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Predicting Quality Attributes in Component-based Software Systems

Fulltext:


Authors:


Publication Type:

Doctoral Thesis

Publisher:

Mälardalen University


Abstract

One of the major challenges to industry today is to provide products with high degrees of quality and functionality at low cost and short time to market. The cost and time to market requirements have quite successfully been addressed by the component-based approach. Unfortunately, satisfactory solutions for handling quality are not yet available. Hence, a still open challenge when building systems with software components is to accurately predict the quality attributes by the produced system. Component technologies widely used in office, desktop and internet domains provide support for integration of components into a system via well-defined functional interfaces. However, the quality attributes of the final software system, such as its performance, scalability or reliability, is not easy to determine for such systems, since current component technologies lack support for managing quality. For this reasons, the component-based approach, although attractive for many reasons, is difficult to utilize in domains in which quality attributes are of primary importance. This thesis demonstrates the possibility of developing component technologies that provide mechanisms for predicting quality attributes of software systems, given the quality attributes of their components. Moreover, a method that can be used to build prediction-enabled component technologies and validate the predictability theory is presented. The method is demonstrated by experiments and a discussion of two different attributes: latency and consistency. There are quality attributes that cannot be predicted equally accurately, if at all, as they lack a formal specification, measurement possibilities, and as they depend on many different factors, not only on properties of components. The thesis proposes a classification of different attributes from a prediction perspective: distinguishing quality attributes that can be predict directly from component properties, from those that need more information, such as usage profile or architecture. Having the means to reason about the qualities of a software design in the same way as one can reason about the qualities of a mechanical design is a dream of software engineers. By introducing predictability capabilities in component-based systems, this thesis is a small step towards fulfilling this dream.

Bibtex

@phdthesis{Larsson575,
author = {Magnus Larsson},
title = {Predicting Quality Attributes in Component-based Software Systems},
number = {8},
month = {March},
year = {2004},
school = {M{\"a}lardalen University},
url = {http://www.es.mdu.se/publications/575-}
}