Software as a Service reflects a ‘service‐oriented’ approach to software development that is based on the notion of composing applications by discovering and invoking network‐available services to accomplish some task. However, as more business organisations adopt service‐oriented solutions and the demands on them grow, the problem of ensuring that the software systems can adapt fast and effectively to changing business needs, changes in their runtime environment and failures in provided services has become an increasingly important research problem. Dynamic adaptation has been proposed as a way to address the problem. However, for adaptation to be effective several other factors need to be considered. This study identifies the key factors that influence runtime adaptation in service‐oriented systems (SOSs) and examines how well they are addressed in 29 adaptation approaches intended to support SOSs.

Providing fault-tolerance (FT) support to Internet of Things (IoT) systems is an open challenge, with many implementations providing static, tightly coupled FT support that does not adapt and evolve like IoT systems do. This paper proposes a pluggable framework based on a microservices architecture that implements FT support as two complementary microservices: one that uses complex event processing for realtime FT detection, and another that uses online machine learning to detect fault patterns and pre-emptively mitigate faults before they are activated. We provide an early evaluation of how our framework can handle a real-world scenario.

We have been generally successful for transferring software engineering knowledge to industry through various forms of education. However, many challenges in software engineering training remain. A key amongst these is how best to energise software engineering education with real-world software engineering practices. This paper describes our experience of delivering a radically different approach based on the notion of a Software Design Studio. The Software Design Studio is both a lab for students engaged in conceiving, designing and developing software products as well as an approach for teaching software engineering in the lab which emphasizes practical hands-on work and experimentation. The feedback on the Software Design Studio -- from both staff and students -- has been outstanding. Although the programme is designed as a small, elite programme there is interest to see if the teaching methods can be transferred across to the much larger undergraduate programme in Computer Science. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of how our studio works in practice so that others, thinking of tak-ing a studio or studio-inspired approach, can use in designing their own courses.

Software engineering is a team activity yet the programmer's key tool, the IDE, is still largely that of a soloist. This paper describes the vision, implementation and initial evaluation of CoffeeTable - a fully featured research prototype resulting from our reflections on the software design process. CoffeeTable exchanges the traditional IDE for one built around a shared interactive desk. The proposed solution encourages smooth transitions between agile and traditional modes of working whilst helping to create a shared vision and common reference frame - key to sustaining a good design. This paper also presents early results from the evaluation of CoffeeTable and offers some insights from the lessons learned. In particular, it highlights the role of developer tools and the software constructions that are shaped by them.

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has rapidly progressed in recent years, with examples appearing in numerous application areas including business processes, high-performance computing, web-based services, and embedded systems. In the embedded systems domain, ubiquitous devices, context-aware systems, and sensor networks are increasingly being used in a plethora of areas. However, because of the nature of their operating environment, service-oriented embedded systems (SOeS) pose unique challenges to quality management. SOeS have to contend not only with the quality of services from providers, but also with the constrained system resources in their operating environment. SOeS need to efficiently utilise available system resources by dynamically adapting themselves to changes in their runtime environment. This paper discusses current SOC resource-management initiatives, setting out the challenges that SOeS systems must overcome, and proposes a pluggable, runtime resource-management framework for SOeS.

The advent of and growing interest in service- oriented architectures (SOA) present business leaders with a number of problems. They promise to deliver hitherto unseen business process agility, but at the risk of making investment in existing systems obsolete. The established orthodoxy is that the maintenance problem presented by installed systems is about finding an acceptable balance between risk involved in evolving the system and benefits offered by the update. SOAs represent a "paradigm-shift" and, as such, present a more complicated problem: how to minimise the risk to their investment (existing software systems) and exploit the benefits of migrating to SOA. We provide a review of a number of approaches that may contribute to a pragmatic strategy for addressing the problem and outline the significant challenges that remain.

Traditional software engineering change management approaches are inadequate for addressing the unique challenges presented by the component-based systems. Current change management techniques view the system under development as a collection of mutable subcomponents, known to the developer and whose interrelationships and development histories are described in a change management system. This contrasts with a component-based view of a system comprising potentially many interconnected, immutable, black-box components. This contrast represents the fundamentally different change management tasks associated with component-based development. We propose a novel architecture-centric approach that combines a process model with a dedicated ADL to provide a framework for change impact analysis.

Some systems failures are due to defects in manufacturing and design, however that there are a significant number of system failures which result from errors, omissions and inconsistencies in the system requirements. We thus need methods to support a 'safe' requirements engineering process whose objectives are to specify system requirements such that system states which compromise safety are avoided and to include, along with the requirements, a justification or safety case which explains why the specified system is indeed safe. This paper describes the extension of a viewpoint-based requirements method to incorporate safety analysis.