Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-17T14:53:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Helaine_Cristina_Silva_Sousa.pdf: 2630560 bytes, checksum: fb46a7db2abe38334d4a7e684f39c287 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-05-14 / FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA E AO DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTIFICO E TECNOLÓGICO DO MARANHÃO / The emergence of model driven approaches provides a new alternative for managing the complexity involved in the creation of test cases, for enhancing the automation of software testing and for promoting the broad reuse of models developed during the analysis of requirements and design of software. In addition, it reduces the injection of errors and software development time. However, in the use of model driven approaches, possible errors can be injected during the manual creation of transformation rules applyied to develop a software system. In this dissertation, we propose metamodels for test, a methodology and a framework called Automatic Test Case based on Models (ATCM) in order to generate test cases to test the source code generated by an model driven approach. A prototype of the framework ATCM was developed, providing tools that minimize the injection of errors during the generation of test cases, making this task less dependent on people and less error-prone reducing the development time and providing high quality and efficiency of test cases. / O surgimento das Abordagens Dirigidas por Modelos fornece uma nova alternativa para o gerenciamento da complexidade do desenvolvimento de software, para criação de testes de software, para automação dos processos de testes e para fornecimento da ampla reutilização de modelos desenvolvidos durante a fase de análise dos requisitos e projeto de software, reduzindo a possível injeção de erros e o tempo de desenvolvimento do software. No entanto, com a utilização das Abordagens Dirigidas por Modelos, possíveis erros podem ser injetados na criação das regras de transformação para implementar um determinado sistema de software. Propõe-se neste trabalho metamodelos de testes, uma metodologia e um framework ATCM (Automatic Test Case based on Models) com a finalidade de gerar casos de teste a fim de testar o código-fonte gerado por uma Abordagem Dirigida por Modelos. Um protótipo do framework ATCM foi desenvolvido, fornecendo ferramentas que minimizam a injeção de erros durante a geração dos casos de teste, tornando esta tarefa menos dependente de pessoas e menos propensa a erros reduzindo o tempo de desenvolvimento e provendo maior qualidade e eficiência nos casos de teste gerados.

Today it is realized by industry that automation of software development leads to increased productivity, maintainability and higher quality. Model-Driven Development (MDD) aims to replace manual software development methods by automated methods using Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) to express domain concepts effectively. Main actors in software industry, Microsoft and IBM have recognized the need to provide technologies and tools to allow building DSLs to support MDD. On the one hand, Microsoft is building DSL Tools integrated in Visual Studio 2005; on the other hand IBM is contributing to the development of Eclipse Modeling Frameworks (EMF/GEF/GMF), both tools aim to make development and deployment of DSLs easier. Software practitioners seek for guidelines regarding how to adopt these tools. In this thesis, the author presents the current state-of-the-art in MDD standards and Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM). Furthermore, the author presents current state-of-the-tools for DSM and performs a comparison of Microsoft DSL Tools and Eclipse EMF/GEF/GMF Frameworks based on a set of evaluation criteria. For the purpose of comparison the author developed two DSL designers (one by using each DSM tool). Based on the experiences gained in development of these DSL designers, the author prepared guidelines regarding how to adopt these tools to existing development environments as well as their advantages and drawbacks.

Model Driven Development (MDD) is considered as a powerful emerging paradigm for developing system software and services. MDD relies heavily on the models to generate part of the code for implementation. It is virtually inevitable that changes at the model level result in breaking the compatibility with the existing code base. The study presented in this thesis is performed in an industrial setting. Our industrial partner is involved in MDD and has experienced compatibility problems described above. The aim of this thesis is to identify the changes that can be made to UML class diagram and investigate what kind of negative impact they pose on the compatibility with already existing Java implementations. Apart from identifying possible model changes and assessing their negative impact the thesis provides suggestions and guidelines of how to perform such modifications so that their negative impact will be minimized. / +46 455-395070

