Context Microservice architecture is an architectural style in modern software systems, characterized by small, independent services called microservices. This architecture is ideal to facilitate rapid feature deployment. However, it presents a challenge for software engineers, who often lack a comprehensive architectural view due to the distributed nature and complex interdependencies of microservices. Objective This paper presents a Model Driven Architecture approach for MicroService Architecture Recovery called MiSAR. Building on previous work that defined a Platform Independent Metamodel, this study seeks to extend this metamodel, introduce a Platform Specific Metamodel, and establish mapping rules. The goal is to enable the semi-automatic recovery of architectural models for microservice systems. Methods An empirical study was conducted on nine microservice systems to define MiSAR’s artefacts and support semiautomatic recovery of architectural models. These artefacts are then implemented and used to semi-automatically recover the architectures of three systems. The effectiveness of MiSAR is evaluated based on metrics such as recall, precision, and F-measure, to assess the recovered models against actual architectures. We also compared the recovered architectural models with the ones documented by the developers. Results The study identified key requirements for the Platform Independent Metamodel to support comprehensive microservice architecture recovery, leading to an incremental extension of the MiSAR Platform Independent Metamodel. Mapping rules were established to effectively transform Platform Specific Models into Platform Independent ones. Furthermore, MiSAR was successfully implemented to recover architecture models. An evaluation using three systems demonstrated that MiSAR could recover architectural models with a high degree of completeness and correctness when compared with the actual architecture. Conclusion The MiSAR artefacts, including the extended Platform Independent Metamodel and mapping rules, effectively produce expressive architectural models of microservice systems. Systems confirmed MiSAR’s ability to semi-automatically recover accurate architectural models, providing a holistic view often missing in current software engineering practices.

Microservices have gained acceptance in software industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more reliable computing. Among the critical microservice architecture design decisions is when to adapt the granularity of a microservice architecture by merging/decomposing microservices. No existing work investigates the following question: How can we reason about the trade-off between predicted benefits and cost of pursuing microservice granularity adaptation under uncertainty? To address this question, we provide a novel formulation of the decision problem to pursue granularity adaptation as a real options problem. We propose a novel evaluation process for dynamically evaluating granularity adaptation design decisions under uncertainty. Our process is based on a novel combination of real options and the concept of Bayesian surprises. We show the benefits of our evaluation process by comparing it to four representative industrial microservice runtime monitoring tools, which can be used for retrospective evaluation for granularity adaptation decisions. Our comparison shows that our process can supersede and/or complement these tools. We implement a microservice application—Filmflix—using Amazon Web Service Lambda and use this implementation as a case study to show the unique benefit of our process compared to traditional application of real options analysis.

Context: The vast majority of software engineering research is reported independently of the application domain: techniques and tools usage is reported without any domain context. As reported in previous research, this has not always been so: early in the computing era, the research focus was frequently application domain specific (for example, scientific and data processing).

Micro service architectures are rapidly establishing themselves in the software industry as a more efficient and effective substitute for monolithic applications. In a micro service architecture, the application is broken down into many small elements called micro services. These are managed in a distributed way and typically involve several development teams. In such an environment, an architectural model can get lost along the way, making it difficult to perform many downstream software engineering tasks, such as migration, audit, integration or impact analysis. To address this problem, we are developing support for Micro Service Architecture Recovery (MiSAR) using a Model Driven Engineering approach. In this paper, we describe an empirical study which aims to identify the core elements of our approach, by undertaking manual analysis on 8 micro service-based open source projects. From this analysis, we define a metamodel for micro service-based architectures and a set of mapping rules which map between the software and the metamodel. The resulting metamodel and mapping rules provide a solid foundation for any micro service architecture recovery approach and hence are a key first step towards managing the architectural integrity of micro service-based applications.

