Generation and evaluation of design alternatives for software architectures (GenEDA)

我们的目标是通过考虑进一步的研究问题，深化和拓宽我们在正在进行的GenEDA项目中开发的方法。在GenEDA的工作中，我们成功地将安全和性能视为外部质量属性。对于提出的项目，我们努力将可进化性作为一个内部质量属性进行调查，并将其整合到我们的方法中。在GenEDA中，我们开发了一种根据质量需求生成设计备选方案的方法。为了选择合适的体系结构设计备选方案，应该检测和解决安全性、性能和新的可进化性需求等质量需求之间的交互和冲突。在所提出的项目中，我们希望提供一种交互和权衡分析的方法来检测和解决这种冲突。第三，我们的目标是为软件工程师在不同的设计方案中进行选择的决策过程提供支持。为此，我们利用优化问题和最新技术来选择关于某一适应度函数的最优设计方案，并开发了不同版本的软件产品，以满足不同用户群体的需求。这就引出了软件产品线工程的研究领域。目前的SPLE方法主要关注功能需求，而对质量需求关注较少。我们希望提供注重质量要求的可变性。引入质量需求为软件产品系列增加了另一个可变性维度，我们希望通过增强GenEDA方法来解决这一问题。总而言之，解决上述主题所获得的结果将为设计具有质量意识的软件体系结构提供更强大的支持。我们首先计划逐一研究上述主题，将它们与当前的GenEDA方法联系起来。在拟议项目的第二阶段，我们将分析调查地区之间的相互影响，并提出如何平衡不同方法的建议。在第三个项目阶段，我们将增强的GenEDA方法应用到现实生活场景中，并开发了一个基准，以支持广泛的研究社区未来的研究。与其他阶段并行，我们将把现有的GenEDA工具集成到一个工具中，并对其进行扩展，以提供对增强的GenEDA方法的支持。

We aim at deepening and broadening our methodology developed in the ongoing project GenEDA by taking into account further research questions. In our work in GenEDA, we successfully treated security and performance as external quality attributes. For the proposed project, we strive forinvestigating evolvability as an internal quality attribute and integrating it in our method.In GenEDA we have developed a method to generate design alternatives with regard to quality requirements. To select a suitable architecture design alternative, interactions and conflicts among quality requirements such as security, performance, and the new evolvability requirements should be detected and resolved. In the proposed project, we want to provide a method for interaction and trade-off analysis to detect and resolve such conflicts.Third, we aim at providing support for software engineers in their decision-making process when choosing among different design alternatives. For this purpose, we make use of optimisation problems and state-of-the-art techniques to select the optimal design alternative with respect to a certain fitness function.To satisfy the needs of different user groups, different variants of software products are developed. This leads to the research area of software product line engineering (SPLE). Current SPLE approaches focus mainly on functional requirements and pay less attention to quality requirements. We want to provide variability with focus on quality requirements. Introducing quality requirements adds another dimension of variability to the software product family, which we want to deal with in an enhancement of the GenEDA method.All in all, the results obtained when addressing the above-mentioned topics will lead to a much more powerful support for designing quality-aware software architectures. We first plan to investigate the above-mentioned topics one by one, relating them to the current GenEDA methodology. In the second phase of the proposed project, the interplay between the investigated areas will be analyzed, and we will come up with a proposal how to balance the different approaches. During the third project phase, we apply the enhanced GenEDA method to a real-life scenario and develop a benchmark, which supports future research by a broad research community. In parallel to the other phases we will integrate our existing GenEDA tools into one single tool and extend it to provide support for the enhanced GenEDA method.