Architectural Conformance in Message-Based Systems

Student: Daniel Popescu, USC

Advisor: Nenad Medvidovic, USC/ISR

Abstract:

Satisfying dependability properties such as fault-tolerance, survivability and security often requires functional solutions that are captured and analyzed in architectural models. Since the abstractions used to describe software architectures are typically different from the constructs used to implement systems, it can be difficult for a software development team to faithfully implement architectural solutions. If the system implementation does not conform to the architecture, then any dependability predictions produced through analysis of architectural models are invalid. This paper proposes an approach for establishing the conformance of an event-based system implementation to its intended architecture. We have applied our technique to several applications implemented on top of two event-driven architecture implementation frameworks. While a number of open research questions remain, the technique has shown good results to date.

Bio:

Daniel Popescu is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California (USC). He is a member of the Software Architecture Research Group at the Center for Systems and Software Engineering at USC. His advisor is Nenad Medvidovic. Popescu's research interests are in the field of software engineering, software architecture, reverse engineering, architectural compliance and program understanding. The underlying theme of his research has been to devise techniques and tools that help to understand complex software systems. Before joining the University of Southern California, Popescu was working in software architecture groups at Toshiba Corporation (Japan), Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (Germany) and Infosys Technologies Limited (India).