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，深化和扩大我们在正在进行的项目GenEDA中开发的方法。在GenEDA的工作中，我们成功地将安全性和性能视为外部质量属性。对于所提出的项目，我们努力forinvestigating演化作为一个内部的质量属性，并将其集成到我们的method.In GenEDA，我们已经开发出一种方法来生成设计方案的质量要求。为了选择一个合适的架构设计方案，质量需求，如安全性，性能和新的可演化性需求之间的相互作用和冲突应该被检测和解决。在建议的项目中，我们希望提供一种方法的相互作用和权衡分析，以检测和解决这种冲突。第三，我们的目标是提供支持，软件工程师在他们的决策过程中，当选择不同的设计方案。为此，我们利用最优化问题和最先进的技术来选择相对于某个适应度函数的最佳设计方案。为了满足不同用户群体的需求，开发了不同的软件产品。这就引出了软件产品线工程（SPLE）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。我们希望提供专注于质量要求的可变性。引入质量需求增加了另一个维度的可变性的软件产品家族，我们要处理的GenEDA方法的增强。总而言之，当解决上述主题时获得的结果将导致设计质量感知的软件架构更强大的支持。我们首先计划逐一调查上述主题，将它们与当前的GenEDA方法学联系起来。在拟议项目的第二阶段，将分析调查区域之间的相互作用，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方法应用于现实生活中的场景，并开发了一个基准，支持广泛的研究社区未来的研究。在其他阶段的同时，我们将把现有的GenEDA工具整合到一个单一的工具中，并对其进行扩展，为增强的GenEDA方法提供支持。

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.