Quarterly News report 11 - December 2012
File: The Process of Software Architectures: State of the art
We live nowadays in a world driven by software as characterized by increasingly automated operating at all levels: social, economic, cultural and others.
From the field of classical computer science to the field of mobile computing dominated by an increasing connectivity, we refer to the Internet of Things where automatic processes will be increasingly ubiquitous in our daily lives.
The need for implementation of adequate software, which has always been a constant concern in software engineering, becomes even more crucial in view of future challenges. Besides, the key word in the development of any software product remains the "quality" in terms of efficiency, operational reliability, maintainability and finally ergonomics.
Many experiments in the production of complex software have shown and proven that the quality of a software product necessarily depends on the quality of the process that led to its development. Several software process models then emerged integrating the continuous change of methods and development practices, suggesting new methods and processes while adapting to the rapid development of technologies and tools.
In the constant search for software quality processes and on the basis of the duality: software product / software process already suggested by L. Osterweil in 1987 in his famous article "Software Processes are software too", B. Boehm notes that while architectures software are effective for the reuse of software products, they also contribute to software processes reuse.
Two ideas are then highlighted: the exploitation of a reuse approach for modeling software processes on the one hand, and the exploration of the concept of software architectures for software processes reuse, on the other hand. The central theme of this issue is an analysis of the software process reuse approaches based on software architectures. These approaches are viewed as very promising solutions for the modeling of quality software processes.
Pr. Ahmed Nacer
Professor at the University of
Science and Technology Houari Boumedienne (USTHB