Rethinking Software Design

Poster

Students: Chris Van der Westhuizen, Ping Chen, Alex Baker

Abstract:

A significant amount of research in the field of software architecture has focused on the nature of architecture itself. This has resulted in the availability of a host of notations and formalizations through which individual architectures can be documented. Current architecture design tools do not allow the architect to easily explore and compare alternatives; furthermore, environments do not allow large and complex architectures to be easily understood. Our proposed solution is to build upon the amassed knowledge of architecture to support architecting, which is the activity of coming to a creative and satisfactory architectural solution to a particular problem. Architecting is a process and environment issue: how can the environment assist the architect in experimentally constructing a design as well as in focusing on only the relevant aspects of the design?

Architecting is a naturally iterative activity consisting of creatively constructing, evaluating, and improving alternatives that eventually coalesce into a single, desired solution. We propose to develop a layered design environment (such as layered graphical editors, e.g., Adobe Photoshop) to support the architecting process. Such a tool would allow the architect to incrementally explore architectures, views, and design concerns as appropriate (communication, behavior, reliability, dynamism, security, and so on). Additionally the tool will incorporate critics to provide critical feedback in the design process and will be extensible such that it can easily be adapted to various domains. The contribution is as unique as it is powerful: it balances the art of creative design with a disciplined software engineering approach to enable exploratory architecting.

Bio: Christopher Van der Westhuizen is a Ph.D. graduate student in the Informatics Department at the University of California, Irvine. His interest is in the area of Software Engineering; he is currently doing research under the guidance of his advisor, André van der Hoek. Currently he is working in the area of Software Design environments.

Bio: Ping H. Chen is a Ph.D. student in the School of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine. Ping graduated from UC Irvine Summa Cum Laude, specializing in Software Systems. He plans to continue his research in software engineering and software architectures. His past research includes managing the evolution of software product line architectures. In the future, he plans to investigate the link between requirements and software design/architectures, and provide tool support for automatically generating parts of the software architecture from the requirements. He has published his work in the International Conference on Software Maintanence.

Bio: Alex Baker is a first year Information and Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include software engineering education, educational card games and software design.