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On building architecture-centric product line architecture

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Abstract

Software architects typically spend a great deal of time and effort exploring uncertainties, evaluating alternatives, and balancing the concerns of stakeholders. Selecting the best architecture to meet both the functional and non-functional requirements is a critical but difficult task, especially at the early stage of software development when there may be many uncertainties. For example, how will a technology match the operational or performance expectations in reality? This paper presents an approach to building architecture-centric product line. The main objective of the proposed approach is to support effective requirements validation and architectural prototyping for the application-level software. Architectural prototyping is practically essential to architecture design and evaluation. However, architectural prototyping practiced in the field mostly is not used to explore alternatives. Effective construction and evaluation of multiple architecture alternatives is one of the critically challenging tasks. The product line architecture advocated in this paper consists of multiple software architecture alternatives, from which the architect can select and rapidly generate a working application prototype. The paper presents a case study of developing a framework that is primarily built with robust architecture patterns in distributed and concurrent computing and includes variation mechanisms to support various applications even in different domains. The development process of the framework is an application of software product line engineering with an aim to effectively facilitate upfront requirements analysis for an application and rapid architectural prototyping to explore and evaluate architecture alternatives.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Nortel Networks for providing us with a network routing software system, cgNet, for research and education. The project was partially funded by National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Chung-Horng Lung & Kamalachelva Selvarajah

  2. Nortel Networks, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Balasangar Balasubramaniam, Poopalasingham Elankeswaran & Umatharan Gopalasundaram

Authors
  1. Chung-Horng Lung
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  2. Balasangar Balasubramaniam
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  3. Kamalachelva Selvarajah
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  4. Poopalasingham Elankeswaran
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  5. Umatharan Gopalasundaram
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chung-Horng Lung.

Appendix

Appendix

The appendix demonstrates the challenge of architecture evaluation for performance. Three systems were evaluated using different architecture alternatives: ST, HS/HA, and LFs. ST was the architecture of the original system, which has been restructured using HS/HA and LFs for performance improvement based on the recommendation of the patterns documentation. However, some results were inconsistent with the expectation. The performance issue is even more challenging at the front-end stage where only abstract representations are available. The experience was one of the reasons that motivated this research.

We present partial performance results of a network routing application running on three independent systems implemented in C++ [1, 27]. Those three systems were designed using ST, HS/HA, and LFs architecture patterns, respectively. Tables 4 and 5 present partial results for a new network protocols, open shorted path first (OSPF), and multi-protocol label switching (MPLS), with respect to the number of packets processed and discarded. The experiments were conducted using PCs with a 2-GHz CPU and 256 MB RAM running on Linux 2.4.18-27.7.x. The results were average of multiple runs, and the duration of each run was 20 min. Figures 5 and 6 illustrate the number of packets discarded for three different architecture alternatives for OSPF and MPLS, respectively.

Table 4 OSPF protocol performance results for three different architecture alternatives
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Table 5 MPLS protocol performance results for three different architecture alternatives
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Fig. 5
figure 5

Packets discarded for the OSPF protocol for three architecture alternatives

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Fig. 6
figure 6

Packets discarded for the MPLS protocol for three architecture alternatives

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The results for this particular application revealed that the performance based on the HS/HA architectural pattern is much better and scalable than LFs and ST. The outcome for different number of threads (from 2 to 15) for LFs is very close (<1 % difference). Further, as presented in Table 4, the performance of the re-engineered systems based on the LFs architectural pattern was even worse than that of the traditional ST design in many situations for the OSPF protocol. Table 5 also shows that ST and LFs have similar results. The outcome for this specific study did not conform to the general understanding that LFs pattern performs faster [36] due to its lower overhead and high parallelism. This outcome may have to do with a high degree of parallelism and high input rates in the specific application under consideration. The results presented here are not meant to draw a general conclusion of performance for three architecture patterns. Nevertheless, the study did illustrate the challenge of conducting software performance engineering at the early stage of the development process.

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Lung, CH., Balasubramaniam, B., Selvarajah, K. et al. On building architecture-centric product line architecture. Requirements Eng 20, 301–321 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-014-0201-3

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