Architecture Consistency (AC) aims to align implemented systems with their intended architectures. Several AC approaches and tools have been proposed and empirically evaluated, suggesting favourable results. In this paper, we empirically examine the state of practice with respect to Architecture Consistency, through interviews with nineteen experienced software engineers. Our goal is to identify 1) any practises that the companies these architects work for, currently undertake to achieve AC; 2) any barriers to undertaking explicit AC approaches in these companies; 3) software development situations where practitioners perceive AC approaches would be useful, and 4) AC tool needs, as perceived by practitioners. We also assess current commercial AC tool offerings in terms of these perceived needs. The study reveals that many practitioners apply informal AC approaches as there are barriers for adopting more formal and explicit approaches. These barriers are: 1) Difficulty in quantifying architectural inconsistency effects, and thus justifying the allocation of resources to fix them to senior management, 2) The near invisibility of architectural inconsistency to customers, 3) Practitioners’ reluctance towards fixing architectural inconsistencies, and 4) Practitioners perception that huge effort is required to map the system to the architecture when using more formal AC approaches and tools. Practitioners still believe that AC would be useful in supporting several of the software development activities such as auditing, evolution and ensuring quality attributes. After reviewing several commercial tools, we posit that AC tool vendors need to work on their ability to support analysis of systems made up of different technologies, that AC tools need to enhance their capabilities with respect to artefacts such as services and meta-data, and to focus more on non-maintainability architectural concerns.

The article Architecture consistency: State of the practice, challenges and requirements, written by Nour Ali et al. was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal on May 15, 2017 without open access. The original article has been corrected.

Isolating fine-grained business functionalities byboundaries into entities called microservices is a core activityunderlying microservitization. We define microservitization asthe paradigm shift towards microservices. Determining theoptimal microservice boundaries (i.e. microservice granularity) is among the key microservitization design decisions thatinfluence the Quality of Service (QoS) of the microservice applicationat runtime. In this paper, we provide an architecturecentricapproach to model this decision problem. We build onambients - a modelling approach that can explicitly capturefunctional boundaries and their adaptation. We extend the aspect-oriented architectural meta-modelling approach of ambients-AMBIENT-PRISMA - with microservice ambients. A microservice ambient is a modelling concept that treatsmicroservice boundaries as an adaptable first-class entity. Weuse a hypothetical online movie subscription-based systemto capture a microservitization scenario using our aspectorientedmodelling approach. The results show the ability ofmicroservice ambients to express the functional boundary of amicroservice, the concerns of each boundary, the relationshipsacross boundaries and the adaptations of these boundaries. Additionally, we evaluate the expressiveness and effectivenessof microservice ambients using criteria from ArchitectureDescription Language (ADL) classification frameworkssince microservice ambients essentially support architecturedescription for microservices. The evaluation focuses on thefundamental modelling constructs of microservice ambientsand how they support microservitization properties such asutility-driven design, tool heterogeneity and decentralised governance. The evaluation highlights how microservice ambientssupport analysis, evolution and mobility/location awarenesswhich are significant to quality-driven microservice granularityadaptation. The evaluation is general and irrespective of theparticular application domain and the business competenciesin that domain.

The goal of this track is to strengthen the crossfertilization of advances from software engineering, services and cloud computing. The workshop aims at exploring, debating and increasing our understanding to the following: (i) how advances in software engineering, with emphasis on engineering requirements software architectures, architecting dependable systems, self-adaptive software architectures, economics-driven software engineering, utility computing, risk management, security software engineering and testing, Search-based software engineering can (not) benefit the case of cloud; (ii) what are the most recent innovations, trends, experiences and concerns in the field that appraise the paradigm-shift in engineering software systems as cloud services or in support of cloud infrastructures; (iii) What are the open research challenges and promising directions for software engineering FOR the cloud? And how cloud is likely to shape the research landscape of software engineering for at least the next decade? (iv) How the paradigm will shape the future of engineering software IN the cloud, i.e. benefiting from the cloud infrastructure, virtualization and economies of scale? The track aims to bridge the gap between software engineering, services, business and cloud computing communities by specifically addressing the challenges for software engineering FOR and IN the cloud. The track extends our scientific query for probing an answer for the above through successive workshops on the Future of Software engineering IN and FOR the Cloud in conjunction with IEEE Cloud, IEE ICWS, and IEEE SCC in conjunction with IEEE Congress on Services, the flagship conference on cloud and service computing.

