Abstract
Software engineers must ensure that systems under development are endowed with software architectures that enable them to meet their requirements. Apart from functionality, systems also have to satisfy extra-functional requirements that may include behavioural constraints that the software must adhere to, as well as qualities to optimise such as performance, availability, and energy efficiency. These qualities are often inter-dependent and heavily influenced by the structure of the system. This results in poorly understood multi-dimensional design spaces, in which trade-offs among qualities are not evident when making architectural decisions. This paper presents Voyager, a tool which allows engineers to visualise architectural configurations and explore the trade-offs among their quality attributes in a multi-dimensional design space. The tool produces contextual visualisations to facilitate trade-off analysis, providing engineers with a streamlined way of understanding architectural design spaces, using an approach that combines architectural structure with multi-dimensional data visualisations. A user study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the tool. Results show that participants achieved a significantly higher accuracy in a shorter time span and had a better user experience when using Voyager, with respect to an existing comparable tool.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The source code, user study data and a video demonstration of the Voyager tool is located online at: https://github.com/jasonmash/voyager.
References
Aldrich, J., Chambers, C., Notkin, D.: ArchJava: connecting software architecture to implementation. In: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2002, pp. 187–197, May 2002
Aleti, A., Buhnova, B., Grunske, L., Koziolek, A., Meedeniya, I.: Software architecture optimization methods: a systematic literature review. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 39(5), 658–683 (2013)
Bagheri, H., Tang, C., Sullivan, K.: Trademaker: automated dynamic analysis of synthesized tradespaces. In: Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2014, pp. 106–116. ACM, New York (2014)
Bass, L., Clements, P., Kazman, R.: Software Architecture in Practice, 3rd edn. Addison-Wesley Professional, Upper Saddle River, NJ (2012)
Cámara, J., Garlan, D., Schmerl, B.R.: Synthesizing tradeoff spaces with quantitative guarantees for families of software systems. J. Syst. Softw. 152, 33–49 (2019)
Clements, P., Northrop, L.: Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns. Addison-Wesley Professional, Reading, MA (2001)
Hinton, A., Kwiatkowska, M., Norman, G., Parker, D.: PRISM: a tool for automatic verification of probabilistic systems. In: Hermanns, H., Palsberg, J. (eds.) TACAS 2006. LNCS, vol. 3920, pp. 441–444. Springer, Heidelberg (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/11691372_29
Kwiatkowska, M.: Quantitative verification: models, techniques and tools. In: 6th Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering: Companion Papers, pp. 449–458. ACM (2007)
Li, D., et al.: ECharts: a declarative framework for rapid construction of web-based visualization. Vis. Inform. 2(2), 136–146 (2018)
Mahdavi-Hezavehi, S., Galster, M., Avgeriou, P.: Variability in quality attributes of service-based software systems: a systematic literature review. Inf. Softw. Technol. 55(2), 320–343 (2013)
Murashkin, A., Antkiewicz, M., Rayside, D., Czarnecki, K.: Visualization and exploration of optimal variants in product line engineering. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Software Product Line Conference, pp. 111–115. ACM (2013)
Mylopoulos, J., Chung, L., Nixon, B.: Representing and using nonfunctional requirements: a process-oriented approach. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 18(6), 483–497 (1992)
Sawant, A.P., Bali, N.: Softarchviz: a software architecture visualization tool. In: 4th IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis, pp. 154–155, June 2007
Sayyad, A.S., Ammar, H.: Pareto-optimal search-based software engineering: a literature survey. In: 2013 2nd International Workshop on Realizing Artificial Intelligence Synergies in Software Engineering, pp. 21–27, May 2013
Schmerl, B., Garlan, D.: AcmeStudio: supporting style-centered architecture development. In: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2004, pp. 704–705 (2004)
Sousa, J.P., Garlan, D.: The aura software architecture: an infrastructure for ubiquitous computing (2003)
Weyns, D., Calinescu, R.: Tele assistance: a self-adaptive service-based system exemplar. In: 2015 IEEE/ACM 10th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems, pp. 88–92 (2015)
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank everyone who kindly volunteered to participate in the user study.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Mashinchi, J., Cámara, J. (2020). Voyager: Software Architecture Trade-off Explorer. In: Muccini, H., et al. Software Architecture. ECSA 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1269. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59155-7_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59155-7_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-59154-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-59155-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)