Tutorials -- Half Day/Tuesday PM

Software systems have to cope with continuously changing requirements. If a software system is derived from a well-defined architecture specification, the effect of changes in the requirement specification will be limited to the boundaries of the abstractions of the architecture. Since architecture specifications are generally abstract, one may create different implementations for the same architecture specification. Each alternative implementation will have different adaptability, performance and reusability characteristics. Providing ultimate adaptability may create too much run-time overhead. Aiming at the fastest implementation may result in unnecessarily rigid software. Aiming at the most reusable software may introduce redundant abstractions for a given problem. Software engineers, therefore, must be able to explicitly compare, evaluate and decide on various design alternatives of architectures based on the relative importance of the quality factors. This tutorial teaches techniques to depict the space of alternative implementations of architectures, and rules to select among the alternatives using quality factors. An example problem will be worked out and its various design and implementation alternatives will be demonstrated on a notebook computer.

The participants will learn techniques to depict the architectural design space, to balance adaptability, reuse and performance factors, and to select among design alternatives.

Attendee Background: Some knowledge of software architectures and programming languages is required.

Mehmet Aksit is working as an associate professor at the University of Twente. He gave more than 60 international and in-company courses in Europe, USA and Canada. Dr. Aksit has been the user and developer of object-oriented systems since 1983. He has been involved in designing architectures for several large industrial projects.