GenQA: automated addition of architectural quality attribute support for Java software?

ABSTRACT

Non-functional requirements for software systems are typically specified using informal notations such as quality attribute scenarios. Further, implementation strategies for such non-functional attributes are frequently common across systems with quite different functional requirements. In such cases, the time invested in implementing these quality attributes could be salvaged, thereby reducing the project lifetime and increasing software quality. In this paper, we present the design and prototype implementation of a tool and associated framework that enables software engineers to effectively capture non-functional requirements, and then automatically generate implementations of these requirements to be added to the application being built. The quality attribute implementations are generated as aspects (AspectJ in the prototype) that can be weaved in with the application code (Java) with minimal development effort.

REFERENCES

• 1: Leonard J. Bass , Mark Klein , Felix Bachmann, Quality Attribute Design Primitives and the Attribute Driven Design Method, Revised Papers from the 4th International Workshop on Software Product-Family Engineering, p.169-186, October 03-05, 2001
• 2: Tushar Deepak Chandra , Sam Toueg, Unreliable failure detectors for reliable distributed systems, Journal of the ACM (JACM), v.43 n.2, p.225-267, March 1996 [doi>10.1145/226643.226647]
• 3: C. Constantinides and T. Skotiniotis. Providing multidimensional decomposition in object-oriented analysis and design. In SE 2004, Feb 2004.
• 4: I. Groher and S. Schulze. Generating aspect code from UML models, Mar 2003.
• 5: G. Kiczales, J. Lamping, A. Menhdhekar, C. Maeda, C. Lopes, J.-M. Loingtier, and J. Irwin. Aspect-oriented programming. In ECOOP '97, pages 220--242, 1997.
• 6: S. Kuninobu. Making programs reliable using AOP. In BPAOSD'06, Mar 2006.
• 7: Y. R. Reddy. An aspect oriented approach to early software development. In 7th ICUML, 2004.
• 8: Nigamanth Sridhar, Dynamic instantiation-checking components, Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Applied computing, April 23-27, 2006, Dijon, France [doi>10.1145/1141277.1141611]
• 9: N. Sridhar and J. O. Hallstrom. A behavioral model for software containers. In FASE'06, pages 139--154, 2006.
• 10: Sun Microsystems. J2EE information and specification. http://java.sun.com/j2ee/.
• 11: Quan Tran , Lawrence Chung, NFR-Assistant: Tool Support for Achieving Quality, Proceedings of the 1999 IEEE Symposium on Application - Specific Systems and Software Engineering and Technology, p.284, March 24-27, 1999

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
aspects, automated generation, software architecture