research-article

A framework for managing uncertainty in software architecture

Author:

Chawanangwa LupafyaAuthors Info & Claims

ECSA '19: Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Software Architecture - Volume 2

Pages 71 - 74

https://doi.org/10.1145/3344948.3344954

Published: 09 September 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Software architecture records key decisions about software systems. Changes to architecture decisions can, therefore, have significant costs. One of the main causes of architecture changes is uncertainty, which is an inherent feature in open, real-world software systems. We hypothesise that capturing uncertainties, as far as they can be predicted, pertaining to structure, behaviour and resources of systems in software architecture and treating them as first-class concerns, would make architecture decisions more resilient to change. Explicitly considering and representing uncertainty in architecture can help developers design for change and minimise architecture erosion as changes invariably occur. In this PhD project, we aim to develop a conceptual framework for the management of uncertainty in software architecture. The conceptual framework will be realised in the form of a workbench of tools for managing uncertainty at the architectural level. The effectiveness of the framework and the workbench will be evaluated using case studies. An ideal case study for evaluation will demonstrate different aspects of uncertainty in software architecture. Potential domains under consideration for case studies include wireless sensor networks and health care systems.

References

[1]

L. Bass, P. Clements, and R. Kazman, SoftwareArchitecture in Practice, 2 ed. Addison-Wesley, 2003.

Digital Library

[2]

J. Whittle, P. Sawyer, N. Bencomo, B. H. C. Chengy, and J. M. Bruelz, "RELAX: Incorporating uncertainty into the specification of self-adaptive systems," Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Requir. Eng., pp. 79--88, 2009.

Digital Library

[3]

N. Esfahani, K. Razavi, and S. Malek, "Dealing with uncertainty in early software architecture," in Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, 2012, p. 21.

Digital Library

[4]

S.-W. Cheng and D. Garlan, "Handling uncertainty in autonomic systems," Int'l Wrkshp. Living with Uncertain., 2007.

[5]

P. A. Laplante, "The Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the halting problem," ACM SIGACT News, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 63--65, 1991.

Digital Library

[6]

D. Garlan, "Software engineering in an uncertain world," Proc. FSE/SDP Work. Futur. Softw. Eng. Res. SE - FoSER ' 10, pp. 125--128, 2010.

Digital Library

[7]

R. Bahsoon and W. Emmerich, "ArchOptions: A real options-based model for predicting the stability of software architectures," in Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Economics-Driven Software Research (EDSER-5), 2003, pp. 35--40.

[8]

A. L. Wolf, "Succeedings of the Second International Software Architecture Workshop," SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 42--56, 1997.

Digital Library

[9]

D. Han, Q. Yang, J. Xing, J. Li, and H. Wang, "FAME: A UML-based framework for modeling fuzzy self-adaptive software," Inf. Softw. Technol., vol. 76, pp. 118--134, 2016.

Digital Library

[10]

P. Maeder, M. Riebisch, and I. Philippow, "Traceability for Managing Evolutionary Change," Proc. ISCA 15th Int. Conf. Softw. Eng. Data Eng. SEDE 2006, pp. 1--8, 2006.

[11]

B. (Virginia T. George, S. A. (Viginia T. Bohner, and P.-D. ( J. M. U. Prieto-Diaz, "Software Informatioin Leaks: A complexity prespective," 2004.

[12]

P. Kruchten, "Architectural blueprints-the" 4+ 1" view model of software architecture," IEEE Softw., vol. 12, no. November, pp. 42--50, 1995.

Digital Library

[13]

R. N. Taylor, N. Medvidovic, and E. M. Dashofy, Software Architecture: Foundations, Theory, and Practice. Wiley Publishing, 2009.

Digital Library

[14]

O. L. de Weck, C. Eckert, and J. Clarkson, "A classification of uncertainty for early product and system design," in International Conference on Engineering Design, 2007.

[15]

M. Smithson, Ignorance and uncertainty: emerging paradigms. Springer Science & Business Media, 1989.

[16]

C. Dictionary, "Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary." PONS-Worterbucher, Klett Ernst Verlag GmbH, 2008.

[17]

E. Letier, D. Stefan, and E. T. Barr, "Uncertainty, risk, and information value in software requirements and architecture," in Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2014, pp. 883--894.

Digital Library

[18]

H. McManus and D. Hastings, "3.4. 1 A Framework for Understanding Uncertainty and its Mitigation and Exploitation in Complex Systems," in INCOSE international symposium, 2005, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 484--503.

