A Compositional Approach to Support Developers in Developing Ultra-large-scale Systems

我们的社会依赖于软件来处理我们日常生活的每一个部分。软件工程支持这种软件的定义，例如，通过回答诸如“如何以正确的方式构建正确的产品？”之类的问题。但是，当今社会所涉及的软件的复杂性在不断增长，在这种背景下，规模改变了软件开发人员的一切。超大规模系统(ULSS)的概念是由Northop等人首创的。2006年确定了一类新的系统，其特点是根据任何可能的维度(例如，源代码、要求、用户数量、存储的数据)的内在复杂性和大规模方面，并不断演变。分离关注点对于将这样的大型系统划分为可管理的单元至关重要，这样开发人员才能做出贡献。学术界和产业界投入了许多努力来解决与这些系统相关的研究挑战。然而，他们孤立地解决了不同的挑战。此外，这些努力针对不同的利益相关者(例如，产品所有者、架构师)，而不是集中在软件开发人员身上。这种孤立和缺乏重点导致了一种情况，即软件开发人员参与了ULSS的紧急设计，但在他们的日常任务中得不到支持。我的研究计划的长期目标是通过确定支持开发人员设计和实现ULSS的核心元素来调查和衡量软件开发人员如何设计ULSS。我定义了三个短期目标：(I)从开发人员的角度对ULSS进行建模，(Ii)定义支持开发人员的组成模型，以及(Iii)对ULSS进行经验分析，以收集需求并验证所获得的结果。为了达到这些目标，我从软件开发人员的角度考虑了与ULSS相关的三类研究任务：(I)超大规模源代码的开发，(Ii)不断变化的需求的管理，以及(Iii)软件开发人员在ULSS设计、实施和维护中的作用。我的计划的结果将以开源数据和软件的形式提供，我们还依赖开源系统来衡量应用于现实生活中的ULSS的贡献的好处。

Our society relies on software to deal with every part of our daily lives. Software engineering supports the definition of such pieces of software, e.g., by answering to questions like “how to build the right product in the right way?”. But the complexity of the pieces of software involved nowadays on our society is constantly growing and, in this context, scale changes everything for software developers. The notion of Ultra-large-scale Systems (ULSSs) was coined by Northop et al. in 2006 to identify a new class of systems, characterized by their intrinsic complexity and large-scale aspect according to any possible dimensions (e.g., source code, requirements, number of users, stored data), and constant evolution. Separation of concerns is essential to divide such large-scale systems into manageable units to wich developers can contribute. Academia and industry invested many efforts to address the research challenges associated with these systems. However, they addressed the different challenges in isolation. Furthermore, these efforts targeted various stakeholders (e.g., product owners, architects) and were not focused on the software developers. This isolation and lack of focus led to a situation in which software developers are involved in the emergent design of ULSSs but are not supported in their daily tasks. The long-term objective of my research program is then to investigate and to measure how software developers design ULSSs by identifying the core elements that support developers designing and implementing ULSSs. I define three short-term objectives: (i) the modelling of ULSSs from the developer's point of view, (ii) the definition of compositional models to support developers and (iii) the empirical analysis of ULSSs to gather requirements and validate the obtained results. To address these objectives, I consider three families of research tasks relevant to ULSSs from the software developer's point of view: (i) the development of ultra-large-scale source-code, (ii) the management of evolving requirements, and (iii) the role of the software developer in the design, implementation and maintenance of ULSSs. The results of my program will be made available as open-source data and software, and we also rely on open-source systems to measure the benefits of the contribution applied to real-life ULSSs.