EXTRA-FUNCTIONAL PROPERTIES FRAMEWORK WITH

CONFIGURATION BASED ON DEPLOYMENT ENVIRONMENT

∗

Tool Demonstration and Case-study

Kamil Je

zek and Premek Brada

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of West Bohemia

Univerzitni 8, 30614 Pilsen, Czech Republic

Keywords:

Extra-functional properties, Evaluation, Case-study, Tool, Component.

Abstract:

Current software systems tend to share not only data but also software parts in a form of software compo-

nents or web services. Once users cooperate third-party software parts, mechanisms and tools integrating and

validating these software parts are desired. Therefore, advanced techniques for verifying compatibility and

interchangeability should also consider extra-functional properties. This paper aims at supporting these tech-

niques introducing a tool capable of deﬁnition, application and evaluation of extra-functional properties. The

ability of the tool is demonstrated in a case-study developed on Common Component Modeling Example.

1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, industry and the research community deal

with the issue of extra-functional properties (EFPs).

For instance, (1) qualities such as speed, response

time, memory consumption or (2) user requirements

such as marketability, price, regular updates, techni-

cal support or (3) behaviour such as synchronisation,

concurrent access, deadlock free computation are of-

ten addressed EFPs.

In our previous work an independent EFP frame-

work (Je

zek and Brada, 2011) enabling EFPs in ex-

isting industrial systems was proposed. This paper

demonstrates that approach in a form of a case-study

developed according to Common Component Model-

ing Example (CoCoME) (Herold et al., 2010).

This paper ﬁrst introduces the case-study in Sec-

tion 3 followed by domain EFP deﬁnitions in Section

3.1 and context-of-usage dependent EFP deﬁnitions

in Section 3.2. Finally, Section 3.3 demonstrates the

EFP evaluation process.

∗

The work was partially supported by the UWB grant

SGS-2010-028 Advanced Computer and Information Sys-

tems, by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic project

number 103/11/1489 Methods of development and veriﬁ-

cation of component-based applications using natural lan-

guage speciﬁcations and by the SPAV grant with the regis-

tration number CZ 1.07/2.3.00/09.0050.

2 RELATED WORK

Other approaches target several disjunctive groups

of EFPs. One group treats EFPs in isolation

(Aagedal, 2001; Franch, 1998; Chung et al., 1999;

ISO/IEC, 2001) while another consider their depen-

dency (Zschaler and Meyerhfer, 2003). They provide

basic ideas of a structure of EFPs, however, lack of

tool support limits their practical usage.

There are structural frameworks with EFPs (Mo-

hammad and Alagar, 2008) or systems with native

support of either EFP or quality of service speciﬁca-

tions (Yan and Piao, 2009; Garc

ıa et al., 2007) which

still focus on a limited set of EFPs.

In addition, there are several component models

(Becker et al., 2009; Muskens et al., 2005) which sup-

port specialised sets of EFPs. As in our work there

are attempts to tool support (Sentilles et al., 2008) or

Q-ImPrESS

targeted at a selected set of component

models.

In our previous work, we stated formal deﬁni-

tions of EFPs (Jezek et al., 2010) which extension and

implementation we developed in (Je

zek and Brada,

2011).

http://www.q-impress.eu/wordpress/

322

Ježek K. and Brada P..

EXTRA-FUNCTIONAL PROPERTIES FRAMEWORK WITH CONFIGURATION BASED ON DEPLOYMENT ENVIRONMENT - Tool Demonstration and

Case-study.

DOI: 10.5220/0003639403220325

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing (KMIS-2011), pages 322-325

ISBN: 978-989-8425-81-2

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

3 CASE-STUDY AND TOOL

DEMONSTRATION

Case-study is in this paper based on CoCoME that

is an example of a trading system with a set of hi-

erarchical components. For the sake of brevity only

few components have been selected to demonstrate

the tool. The components composing the case-study

are shown in Figure 1 with Notes to show attached

EFPs.

Figure 1: CoCoME Sub-part.

3.1 Domain Dependent Deﬁnitions of

Properties

The presented tool uses commonly accessible EFP

repository spiting domain and context-of-usage con-

cerns. For that, Global Registries (GRs) (Jezek et al.,

2010) hold domain speciﬁc EFP deﬁnitions ﬁlled by

domain experts.

Figure 2 shows a GUI editor of GR. The tool ac-

cesses a remote web-server storing the GR structure

(Je

zek and Brada, 2011). A user selects GR which

he or she tends to work with, then EFPs are edited in

terms of their names, data types, comparing functions

and named values (in detail formalised in (Jezek et al.,

2010)).

Figure 2: EFP Registry Tool.

For our study, a GR named CoCoME with sev-

eral EFPs (response time, express mode supported,

bar code type, bar code scanner type) has been cre-

ated. The EFPs deﬁned in one GR bounds EFPs as

valid and meaningful in one domain. Hence, the EFPs

created for CoCoME cover the domain of trading sys-

tems.

Figure 3: EFP Local Registry Editor.

The context-of-usage concern is captured in a set

of Local Registries (LRs) (Jezek et al., 2010) with

an editor shown in Figure 3. In the tool a user cre-

ates named intervals of values that has two advan-

tages: (1) the “plain“ values are given the semantics

and (2) values from one interval are uniﬁed to the

same scale. For instance, response time in an inter-

val {1000, 3000}ms may be “average” for back-end

ofﬁce (Inventory in CoCoME) for all values 1000ms,

2000ms, 3000ms as long as they belong to one group.

3.2 Application of Property Values

Once EFPs are deﬁned in Registries, the tool shown

in Figure 4 is used for attaching selected values to

components. Components are shown in one panel and

EXTRA-FUNCTIONAL PROPERTIES FRAMEWORK WITH CONFIGURATION BASED ON DEPLOYMENT

ENVIRONMENT - Tool Demonstration and Case-study

323

EFPs in the other one. A user drag-and-drops to attach

EFPs.

Figure 4: EFP Assignment Tool.

The tool allows to assign three type of values

(Je

zek and Brada, 2011):

Context Independent Values. A lot of EFPs ex-

press values unchanged among all contexts-of-usage.

Here, the tool assigns a concrete EFP value (e.g. num-

ber, string, boolean). An example of a property is

the express mode supported attached to ExpressMod-

eEnabledEvent. It is a boolean indicating the express

mode of a cash desk which essentially has the same

meaning all the time.

Context Dependent Values. Often values vary

among contexts-of-usage. Here, several LR named

values may be assigned. In the evaluation a user

selects the LR to evaluator for. Such a property is

response time in the case-study. E.g. a cash desk

may have harder performance needs than Inventory.

Hence, the property values are deﬁned in two sepa-

rated LRs to distinguish two environments.

Computed Values. Complex properties are typi-

cally inﬂuenced each other (e.g. performance of one

component is inﬂuenced by a connected components).

Here, the tool adds mathematical or logical formulas

computing an EFP value depending on other EFPs.

In CoCoME, the component Inventory::Database,

Inventory::Data and Inventory::Application are used.

Modeling EFPs, the property response time on

the output of Inventory::Data is inﬂuenced by

the output on Inventory::Database. A user

may deﬁne e.g. a mathematical formula Inven-

tory::Data: response time(PersistenceI f ) = 1.2 ∗

response time(JDBC)

Another example uses the bar code type with val-

ues {EAN-8, EAN-13, UPC-A, UPC-E, ...} for ex-

isting bar codes. Bar code scanner type may be com-

puted by a logical formula: bar code scanner type =

EU ⇔ bar code type = {EAN8, EAN13} where EU

is the item of an enumeration.

3.3 Evaluation Process

When components are being assembled into an ap-

plication, the EFPs of the provided and required fea-

tures need to be evaluated for the compatibility. This

is performed by an evaluator tool which, unlike other

tools, does not have a GUI. It is rather implemented

as a framework embeddable to other systems. It uses

two steps to evaluate EFPs: (1) it binds components

via their features and creates a graph expressing their

connections, (2) the properties on bound features are

compared by the algorithm from (Je

zek and Brada,

2011).

For context independent values, the evaluator

compares values directly attached on both con-

nected properties. According to the case-study,

if the CashDesk::CashDeskApplication requires the

property express mode enabled set to true, then a

compatible CashDesk::CardReaderController com-

ponent has to provide express mode enabled also set

to true.

Evaluation of context dependent values compares

only values from a selected LR where a LR setting is

a matter of conﬁguration. Values irrelevant for other

LRs are ignored. For instance, values on the proper-

ties response time for Inventory are taken only from

Store LR while others are ignored.

Computed values evaluation uses depth-ﬁrst

search algorithm to recursively compute properties

in a formula. In the use-case, evaluation on Inven-

tory::Application:PersistenceIf needs to ﬁnd Inven-

tory::Database::JDBC ﬁrst. Then a value of response

time on Inventory::Data:PersistenceIf depending on

Inventory::Data:JDBC may be computed. At the end,

the values are compared as for direct values.

4 CONCLUSIONS

In this work a tool concerning extra-functional prop-

erties in terms of their deﬁnition, application and eval-

uation has been presented. The tool is based on a

framework, developed in our previous work.

KMIS 2011 - International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing

324

The tool aims at improving adoption of extra-

functional properties in practice. This aim has been

demonstrated by the presented case-study which com-

prises a part of the Common Component Modeling

Example proving the framework’s applicability to a

practical application.

The case-study has shown that the system of reg-

istries is capable of managing extra-functional prop-

erties on systems deployed in different runtime envi-

ronments. On the other hand a few weakness have

been found. Namely, there are properties which need

more sophisticated evaluating methods (for instance,

memory consumption is not a simple summation of

each component if they use shared libraries). Such

evaluating methods we will target in the future. In ad-

dition, ﬁlling of values in LRs is a time consuming

manual work. For that reason formulas transferring

values among LRs would improve the approach.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank students Martin

Stulc, Luk

cek and Jan

ab for their considerable help in

preparing the presented case-study.

REFERENCES

Aagedal, J. Ø. (2001). Quality of Service Support in Devel-

opment of Distributed Systems. PhD thesis, University

of Oslo.

Becker, S., Koziolek, H., and Reussner, R. (2009). The pal-

ladio component model for model-driven performance

prediction. Journal of Systems and Software, 82(1):3

– 22. Special Issue: Software Performance - Modeling

and Analysis.

Chung, L., Nixon, B. A., Yu, E., and Mylopoulos, J. (1999).

Non-Functional Requirements in Software Engineer-

ing. Series: International Series in Software Engineer-

ing, Vol. 5, Springer, 476 p, ISBN: 978-0-7923-8666-

Franch, X. (1998). Systematic formulation of non-

functional characteristics of software. In Proceedings

of International Conference on Requirements Engi-

neering (ICRE), pages 174–181.

Garc

ıa, J. M., Ruiz, D., Ruiz-Cort

es, A., Mart

ın-D

ıaz, O.,

and Resinas, M. (2007). An hybrid, qos-aware dis-

covery of semantic web services using constraint pro-

gramming. In ICSOC ’07: Proceedings of the 5th in-

ternational conference on Service-Oriented Comput-

ing, Springer-Verlag Berlin, Heidelberg 2007, ISBN:

978-3-540-74973-8, pages 69–80, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Springer-Verlag.

Herold, S., Klus, H., Welsch, Y., Rausch, A., Reuss-

ner, R., Krogmann, K., Koziolek, H., Miran-

dola, R., Benjamin, Hummel, Meisinger, M.,

and Pfaller, C. (2010). Common component

modelling example (CoCoME). Book Chap-

ter. Available at http://agrausch.informatik.uni-

kl.de/CoCoME/downloads (2010).

ISO/IEC (2001). ISO/IEC 9126: Informational technology

- product quality - part1: Quality model, international

standard iso/iec 9126, international standard organiza-

tion.

zek, K. and Brada, P. (2011). Correct matching of compo-

nents with extra-functional properties - a framework

applicable to a variety of component models. In Eval-

uation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering

(ENASE 2011). [accepted to publication].

Jezek, K., Brada, P., and Stepan, P. (2010). Towards con-

text independent extra-functional properties descrip-

tor for components. In Proceedings of the 7th Interna-

tional Workshop on Formal Engineering approaches

to Software Components and Architectures (FESCA

2010), Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Sci-

ence (ENTCS) Volume 264, page 55-71, ISSN: 1571-

0661, pages 55–71.

Mohammad, M. and Alagar, V. S. (2008). TADL -

an architecture description language for trustworthy

component-based systems. In ECSA ’08: Proceedings

of the 2nd European conference on Software Architec-

ture, pages 290–297. Springer.

Muskens, J., Chaudron, M. R., and Lukkien, J. J. (2005).

Component-Based Software Development for Embed-

ded Systems, chapter A Component Framework for

Consumer Electronics Middleware, pages 164–184.

Springer Verlag.

Sentilles, S., H

akansson, J., Pettersson, P., and Crnkovic,

I. (2008). Save-ide – an integrated development en-

vironment for building predictable component-based

embedded systems. In Proceedings of the 23rd

IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated

Software Engineering (ASE 2008).

Yan, J. and Piao, J. (2009). Towards qos-based web services

discovery. In Service-Oriented Computing ICSOC

2008 Workshops, Lecture Notes in Computer Science,

2009, Volume 5472/2009, 200-210, ISBN: 978-3-642-

01246-4.

Zschaler, S. and Meyerhfer, M. (2003). Explicit mod-

elling of qos-dependencies. In Proceedings of the

1st International Workshop on Quality of Service

in Component-Based Software Engineering, Cpadus-

ditions, Toulouse, France, pages 57–66.

EXTRA-FUNCTIONAL PROPERTIES FRAMEWORK WITH CONFIGURATION BASED ON DEPLOYMENT

ENVIRONMENT - Tool Demonstration and Case-study

325