Context. Software systems, becoming larger and more complex day-by-day, have resulted in software development processes to become more complex to understand and manage. Many companies have started to adapt distributed software engineering practices that would allow them to work in distributed teams at different organizations and/or geographical locations. For example, model-driven engineering methods are being used in such global software engineering projects. Among the activities in model-based software development, consistency checking is one of the widely known ones. Consistency checking is concerned with consistent models; in particular, having a consistent group of multiple models for a whole system, e.g., multiple models produced by distributed teams. Objectives. This thesis aims to find out how ‘Global Consistency Checking (GCC)’ can be utilized for exploring inconsistency problems between distributed models; particularly among UML class diagram relationships (in terms of consistency), as well as how GCC can be scaled with large number of models and relationships. Thereby, these inconsistencies are also aimed to incrementally resolve in our approach. Methods. We made a review in distributed software development domain and model management, in particular, methods of consistency checking between ‘Distributed Models (DM)’. Next, we conducted two case studies in two problem domains in order to apply our ‘consistency checking methodology’. We concurrently constructed and implemented new consistency rules, most of which are gathered from literatures and brainstorming with our coordinators. Generally, the method contains implementing different models of the case studies with a tool support and trying to figure out overlaps, merging models and checking the merged model against the consistency rules, and evaluating the results of GCC. We mainly addressed issues focused on consistency checking of individual models and the mapping between them e.g., pair-wise consistency checking (PCC), which are incapable of fully addressing problems against any consistency rules encountered in distributed environments. Results. We have identified seven types of inconsistency, which are divided in two groups named ‘Global inconsistency’ and ‘Pair-wise inconsistency’. In the first case study, we have 94 global inconsistencies and 73 pair-wise. In the second one, 14 global and 25 pair-wise inconsistencies are resulted. During ‘Resolution approach’, we followed six steps as a ‘systematic procedure’ for resolving these inconsistencies and constructed new merged model in each iteration. The initial merged model (inconsistent model) as an input for the first step has 1267 elements, and the consistent merged model (the output) from the sixth step has 686 elements. ‘time duration’ and ‘required effort’ for checking consistency against each ‘consistency rule’ were recorded, analyzed and illustrated in Sections 4.1.5 and 4.2.4. Conclusions. We concluded that GCC enables us to explore the inconsistencies, inclusive of resolving them and therefore, refining the relationships between different models, which are difficult to detect by e.g., a pair-wise method. The most important issues are: The number of model comparisons conducted by PCC, The inability of PCC for identifying some inconsistencies, Model relationships refinement and classification based on PCC approach will not lead to a final consistent DM, whereas, GCC guarantees it. Consistency rules application, inconsistency identification and resolving them could be generalized to any UML class diagram model representing a problem domain within the fields of consistency checking in software engineering. / 0046760850792, 0046737749752

Model-Driven Development can improve the development process, but it needs tools for model transformation. For industrial companies, the most important aspect is that the transformation tools should scale well, so that they can be used with huge models. There are some open-source model transformation tools on the market, and this report aims to investigate the scalability of open source tools for model transformation. For the investigation, Eclipse Modeling Framework is used. This report identifies four open-source model transformation tools (ATL, QVT Operational, QVT Declarative, SmartQVT) and identifies the variables needed for a tool to be evaluated within the bounds of an experiment. The only tool which could be benchmarked was ATL, which scaled linearly in both terms of transformation time and memory consumption.

Model-driven and component-based software engineering have been widely recognized as promising paradigms for development of a wide range of systems. Moreover, in the embedded real-time domain, their combination is believed to be helpful in handling the ever-increasing complexity of such systems design.However, in order for these paradigms and their combination to definitely break through at an industrial level for development of embedded real-time systems, both functional and extra-functional properties need to be addressed at each level of abstraction. This research focuses on the preservation of extra-functional properties. More specifically, the aim is to provide support for easing such preservation throughout the entire development process at different abstraction levels.The main outcome of the research work is a round-trip engineering approach aiding the preservation of extra-functional properties by providing code generators, supporting monitoring and analysis of code execution, and then enabling back-propagation of the results to modelling level. In this way, properties that can only be roughly estimated statically are evaluated against runtime values and this consequently allows to optimize the design models for ensuring preservation of analysed extra-functional properties. Moreover, a solution for managing evolution of computational context in which extra-functional properties are defined by means of validity analysis is provided. Such solution introduces a new language for the description of the computational context in which a given property is provided and/or computed by some analysis, enables detection of changes performed to the context description, and analyses the possible impacts on the extra-functional property values based on a precise representation of differences between previous and current version of the model.

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) and model-driven development (MDD) are two approaches for handling software development complexity. In essence, while CBSE focuses on the construction of systems from existing software modules called components; MDD promotes the usage of system models which after a series of transformations result with an implementation of the desired system. Even though they are different, MDD and CBSE are not mutually exclusive. However, there has not been any substantial research about what their similarities and differences are and how they can be combined. In this respect, the main goal of this thesis is to summarize the theoretical background of MDD and CBSE, and to propose and apply a systematic method for their comparison. The method takes into account the different effects that these development paradigms have on a wide range of development aspects. The comparison results are then summarized and analyzed. The thesis also enriches the theoretical discussion with a practical case study comparing CBSE and MDD with respect to ProCom, a component model designed for the development of component-based embedded systems in the vehicular-, automation- and telecommunication domains. The aforementioned comparison method is refined and applied for this purpose. The comparison results are again summarized, analyzed and proposals about future work on ProCom are made.

