The Role of Architecture in Facilitating Design Collaboration

架构在促进设计协作中的作用

• 批准号: 0534656
• 负责人: James Herbsleb
• 金额: $ 50万
• 依托单位: Carnegie-Mellon University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-11-15 至 2009-10-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0534656&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Role; Architecture; Facilitating; Design; Collaboration

This project seeks to develop a scientific basis for principles for relating architectures to artifacts, and experimentally validate those principles, with specific application to software design. The intimate relationship between artifact architecture and collaboration in artifact design is widely acknowledged but inadequately understood. Architectures describe a system in terms of its high-level structures and the relationships between them. Because architectural descriptions take advantage of the "nearly decomposable" nature of the designed artifact, they provide a powerful basis for dividing the work in such a way that teams can design individual components without being overwhelmed by the need to coordinate with other teams designing other components. The decoupling of functionality defined by the architecture translates into a decoupling of the work, which makes collaboration feasible.Yet, components interact, and the details of these interactions create varied and potentially complex interdependencies in the design work. We cannot fully exploit the potential of architectures for supporting coordination because we know very little about the fit between organizational characteristics and architectures. How do organizational characteristics constrain the range of architectural styles an organization can use in design? How do architectural characteristics constrain the range of organizations that can build them?In many kinds of design, we also know very little about how to make the architecture visible in the day-to-day design and implementation work. In software design, for example, there are no practical and effective techniques for guiding a component designer toward decisions that conform to the architectural description, or for checking whether an implementation is faithful to its architecture. In practice, violations of architectural descriptions, resulting in unpredictable dependencies among components, are commonplace.This research will focus on the relationship between software architectures and collaboration in software projects because the highly volatile nature of software requires frequent change, and because the rapid emergence of new organizational forms (open source, outsourcing, globally distributed) present serious challenges to existing ways of coordinating work. In collaboration with industry partners (at Siemens Corporation and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory), field studies will be conducted of collaborations occurring within a variety of architectural styles in order to identify the principles that relate architectural descriptions to task characteristics, such as uncertainty, interdependence, equivocality, and centralization, which are known to have major implications for coordination, collaboration, and communication in organizations. These principles will make it possible to develop technologies to analyze the tradeoffs and understand the fit of product architectures and organizations.The research will also develop practical techniques for exposing the architecture in the code so that the architectural description can effectively guide the development work. It will develop innovative structuring techniques for making the component and connector architecture visible, and for enforcing style-specific constraints and idioms. In addition, a new language will be created to define and check mappings between architecture and the implementation constructs. Finally, research will validate these techniques, both in laboratory studies in order to see if they improve speed and quality of development, and in the field to test their robustness, generality, and ability to scale.The engineering techniques will be made generally available for use in architectural tradeoff analysis. The techniques will also be introduced into well-established software engineering curriculum, where they will impact students at many schools for whom this curriculum serves as a model.

该项目旨在为将架构与工件相关联的原则开发科学基础，并通过实验验证这些原则，并将其具体应用于软件设计。工件架构和工件设计中的协作之间的密切关系被广泛承认，但没有得到充分的理解。体系结构描述了系统的高层结构和它们之间的关系。因为架构描述利用了所设计的工件的“几乎可分解”的特性，所以它们提供了一个强大的基础来划分工作，这样团队就可以设计单独的组件，而不必与设计其他组件的其他团队进行协调。由架构定义的功能的分离转化为工作的分离，这使得协作成为可能。然而，组件相互作用，这些交互的细节在设计工作中产生了各种各样的和潜在的复杂的相互依赖性。我们不能充分利用架构的潜力来支持协调，因为我们对组织特征和架构之间的匹配知之甚少。组织特征如何约束组织在设计中可以使用的架构风格的范围？体系结构特征如何限制能够构建它们的组织的范围？在许多设计中，我们对如何在日常设计和实现工作中使架构可见也知之甚少。例如，在软件设计中，没有实用和有效的技术来指导组件设计师做出符合体系结构描述的决策，或者检查实现是否忠实于其体系结构。在实践中，违反体系结构描述，导致组件之间不可预测的依赖关系是司空见惯的。由于软件的高度不稳定性需要频繁的更改，并且由于新的组织形式的快速出现，因此本研究将关注软件体系结构与软件项目中协作之间的关系（开放源代码、外包、全球分布）对现有的协调工作方式提出了严峻的挑战。与行业合作伙伴合作（在西门子公司和美国宇航局喷气推进实验室），将进行现场研究的合作发生在各种建筑风格，以确定原则，涉及建筑描述的任务特点，如不确定性，相互依存性，模棱两可，和集中，这是众所周知的有重大影响的协调，合作，组织中的沟通。这些原则将使开发技术来分析权衡和理解产品架构和组织的适合性成为可能，研究还将开发实用技术来在代码中公开架构，以便架构描述可以有效地指导开发工作。它将开发创新的结构化技术，使组件和连接器架构可见，并强制执行特定于风格的约束和习惯用法。此外，还将创建一种新的语言来定义和检查体系结构与实现构造之间的映射。最后，研究将验证这些技术，无论是在实验室的研究，以了解他们是否提高速度和质量的发展，并在现场测试他们的鲁棒性，通用性，和scale.The工程技术的能力将普遍适用于建筑权衡分析。这些技术也将被引入到完善的软件工程课程中，在那里它们将影响许多学校的学生，这些学校的课程将作为一个模型。