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Poster: Software Architecture-based Analysis and Testing:
the Past and the Future

Visiting Researcher: Henry Muccini

Advisor: Debra J. Richardson

Abstract: Software Architectures (SAs) have been recognized, both by academia and software industries, as the most promising approach to tackle the problem of scaling up in software engineering, because, through suitable abstractions, it provides the way to make large applications manageable. However, the SA production and management is, in general, an expensive task and the effort is justified if the SA artifacts are extensively used for multiple purposes, in particular for analysis and testing. In the last years many approaches have been proposed to analyze SAs from different perspectives. Works on SA and performance, deadlock, security, refinement, testing and model checking have been proposed. What we proposed in the last years are three different approaches that utilize semi-formal SA descriptions (and the obtained models) to analyze software architectures: i) we presented an approach for deriving test plans for the conformance testing of a system implementation with respect to the formal description of its SA; ii) the second research work was devoted to integrate SAs and Coordination models and languages in the same development process and finally iii) we presented our approach for SA models consistency checking. What we recognize, today, is the necessity of integration between the different life-cycle phases: it seems that there is a lot of work in each area (Requirement Engineering, Software Architecture, Design and so on) but little effort in using the results of each phase for the next steps. Our future work goes in this direction and we hope to receive comments and suggestions from the audience.

Bio: Henry Muccini received is PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of L'Aquila (Italy) in 2002. Actually is a post-doctoral researcher at the Information and Computer Science department, University of California, Irvine. Henry's research interests are in software architecture-based analysis techniques; specifically, in testing of software subsystems integration against a software architecture specification, in integrating coordination policies inside the architectural description and validating software architectures with respect to semi-formal specifications.

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