DSE Seminars 2006-2007
Using Resemblance to Support Component Reuse and Evolution
Andrew McVeigh (Imperial College), Wednesday 29 November 2006, 12.00, Studio B
Speaker. Andrew McVeigh is in the second year of a PhD at Imperial College, supervised by Professors Jeff Kramer and Jeff Magee. He has a background of 15 years working as a software architect and developer in telecommunications, digital broadcasting and finance.
Abstract. The aim of a component-based approach to software is to allow the construction of a system by reusing and connecting together a number of existing components. To successfully reuse a component, alterations generally need to be made to it, particularly if the abstraction level is high. However, existing usage of a component means that it cannot be altered without affecting the systems that reuse it already. This leads to a dilemma which frustrates the goals of the compositional approach to reuse.
- To help resolve this dilemma, we introduce the resemblance construct, allowing a new component to be defined in terms of changes to a base component. This allows us to effectively alter a base component for reuse, without affecting the existing definition or any users of the component. We use an example to show how this and other constructs ameliorate the reuse problems of complex, possibly composite, components and provide an intuitive modelling approach for systems construction.
Pheme: An Infrastructure for Software Knowledge Distribution
- Slinger Jansen (UCL/Utrecht University), Wednesday 06 December 2006, 12.00, Studio B
Speaker. Slinger Jansen is currently a visiting PhD student at University College London. His home institution is the Institute for Information and Organization at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, where he studies under Sjaak Brinkkemper into the area of product software and software product management. He obtained his Master's degree in computer science in 2003. Slinger is expecting to finish his PhD thesis, with the working title "Improving the Customer Configuration Update Process in a Software Supply Network" in 2007. His hobbies include Jiu-Jitsu, opera, and theatre.
Abstract. In 6 industrial case studies of product software vendors it was discovered that as much as 15% of the deployments and product updates of new products do not proceed as planned and require unplanned extra support from the software vendor. These organizations are held back in their growth, due to the fact that they cannot handle larger customer bases, since it would result into more configurations that require maintenance and updates. In this tool demonstration we show an infrastructure for communication about software products, be it product news, product updates, licensing information, and error and feedback reports. This tool attempts to integrate software deployment and software knowledge distribution. We expect this tool to be beneficial for product software vendors struggling with the problems described.