[19]

D. Perez-Palacin and R. Mirandola, "Uncertainties in the modeling of self-adaptive systems: a taxonomy and an example of availability evaluation," in Proceedings of the 5th ACM/SPEC international conference on Performance engineering, 2014, pp. 3--14.

Digital Library

[20]

D. Weyns et al., "Perpetual assurances for self-adaptive systems," in Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems III. Assurances, Springer, 2017, pp. 31--63.

[21]

A. O'Hagan et al., Uncertain judgements: eliciting experts' probabilities. John Wiley & Sons, 2006.

[22]

S. Mahdavi-Hezavehi, P. Avgeriou, and D. Weyns, "A classification framework of uncertainty in architecture-based self-adaptive systems with multiple quality requirements," in Managing Trade-Offs in Adaptable Software Architectures, Elsevier, 2017, pp. 45--77.

[23]

C. Hewitt and J. Woods, "Inconsistency Robustness," Coll. Pub., London, vol. vol 52, 2015.

[24]

L. Cheung, L. Golubchik, N. Medvidovic, and G. Sukhatme, "Identifying and addressing uncertainty in architecture-level software reliability modeling," in Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, 2007. IPDPS 2007. IEEE International, 2007, pp. 1--6.

[25]

E. Letier, D. Stefan, and E. T. Barr, "Uncertainty, Risk, and Information Value in Software Requirements and Architecture," Proc. 36th Int. Conf. Softw. Eng., pp. 883--894, 2014.

Digital Library

[26]

I. Malavolta, P. Lago, H. Muccini, P. Pelliccione, and A. Tang, "What industry needs from architectural languages: A survey," IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng., vol. 39, no. 6, pp. 869--891, 2013.

Digital Library

Cited By

Fellah A(2024)Embracing Residuality Theory in Software Architecture to Address Uncertainty: Key Challenges and StrategiesSoftware and Data Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-75201-8_3(31-42)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-75201-8_3
Lupafya CBalasubramaniam D(2022)A Framework for Considering Uncertainty in Software Systems2022 IEEE 46th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC)10.1109/COMPSAC54236.2022.00241(1519-1524)Online publication date: Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/COMPSAC54236.2022.00241

Index Terms

A framework for managing uncertainty in software architecture
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Software system structures
      1. Software architectures

Recommendations

Uncertainty expressions in software architecture group decision making: explorative study
ECSA '18: Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Software Architecture: Companion Proceedings

Software architecture can be seen as a set of architectural design decisions (ADDs) that shape the resulting software solution. To make an ADD, stakeholders follow some organization- or team-specific group decisions making process. In this study, we ...
Dealing with uncertainty in early software architecture
FSE '12: Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

Changing early architectural decisions of a system is both difficult and costly. It is very important for the architect to get them "right". However, in early design, the architect is often forced to make these decisions under uncertainty, i.e., not ...
Software architecture: reflections on an evolving discipline
ESEC/FSE '11: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSOFT symposium and the 13th European conference on Foundations of software engineering

Software Architecture emerged in the 1990's as an important sub-field of software engineering. While good architectural design had long been recognized as critical to the success of any complex software system, before then the practice of architecting ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

ECSA '19: Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Software Architecture - Volume 2

September 2019

286 pages

ISBN:9781450371421

DOI:10.1145/3344948

Editors:
Laurence Duchien
University of Lille, France
,
Catia Trubiani
Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI), Italy
,
Riccardo Scandariato
Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, Sweden
,
Raffaela Mirandola
Polytecnico di Milano, Italy
,
Elena Maria Navarro Martinez
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
,
Danny Weyns
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
,
Anne Koziolek
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
,
Patrizia Scandurra
University of Bergamo, Italy
,
Clément Quinton
University of Lille, France

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 September 2019

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ECSA

ECSA: European Conference on Software Architecture

September 9 - 13, 2019

Paris, France

Acceptance Rates

ECSA '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 48 of 72 submissions, 67%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 48 of 72 submissions, 67%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

1
Total Citations
View Citations
286
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)22
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 09 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Fellah A(2024)Embracing Residuality Theory in Software Architecture to Address Uncertainty: Key Challenges and StrategiesSoftware and Data Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-75201-8_3(31-42)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-75201-8_3
Lupafya CBalasubramaniam D(2022)A Framework for Considering Uncertainty in Software Systems2022 IEEE 46th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC)10.1109/COMPSAC54236.2022.00241(1519-1524)Online publication date: Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/COMPSAC54236.2022.00241

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents