International audience

In this paper, we present the MegaM@Rt2 ECSEL project and discuss in details our approach for fostering collaboration in this project. We choose to use an internal hackathon approach that focuses on technical collaboration between case study owners and tool/method providers. The novelty of the approach is that we organize the technical workshop at our regular project progress meetings as a challenge-based contest involving all partners in the project. Case study partners submit their challenges related to the project goals and their use cases in advance. These challenges are concise enough to be experimented within approximately 4 hours. Teams are then formed to address those challenges. The teams include tool/method providers, case study owners and researchers/developers from other consortium members. On the hackathon day, partners work together to come with results addressing the challenges that are both interesting to encourage collaboration and convincing to continue further deeper investigations. Obtained results demonstrate that the hackathon approach stimulated knowledge exchanges among project partners and triggered new collaborations, notably between tool providers and use case owners.

System performance is a key factor to take into account throughout the software life cycle of modern computer systems, mostly due to their typical characteristics such as distributed deployment, code mobility, and platform heterogeneity. An open challenge in this direction is to integrate the performance validation as a transparent and efficient activity in the system development process. Several methodologies have been proposed to automate the transformation of software/hardware models into performance models. In this paper, we do not take a transformational approach; rather, we present a framework to integrate a software model with a platform model in order to build a performance model. Performance indices are obtained from simulation of the resulting performance model. Our framework provides a library of predefined resource models, model annotation and integration procedures, and simulation support that makes the performance analysis a much easier activity. We present the results obtained from two different industrial case studies that show the maturity and the stability of our approach.

This paper illustrates an industrial application of a performance validation methodology, which integrates software and resource models in a UML-RT development environment. The methodology is successfully applied on a synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) telecommunication system modeled and simulated using the Rose Real Time toolset. The case study demonstrates the validity of the methodology, and it is an opportunity to refine the mechanisms of the methodology as well as to extend its scope. One of the key factors that the case study highlights is the concept of "transparency", i.e. the ability to apply a performance validation methodology without deeply modifying the software development process and environment.

Nowadays common practice indicates that the requirement engineering (RE) process critically influences the success of the system development life cycle. Several commercial tools allow to classify, archive and manage requirements and then to print out reports and requirement documents. QuARS (Quality Analyzer for Requirements Specifications) is an automatic analyzer of such requirement documents, developed by ISTI-CNR, that can be adopted to evaluate the document quality by linguistic point of view. This paper presents how a requirement management tool, an automatic document generator, and QuARS can be integrated to define an RE automation support. The case study investigates and highlights the efficacy and the role of such proposed support in the Siemens C.N.X. development process.