In the global context, the software sector has gained importance and this trend seems to continue in many countries including Turkey. There are more than 35 large companies operating in the software market in Turkey. The quality of Turkish software companies is increasing each year. A growing number of software companies have obtained at least the CMMI level 3 rating. Over the last years, Turkish software companies have also started to export software to almost 70 countries.

In order to meet the communication, coordination and control requirements of distributed Global Software Development (GSD) teams, it is necessary to define a proper software architecture. Designing a GSD architecture, however, involves a multitude of design decisions that are related in different ways. As such, it is not trivial for the architect to design a system that meets the different GSD concerns. To assist the architect in designing a suitable GSD architecture we propose the tool framework Global Architect. The tool framework is based on a common meta-model for GSD and a question framework, which includes a predefined set of questions that are related to abstract design rules for designing GSD systems. Based on the answers provided to the questions of the question framework, the tool automatically selects and instantiates the necessary rules and generates the GSD architecture. Global Architect has been applied to design the GSD architecture for a real industrial project of Cybersoft, a leading GSD company in Turkey.

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is a prominent paradigm for the assembly of a family of products using product line core assets. The modeling of software assets that together form the actual products is critical for achieving the strategic benefits of Software Product Lines (SPLs). We propose a feature-based approach to software asset modeling based on abstractions provided by Domain-Specific Kits (DSKs). This approach involves a software Asset Metamodel (AMM) used to derive Asset Modeling Languages (AMLs) that define reusable software assets in domain-specific terms. The approach also prescribes a roadmap for modeling these software assets in conjunction with the product line reference architecture. Asset capabilities can be modeled using feature diagrams as the external views of the software assets. Internal views can be expressed in terms of Domain-Specific Artifacts (DSAs) with Variability Points (VPs), where the domain-specific artifacts are created using Domain-Specific Kits. This approach produces loosely coupled and highly cohesive software assets that are reusable for multiple product lines. The approach is validated by assessing software asset reuse in two different product lines in the finance domain. We also evaluated the productivity gains in large-scale complex projects, and found that the approach yielded a significant reduction in the total project effort.

Managing software development across boundaries is quite challenging. The boundaries may be around teams, organizations, cities, and even countries. From small scale to enterprise scale, distributed software development requires particular devotion to many aspects of software engineering. New name of the same old problem is "Global Software Development (GSD)" nowadays. This paper briefly identifies the challenges of GSD, presents the state-of-the-art for meeting such challenges, discusses the shortcomings of existing approaches, and proposes a "federated approach" to cover the broader palette of open issues / challenges in the area of distributed software development.

There has been no commonsense on how to identify problem domain concerns in architectural modeling of software systems. Even, there is no commonly accepted method for modeling the non-functional requirements (NFRs) effectively associated with the architectural aspects in the solution domain. This paper introduces the use of a machine learning (ML) method based on support vector machines to relate NFRs to classified "architectural concerns" in an automated way. This method uses natural language processing techniques to fragment the plain NFR texts under the supervision of domain experts. The contribution of this approach lies in continuously applying ML techniques against previously discovered ldquoNFR - architectural concernsrdquo associations to improve the intelligence of repositories for requirements engineering. The paper illustrates a charted roadmap and demonstrates the automated requirements engineering toolset for this roadmap. It also validates the approach and effectiveness of the toolset on the snapshot of a real-life project.

Although service-oriented computing holds great promises, it is still not clear when and how the existing systems will exploit this new computational model. The problem is particularly severe for the software having several years of use. This work provides a roadmap for the migration of legacy software to service-oriented computing by means of right levels of abstraction. The key idea is having integration even at the presentation layer, not only at backend layers such as application or data. This requires re-inventing the popular MASHUP technology of Web 2.0 at the enterprise level. Domain- specific-kits and choreography engine concepts that were originally introduced by the software factory automation approach have been reshaped as another enabling technology towards migrating to the service harmonization platform. The paper also exemplifies the proposed approach on a simple case problem.

Architectural modeling identifies several concerns in problem domain and associates them with design decisions in solution domain. There is, however, no commonsense on how to localize problem domain concerns and relate them to the solution domain. This paper proposes a modeling approach to address the architectural concerns in multiple concern spaces both for problem and solution domains, and align them "symmetrically". This approach identifies the problem domain in multiple concern spaces by correlating the "architectural aspects" and "quality attributes". The solution domain is likewise identified in other multiple concern spaces by correlating the "multi-views" and "multi-tiers" of architectures. Symmetric alignment is used here for the correlation between separate concern spaces instead of mapping individual concerns from problem to solution domain. The paper claims that this alignment helps identifying architectural components, connectors and properties in the solution domain.