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

支持开发人员开发超大规模系统的组合方法

• 批准号: RGPIN-2020-05791
• 负责人: Mosser, Sébastien
• 金额: $ 2.11万
• 依托单位: McMaster University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2021-01-01 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=740830
• 关键词: Compositional; Approach; Support; Developers; Developing

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.

我们的社会依靠软件来处理我们日常生活的每一部分。软件工程支持这些软件的定义，例如，通过回答诸如“如何以正确的方式构建正确的产品？".但是，当今社会所涉及的软件的复杂性正在不断增长，在这种情况下，规模改变了软件开发人员的一切。超大规模系统（ULSSs）的概念是由Northop等人于2006年提出的，旨在识别一类新的系统，其特征是根据任何可能的维度（例如，源代码、需求、用户数量、存储的数据），以及不断发展。关注点分离对于将这样的大规模系统划分为开发人员可以贡献的可管理单元是必不可少的。学术界和工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，它们孤立地处理了不同的挑战。此外，这些努力针对各种利益攸关方（例如，产品所有者、架构师），而不是专注于软件开发人员。这种孤立和缺乏关注导致了这样一种情况，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不受支持。我的研究计划的长期目标，然后调查和衡量软件开发人员如何设计ULSS，确定支持开发人员设计和实施ULSS的核心要素。我定义了三个短期目标：（一）建模的ULSS从开发商的角度来看，（二）组成模型的定义，以支持开发商和（iii）的实证分析的ULSS收集的要求和验证所获得的结果。为了实现这些目标，我认为三个家庭的研究任务相关的ULSS从软件开发商的角度来看：（一）超大规模的源代码的开发，（二）不断变化的需求的管理，及（三）软件开发商在设计，实施和维护的ULSS的作用。我的计划的结果将作为开源数据和软件提供，我们也依赖开源系统来衡量应用于现实生活中ULSS的贡献的好处。