Concern-Driven Requirements for Adaptive Socio-Technical Systems

该研究计划的愿景是建立基于大规模软件重用的下一代基于模型的软件需求工程环境，以解决“高影响、社会技术系统”的挑战。这些系统的特点是具有相互冲突的目标、技术、组织过程和部署这些系统的不同社会背景的人员之间的复杂相互关系。例如，为数百万没有保险的美国公民提供负担得起的医疗保健就属于这一类，联合国协调世界各地疫苗接种制度的项目也是如此。此外，这样的系统需要不断适应不断变化的社会、经济和技术环境，以保持相关性和有用性。大型系统必须考虑许多问题（例如，可用性、安全性）。关注点分离是指专注于一个关注点，同时暂时忘记所有其他关注点的能力，允许人类处理此类系统的复杂性。然而，一些被称为“横切关注点”的关注点与许多其他关注点错综复杂地相互关联，使得单独分析关注点变得困难。现有的高级关注点分离技术通过将横切关注点与其他关注点的关系形式化来解决这个问题，这使得可以推断横切关注点对系统的影响。因此，可以通过组合一组可重用的关注点单元来分析和构建系统，而不管关注点是否横切。然而，*关注驱动的开发*，即跨软件开发阶段的大规模关注单元的系统应用，还没有得到重要的关注。可以从软件重用的成功案例中学到很多东西，从通用的、小规模的编程库到计划好的、大规模的软件产品线（SPLs）。spc是以产品为导向的，也就是说，它们描述了一系列类似的产品，例如一套助听器。相反，本研究追求关注导向——导致*软件关注线*——以最大限度地提高潜在的重用效益，因为关注不仅适用于一个产品族，而且适用于广泛的产品族。此外，在从一组类似的、适用于当前上下文的可重用单元中选择可重用单元时，需要支持对运行时适应性的需求。在当今的信息世界中，环境变化以闪电般的速度传播，这意味着需要快速做出正确的选择，以适应相关的运行时系统。这种支持目前还不容易获得。本研究提出的关注单元包括一组不同抽象级别的协调的、异构的、可重用的模型，并在组合关注以适应变化的上下文时尽可能使用最抽象、最高级的需求模型。研究计划的目标是推进面向关注的建模语言、框架和工具，用于自适应社会技术系统的需求工程，在可重用关注单元的帮助下，将社会、经济和技术背景考虑到运行时系统的适应性。该研究项目的影响是提高了大规模的重用，从而提高了生产力，导致了加拿大软件业服务的许多组织的创新和提高了竞争力。软件关注线有望成为加拿大软件行业的可行开发选择，甚至在快速发展的软件开发项目的背景下也是如此，并且将允许软件行业进一步专业化，使软件工程与其他工程学科更加一致。

The research program’s vision is to build the next generation, model-based software requirements engineering environment based on large-scale software reuse to address the challenges of *high-impact, socio-technical systems*. Such systems are characterized by the complex interrelatedness of people with conflicting goals, technology, organizational processes, and the diverse social context in which these systems are deployed. For example, providing affordable health care to millions of uninsured US citizens falls into this category, as does a United Nations program to coordinate vaccination regimes around the world. Furthermore, systems like that need to constantly adapt to the ever changing social, economic, and technical environment to remain relevant and useful.Large-scale systems have to take many concerns into account (e.g., availability, security). Separation of concerns is the ability to concentrate on one concern, while temporarily forgetting about all other concerns, allowing humans to handle the complexities of such systems. However, some concerns, called *crosscutting concerns*, are intricately interconnected with many other concerns, making it difficult to analyze concerns individually. Existing techniques for advanced separation of concerns address this issue by formalizing the relationship of a crosscutting concern with other concerns, which enables reasoning about the impact of a crosscutting concern on a system. Consequently, systems can be analyzed and built by composing a set of reusable concern units, regardless of whether concerns crosscut or not. Nevertheless, *concern-driven development*, i.e., the systematic application of large-scale concern units across software development phases, has not yet received significant attention.Much can be learned from success stories for software reuse, ranging from generic, small-scale programming libraries to planned, large-scale Software Product Lines (SPLs). SPLs are product-oriented, i.e., they describe a family of similar products, e.g., a set of hearing aids. This research pursues concern-orientation instead – leading to *Software Concern Lines* – to maximize the potential reuse benefit, because concerns are applicable to not only one product family but across a wide range of product families. In addition, the need for run-time adaptation requires support when selecting a reusable unit out of a set of similar, applicable ones for the current context. The lightning speed with which changes in context propagate through today’s information world means correct selections need to be made quickly for relevant run-time system adaptation. Such support is not yet readily available.This research proposes concern units that include a set of coordinated, heterogeneous, reusable models at different levels of abstraction and use the most abstract, most high-level requirements model possible when composing concerns to adapt to changed context. The research program’s objective is to advance concern-oriented modeling languages, frameworks, and tools for requirements engineering of adaptive socio-technical systems, taking social, economic, and technical context into account for run-time system adaptation with the help of reusable concern units.The research program’s impact is improved large-scale reuse and hence improved productivity, leading to innovation in and increased competitiveness of the many organizations served by the Canadian software industry. Software Concern Lines are expected to become a viable development choice for the Canadian software industry even in the context of rapidly evolving software development projects, and will allow the software industry to further specialize, bringing software engineering more in line with other engineering disciplines.