This paper presents an overview of the field of software systems requirements engineering (RE). It describes the main areas of RE practice, and highlights some key open research issues for the future. 1

Software’s increasingly critical role in systems of widespread significance presents new challenges for the education of software engineers. Not only is our dependence on software increasing, but the character of software production is itself changing – and with it the demands on the software developers. Four challenges for educators of software developers help identify aspirations for software engineering education.

Most research done to date on software maintenance has been focused mainly on the evolution of legacy systems based on obsolete technologies. However, the use of more recent yet evolving technologies, like component-based techniques, also raise various issues about software comprehension and evolution. In particular, current industrial-strength component models like COM are based on many technical aspects that make them difficult to understand and use. The evolution of large componentbased software products is thus an emerging issue. This paper takes as a case study the component model developed and used by Dassault Systèmes, one of the largest software companies in Europe, for the development of its product lines, namely CATIA, DELMIA, and ENOVIA. This paper shows how the use of a meta model can help in

Abstract: Successful development of software product lines requires an architecture-centric approach with well established methodologies for both product line architecture (PLA) development and assessment. While several methodologies for PLA development have been proposed, the assessment of PLAs has mostly relied on methods developed for single product architectures. In this paper, we extend the popular ATAM (Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method) method into a holistic approach that analyzes the quality attribute tradeoffs not only for the product line architecture, but for the individual product architectures as well. In addition, it prescribes a qualitative analytical treatment of variation points using scenarios. We present the main tenets of the extended

this article is to present a good abstraction for an enhanced role model in a standard object-oriented language, namely, using the syntax and semantics of behavioral reflection by Javassist [15]. We present an enhanced role model alleviating and coping with the role-binding anomaly, and also satisfying the role properties characterized in [8] sufficiently

To maintain and understand large applications, it is important to know their architecture. The first problem is that unlike classes and packages, architecture is not explicitly represented in the code. The second problem is that successful applications evolve over time, so their architecture inevitably drifts. Reconstructing the architecture and checking whether it is still valid is therefore an important aid. While there is a plethora of approaches and techniques supporting architecture reconstruction, there is no comprehensive software architecture reconstruction state of the art and it is often difficult to compare the approaches. This article presents a state of the art in software architecture reconstruction approaches.

Towards having computers understand human users context information, this dissertation proposes a systematic context-sensing implementation methodology that can easily combine sensor outputs with subjective judgments. The feasibility of this idea is demonstrated via a meeting-participants focus-of-attention analysis case study with several simulated sensors using prerecorded experimental data and artificially generated sensor outputs distributed over a LAN network. The methodology advocates a top-down approach: (1) For a given application, a context information structure is defined

The next ten years will see distributed real-time computer systems replacing many mechanical and hydraulic control systems in high-dependability applications. In these applications a failure in the temporal domain can be as critical as a failure in the value domain. This paper discusses some of the technology trends that explain why distributed embedded real-time systems for highdependability applications will move into the mainstream. It then investigates the new requirements that must be addressed by the software engineering process. Two of the most important requirements are the design for composability and the systematic validation of highdependability distributed real-time systems. In the last two sections, these issues of composability and validation are treated in some detail. KEYWORDS Real-time systems, composability, distributed systems, validation, system architecture 1.

In this paper we study the need for multidimensional separation of concerns in architecture representations, including architecture-centered software development. We present a case study of a simple video surveillance system, describe its software architecture using an ADL called Wright, and we discuss the pragmatics and problems in the use of ADLs in general, compared to a concern-based approach to software architecture description. Our position is that current ADLs provide architectural abstractions that need to be extended to achieve the major goals of software architecture. Furthermore, in order to cover all concerns of importance in a software architecture description, software architects must be able to separate various dimensions of concern and consider the system from multiple perspectives simultaneously. Keywords: Multidimensional separation of concerns, software architecture, software architecture description, ADL, architectural viewpoints, architectural views, concern s...

this paper, we focus on several aspects of TrustME that facilitate specification and analysis of middlewarebased architectures for trusted enterprise computing systems