CI-P: Collaborative Research: Planning and Prototyping a Community-Wide Software Architecture Instrument

在软件系统的生命周期中，维护的工作量和成本占主导地位。在过去的二十年里，软件体系结构研究已经产生了许多工具和技术来理解和维护软件系统的体系结构。然而，大量互不相连的环境、缺乏共享的研究基础设施、使工具健壮的成本以及缺乏进行面向架构的实证研究所需的数据集，阻碍了实证研究和技术转让。因此，研究人员和实践者经常重复对方的努力，从而限制了潜在的突破。该项目开发了集成框架的计划和初始原型，该框架集合了与体系结构相关的技术，以实现以维护为重点的实证研究。该框架彻底改变了软件系统研究和开发的未来。它促进了尖端技术和工具的发现和采用，并促进了比目前更有效的大学与行业合作。此规划项目引出需求并确定其优先顺序，收集社区反馈，并为软件体系结构工具(SAIN)开发了一个原型，这是同类工具中的第一个集成框架。SAIN由三个主要组成部分组成：(1)用于逆向工程和分析软件体系结构的编目工具库；(2)用于集成这些技术以实现面向体系结构的经验研究的即插即用工具；以及(3)可通过网络访问的软件体系结构数据集和基准的储存库。这一规划项目开发了一个概念验证解决方案，证明了拟议文书的可行性，以及该文书促成的研究活动。SAIN通过持续集成各种工具，为软件体系结构研究和实践提供了一个有效的、社区范围的平台。它支持架构在广泛的软件工程活动中的核心作用。该框架包括托管大量恢复的体系结构的第一个存储库，以使研究人员能够有效地评估他们的技术，并旨在重振软件体系结构的经验研究。

The effort and cost of maintenance dominate activities in a software system's lifecycle. Over the past two decades, software architecture research has yielded many tools and techniques for understanding and maintaining the architectures of software systems. However, empirical research and technology transfer are impeded by myriad disjoint environments, lack of a shared research infrastructure, the costs of making tools robust, and lack of datasets needed to conduct architecture-oriented empirical research. Consequently, researchers and practitioners often repeat each other's efforts, thus limiting potential breakthroughs. This projects develops the plans and an initial prototype for an integration framework that assembles architecture-related techniques to enable maintenance-focused empirical research. The framework revolutionizes the future of software systems research and development. It facilitates the discovery and adoption of cutting-edge techniques and tools, and fosters much more effective university-industry collaboration than exists today. This planning project elicits and prioritizes the requirements, collects the community feedback, and develops a prototype for the Software Architecture INstrument (SAIN), a first-of-its-kind integration framework. SAIN comprises three principal components: (1) a catalogued library of tools for reverse engineering and analyzing software architectures; (2) a plug-and-play instrument for integrating the techniques to enable architecture-oriented empirical studies; and (3) a repository of Web-accessible software-architecture datasets and benchmarks. This planning project develops a proof-of-concept solution that demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed instrument, as well as the research activities enabled by this instrument. SAIN provides an effective, community-wide platform for software architecture research and practice through continuous integration of diverse tools. It supports architecture's central role in a broad range of software engineering activities. The framework comprises the first repository hosting large numbers of recovered architectures to enable researchers to effectively evaluate their techniques, and is aimed at reinvigorating empirical research in software architecture.