In software development it is often crucial that the system implementationfollows the architecture dened through design patterns and a constraint set.In Model-Driven development most artefacts are created using models, butthe architectural design rules is one area where no standard to model therules exists. ArCon, Architecture Conformance Checker, is a tool to checkconformance of architectural design rules on a system model, dened in UML,that implements the system or application. The architectural design rules aredened in a UML model but with a specic meaning, dierent from standardUML, proposed by the authors of ArCon. Within this thesis ArCon wasextended to be able to check models created by the Open-Source modelingtool Papyrus, and integrated as a plugin on the Eclipse platform. The methodused by ArCon, to dene architectural rules, was also given a short evaluationduring the project to get a hint of its potential and future use. The case-studyshowed some problems and potential improvements of the used implementationof ArCon and its supported method.

Dynamic model driven architecture (DMDA) is a architecture made to aid in the development of parallel computing code. This thesis is applied to an implementation of DMDA known as DMDA3 that should convert graphs of computations into efficient computation code, and it deals with the translation of Platform Specific Models (PSM) into running systems. Currently DMDA3 can generate schedules of operations but not finished code. This thesis describes a DMDA3 module that turns a schedule of operations into a runable program. Code was obtained from the DMDA3 schedules by reflection and a framework was build that allowed generation of low level language code from schedules. The module is written in Java and can currently generate C and Fortran code for computational tasks. Based on runtime tests for matrix multiplication algorithms the generated code is almost as fast as handwritten code.

Le développement de logiciels pour les robots connectés est une difficulté majeure dans le domaine du génie logiciel. Les systèmes proposés sont souvent issus de la fusion de une ou plusieurs plates-formes provenant des robots, des ordinateurs autonomes, des appareils mobiles, des machines virtuelles, des caméras et des réseaux. Nous proposons ici une approche orientée agent permettant de représenter les robots et tous les systèmes auxiliaires comme des agents d’un système. Ce concept de l’agence préserve l’autonomie sur chacun des agents, ce qui est essentiel dans la mise en oeuvre logique d’un nuage d’éléments connectés. Afin de procurer une flexibilité de mise en oeuvre des échanges entre les différentes entités, nous avons mis en place un mécanisme d’hyperactivité ce qui permet de libérer sélectivement une certaine autonomie d’un agent par rapport à ces associés.Actuellement, il n’existe pas de solution orientée méta-modèle pour décrire les ensembles de robots interconnectés. Dans cette thèse, nous présentons un méta-modèle appelé HTM5 pour spécifier a structure, les relations, les échanges, le comportement du système et l’hyperactivité dans un système de nuages de robots. La thèse décrit l’anatomie du méta-modèle (HTM5) en spécifiant les différentes couches indépendantes et en intégrant une plate-forme indépendante de toute plateforme spécifique. Par ailleurs, la thèse décrit également un langage de domaine spécifique pour la modélisation indépendante dans HTM5. Des études de cas concernant la conception et la mise en oeuvre d’un système multi-robots basés sur le modèle développé sont également présentés dans la thèse. Ces études présentent des applications où les décisions commerciales dynamiques sont modélisées à l’aide du modèle HTM5 confirmant ainsi la faisabilité du méta-modèle proposé. / Software development for cloud connected robotic systems is a complex software engineeringendeavour. These systems are often an amalgamation of one or more robotic platforms, standalonecomputers, mobile devices, server banks, virtual machines, cameras, network elements and ambientintelligence. An agent oriented approach represents robots and other auxiliary systems as agents inthe system.Software development for distributed and diverse systems like cloud robotic systems require specialsoftware modelling processes and tools. Model driven software development for such complexsystems will increase flexibility, reusability, cost effectiveness and overall quality of the end product.The proposed 5-view meta-model has separate meta-models for specifying structure, relationships,trade, system behaviour and hyperactivity in a cloud robotic system. The thesis describes theanatomy of the 5-view Hyperactive Transaction Meta-Model (HTM5) in computation independent,platform independent and platform specific layers. The thesis also describes a domain specificlanguage for computation independent modelling in HTM5.The thesis has presented a complete meta-model for agent oriented cloud robotic systems and hasseveral simulated and real experiment-projects justifying HTM5 as a feasible meta-model.