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In the software engineering process some tasks of software engineers are to design software documents, analyze the documents, and comprehend component relationships within software diagrams. Those diagrams represent the software architecture which models the structure, behavior, relationships, and constraints among system components while ignoring implementation detail. In the software lifecycle, the system is implemented from the software architecture and errors and mistakes caused from a lack of comprehension or incorrect comprehension could cause engineers to incorrectly design the system. These errors can be defined as lapses, slips, or lack of understanding and fall into three categories: skill, rule, and knowledge errors. The Gestalt principles of organization, from the cognitive science domain, deal with how humans perceive the world around them. This dissertation seeks to identify whether the Gestalt principles of continuity, similarity of size, proximity, and similarity of name affect comprehension of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagrams. Diagram comprehension is measured by response time and subject accuracy on questions and the mental workload perceived by subjects while answering questions related to the diagrams. The research hypotheses are diagrams that utilize the Gestalt principles of continuity, similarity of size, proximity, and similarity of name will have faster response times, higher accuracy, and lower mental workload scores than diagrams that do not use the Gestalt principles. The results of the research indicate that the Gestalt principle of proximity helped ease diagram comprehension. Through the use of this design principle, the Gestalt principle of continuity is applied because line crossings, line bends, and line length are minimized. Subjects were prone to make more errors on knowledge based questions that dealt with system understanding and UML semantics than skill and rule questions that dealt with system connections and UML syntax. These results provide software designers heuristics that can lead to better diagram design and identifies software engineering tasks that can lead to more errors.

In recent years, a number of laws and regulations (such as the Basel II accord or SOX) demand that organizations record certain activities or decisions to fulfill legally enforced reporting duties. Most of these regulations have a direct impact on the information systems that support an organization's business processes. Therefore, the definition of audit requirements at the modeling-level is an important prerequisite for the thorough implementation and enforcement of corresponding policies in a software system. In this paper, we present a UML extension for the specification of audit properties. The extension is generic and can be applied to a wide variety of UML elements. In a model-driven development (MDD) approach, our extension can be used to generate corresponding audit rules via model transformations. (author's abstract)

We have developed a tool that can create a Java code generator for a behavioural modelling notation given only a description of the notation's semantics as a set of parameters. This description is based on template semantics, which has previously been used to describe a wide variety of notations. As a result, we have a technique for generating Java code for models written in any notation describable in template semantics. Since template semantics allows for models containing nondeterminism, we introduce mechanisms for eliminating this nondeterminism when generating code. We describe Java implementations of several template-semantics composition operators that have no natural Java representations and give some techniques for optimizing the generated code without sacrificing correctness. The efficiency of our generated code is comparable to that of commercial notation-specific code generators.

We have developed a tool that can create a Java code generator for a behavioural modelling notation given only a description of the notation's semantics as a set of parameters. This description is based on template semantics, which has previously been used to describe a wide variety of notations. As a result, we have a technique for generating Java code for models written in any notation describable in template semantics. Since template semantics allows for models containing nondeterminism, we introduce mechanisms for eliminating this nondeterminism when generating code. We describe Java implementations of several template-semantics composition operators that have no natural Java representations and give some techniques for optimizing the generated code without sacrificing correctness. The efficiency of our generated code is comparable to that of commercial notation-specific code generators.

High security level must be guaranteed in applications in order to mitigate risks during the deployment of information systems in open network environments. However, a significant number of legacy systems remain in use which poses security risks to the enterprise' assets due to the poor technologies used and lack of security concerns when they were in design. Software reengineering is a way out to improve their security levels in a systematic way. Model driven is an approach in which model as defined by its type directs the execution of the process. The aim of this research is to explore how model driven approach can facilitate the software reengineering driven by security demand. The research in this thesis involves the following three phases. Firstly, legacy system understanding is performed using reverse engineering techniques. Task of this phase is to reverse engineer legacy system into UML models, partition the legacy system into subsystems with the help of model slicing technique and detect existing security mechanisms to determine whether or not the provided security in the legacy system satisfies the user's security objectives. Secondly, security requirements are elicited using risk analysis method. It is the process of analysing key aspects of the legacy systems in terms of security. A new risk assessment method, taking consideration of asset, threat and vulnerability, is proposed and used to elicit the security requirements which will generate the detailed security requirements in the specific format to direct the subsequent security enhancement. Finally, security enhancement for the system is performed using the proposed ontology based security pattern approach. It is the stage that security patterns derived from security expertise and fulfilling the elicited security requirements are selected and integrated in the legacy system models with the help of the proposed security ontology. The proposed approach is evaluated by the selected case study. Based on the analysis, conclusions are drawn and future research is discussed at the end of this thesis. The results show this thesis contributes an effective, reusable and suitable evolution approach for software security.

The Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK) is a highly utilized open source medical imaging library. Written in C++, ITK provides chiefly the functionality to register, segment, and filter medical images. Although extremely powerful, ITK has a very steep learning curve for users with little or no background in programming. It was for this reason that SimITK was developed. SimITK wraps ITK into the model driven engineering environment Simulink, a part of the Matlab development suite. The first released version of SimITK was a proof of concept, and demonstrated that ITK could be wrapped successfully in Simulink. Very few segmentation and registration functions were available and the system was based on ITK version 3 with a semi-automatic wrapping procedure. In this thesis a new version of SimITK is presented that includes thirty-seven image filter, twelve optimizer, and nineteen transform classes from ITK version 4 which are successfully wrapped and tested. These classes were chosen to represent a broad range of usability (in the case of the filters) and to allow for greater flexibility when creating registration pipelines by having more options for optimizers, transforms, and metrics. Many usability improvements were also implemented for the registration pipeline, including providing the user with the metric value while executing a registration model and allowing the output image size to be specified for certain filters. In order for SimITK to transition to a usable research tool, several usability improvements were needed. These included transitioning from wrapping ITK version 3 to ITK version 4, fully automating the wrapping process, and usability modifications to the registration pipeline including a metric value output. These implementations of an automated wrapping procedure for ITK version 4, and improved usability of the registration pipeline have propelled SimITK on a path towards a usable research tool. The author will be creating a release of these changes, updating installation documentation, and updating tutorials which are available at www.SimITKVTK.com / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2013-08-05 10:15:16.607

In this thesis, we present an abstract meta-model for model driven development of web applications targeting multiple platforms. We review the existing technologies and the related work in order to obtain a list of requirements for such an abstract model. The abstract model is built by extending an existing UML-based model for web applications. We demonstrate that it is possible to map this abstract model to more than one specific development platform by providing transformations for these mappings. We also lay out the general outline of a model-driven process based on the proposed abstract model. The abstract model and the model-driven process are supported by a set of tools, case studies and a visual modeling notation. Model-driven techniques have been used in the area of web development to a great extent. Most of the existing approaches are tuned toward specific platforms or develop only certain parts of web applications. These approaches generally use meta-models adapted to their targeted platforms. In order to flexibly target multiple platforms, the level of abstraction of the meta-model must be raised. Such a meta-model must allow the description of relevant features of web applications independently from the specificities of specific platforms. Additionally, transformations mapping from abstract to specific web descriptions must be expressible in a flexible way. In this thesis, we propose such an abstract meta-model. Mappings that transform abstract models to specific platforms are also presented. Different benefits can be foreseen from this approach. By relieving developers from low-level platform-specific related design, the approach has the potential to shift the development task to issues related to business needs. Another benefit is shortened development time. This could help web developers to overcome the problem of schedule delays, which is recognized as one of the top five most-cited problems with large-scale web systems. The approach is specifically suitable for information-intensive web-based systems. These applications typically involve large data stores accessed through a web interface. A distinctive aspect of this approach is its use of a specification of the data mapping as part of its high-level input. More importantly, the common features required to process data and communicate data objects between different layers and components are targeted.

Title: Universal Constraint Language Author: Peter Piják Department / Institute: Department of Software Engineering Supervisor of the master thesis: Mgr. Martin Nečaský, Ph.D. Abstract: Today's software applications are typically compound of system of more application components. By modeling of software, various integrity constraint languages are used for particular parts of model (e.g. OCL for UML class diagrams, Schematron for XML or SQL triggers for relational databases). Constraint expressions need to be converted to expressions over different meta-models. These tasks are non-trivial. In this thesis, a new common language Universal Constraint Language (UCL) for expressing integrity constraints over various data meta-models is introduced. It is formally defined and also its parser is implemented. We also present semi-automatic translating between constraints over various meta-models; and deriving constraints from the introduced language to constraints in specific constraint languages. Keywords: constraint language, model-driven architecture, universal formalism

Este trabalho tem por objetivo propor a utilização de soluções pré-definidas e comprovadas na abordagem MDA, auxiliando o desenvolvedor na resolução de problemas recorrentes ao desenvolvimento de software. A utilização destas soluções pré-definidas leva a um aumento de produtividade no contexto MDA e na geração de software baseado em boas práticas. Para que este objetivo seja cumprido, é empreendida uma análise sobre o MDA e sobre como operacionalizar as transformações entre modelos. Também é empreendida uma análise sobre o suporte fornecido pela UML e sobre reutilização em desenvolvimento orientado a modelos. Por fim este trabalho apresenta partes de uma aplicação protótipo, construída para ser uma prova de conceito de código gerado através da combinação de UML e soluções pré-definidas. / The goal of this work is to propose the use of pre-defined solutions on MDA approach, supporting the developer in solving recurrent problems of software development. The use of these pre-defined solutions leads to an increase of productivity in MDA context, and in the generation of software based on best practices. To reach this goal, an analysis of MDA is undertaken, as well as an analysis of how to enable the transformations between models. It is also undertaken an analysis about the use of UML and the reuse in model driven development. Finally this work presents portions of a prototype application, constructed to be a proof-of-concept of generated code, combining UML and the pre-defined solutions.