling software architectures, known as ADLs. Object Stochastic Activity Network (OSAN) is a new model which inherits useful features from Petri nets, stochastic activity networks and queue networks, which made it a powerful and flexible tool to model concurrent systems and evaluate and verify them. This paper introduces OSAN as a new analyzable architecture description language, which can be used both for modeling architectural aspects of... 

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... 

Recent challenges have brought about an inevitable tendency for enterprises to lunge towards organizing their information activities in a comprehensive way. In this respect, Enterprise Architecture (EA) has proven to be the leading option for development and maintenance of information systems. EA clearly provides a thorough outline of the whole information system comprising an enterprise. To establish such an outline, a logical framework needs to be laid upon the entire information system. Zachman framework (ZF) has been widely accepted as a standard scheme for identifying and organizing descriptive representations that have critical roles in enterprise management and system development. In... 

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... 

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 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... 

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... 

The pyramid network is one of the most important interconnection topologies used as hardware architecture or software data structure. It has a combined tree-mesh structure making it suitable for solving many parallel problems and applications. This paper proposes a parallel algorithm for Hermite Interpolation on the Pyramid network which has at least N nodes. The proposed algorithm has 3 phases: initialization, main, and final. The algorithm is optimal with a time complexity of O(N) for an N-point interpolation. ©2007 IEEE  

Model-driven approaches to software engineering have expanded their influence in recent years, with Object Management Group's Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) being the major force behind this boost. However, despite its merits, MDA remains insufficient for software system development, in the sense that it does not provide a concrete and comprehensive process for governing software development activities. There is therefore a strongly felt need for new model-driven software development methodologies. In this paper we review a number of existing model-driven methodologies, and propose a general framework for Model-Driven Development (MDD) based on MDA. The framework can be used for assessing...