Systematic inference of the context of utilization of the design knowledge by using a reference model

Abstract

Software engineering is concerned with systematic procedures for obtaining software that meets the customer’s expectations. Taking into account the impacts of the software design artifacts when designing the architecture of a software system is critical, but it remains a major challenge. The contribution of the architecture to achieve or not targeted objectives results from the utilization in the architecture and in the detailed design of an appropriate set of software design artifacts (SDAs) such as styles, tactics, and design patterns. The styles and design patterns organize the design decisions, and the tactics are building blocks of these styles and patterns. The software designer is responsible for applying tactics, patterns, and styles that best achieve the targeted objectives. This requires understanding what objectives are affected by the styles, patterns, and tactics applied, identifying which styles and patterns best support a set of tactics, and discerning which set of design decisions produces the best balance across the targeted objectives. The software designers encounter at least three problems when discerning the design context and measuring the effects of a style, a design pattern, or a tactic on a set of objectives: 1. the representation schemes usually used to describe the SDAs force the software designers to extract from textual descriptions the finer-grained decisions and the related explications about how they impact the objectives; 2. the explanations of these impacts are described in terms of characteristics of quality, and they are not precisely detailed and supported with contextual design rationale; 3. the effects of a design decision are not quantified but merely discussed textually making it hard to evaluate which decision is better than others in a particular context. This research project provides a reference model of software design artifacts for describing the styles, patterns, and tactics using a set of software design artifacts and arguments. This reference model and the related techniques will support designers to systematically analyze styles, tactics, and design patterns for inferring the order of treatment of the related issues from given sets of software design artifacts and contextualized arguments.

Date	7 Jun 2016
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Alain Abran (Supervisor) & Ghizlane El Boussaidi (Co-supervisor)