Social media and online Question and Answer (Q&A) communities in particular have become a successful solution for finding answers on diverse topics. However, not all questions are answered by these communities. Also, many questions are not answered quickly enough. In this paper, we propose a framework for predicting users' response time. The framework uses a diverse set of features including information on users, the content they generate while communicating, question tags, spatial and temporal features. Then these features are used as input for training predictive models by various machine learning algorithms. As a case study, three diverse Q&A communities from Stack Exchange are selected to test the framework. We demonstrate that Deep Belief Networks outperform Logistic Regression (LR), k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), and Decision Trees (DT) in the accuracy of the prediction across the three diverse Q&A communities.

The IEEE Engineering Mobile Service Oriented Systems (EMSOS) Workshop aims to bring together researchers from academia and industry, as well as practitioners in the area of engineering services in mobile environments in order to provide a forum where recent research results can be presented and discussed. The objective is to understand open issues in the software engineering area of services applied in mobile environments, and to build a community of researchers and practitioners willing to collaborate on these issues.

The goal of this track is to strengthen the cross-fertilization of advances from software engineering, services and cloud computing. The workshop aims at exploring, debating and increasing our understanding to the following: (i) how advances in software engineering, with emphasis on engineering requirements software architectures, architecting dependable systems, self-adaptive software architectures, economics-driven software engineering, utility computing, risk management, security software engineering and testing, Search-based software engineering can (not) benefit the case of cloud, (ii) what are the most recent innovations, trends, experiences and concerns in the field that appraise the paradigm-shift in engineering software systems as cloud services or in support of cloud infrastructures, (iii) What are the open research challenges and promising directions for software engineering FOR the cloud? And how cloud is likely to shape the research landscape of software engineering for at least the next decade? (iv) How the paradigm will shape the future of engineering software IN the cloud, i.e. Benefiting from the cloud infrastructure, virtualization and economies of scale?

Several initiatives have been proposed in recent years with the purpose of investigating how to tackle sustainability issues within software systems and software engineering. However, there is a lack of attention from the research community in exploring sustainability as an emergent quality property of the software systems, especially when they are becoming more and more distributed, heterogeneous, and dynamic. In order to involve a more international research community, and provide an open forum for researchers and practitioners working on green and sustainable measurement and metrics, an interactive workshop is planned within the IWSM-Mensura conference.

The IEEE Engineering Mobile Service Oriented Systems (EMSOS) Workshop aims to bring together researchers from academia and industry, as well as practitioners in the area of engineering services in mobile environments in order to provide a forum where recent research results can be presented and discussed. The objective is to understand open issues in the software engineering area of services applied in mobile environments, and to build a community of researchers and practitioners willing to collaborate on these issues.

The workshop aims to bridge the gap between software engineering, services, business and cloud computing communities by specifically addressing the challenges for software engineering FOR and IN the cloud. The workshop issue extends our scientific query for probing an answer for the above through successive workshops on the Future of Software engineering IN and FOR the Cloud in conjunction with IEEE Cloud, IEE ICWS, and IEEE SCC in conjunction with IEEE Congress on Services, the flagship conference on cloud and service computing.

Complexity and scale of modern data is at its highest level but its temporal properties are often neglected. As a result, it is often hard for a user to make an informed decision about its time related characteristics. However, an aesthetic and efficient visualization can mitigate this drawback of data representation. For example, an informative graphical visualization based on user's interaction with a computer interface can dramatically improve user experience with temporal data. In this paper, I propose such visualization of temporal data for reasoning. I developed a temporal model supporting different temporal entities for this data. These include timestamps, intervals, different time granularity and uncertainty of time. I proposed a multimodal visualization based on this abstract time model so a user will have the functionality to reason on temporal properties of visualized data from different points of view.

Architectural drift is a widely cited problem in software engineering, where the implementation of a software system diverges from the designed architecture over time causing architecture inconsistencies. Previous work suggests that this architectural drift is, in part, due to programmers' lack of architecture awareness as they develop code. JITTAC is a tool that uses a real-time Reflexion Modeling approach to inform programmers of the architectural consequences of their programming actions as, and often just before, they perform them. Thus, it provides developers with Just-In-Time architectural awareness towards promoting consistency between the as-designed architecture and the as-implemented system. JITTAC also allows programmers to give real-time feedback on introduced inconsistencies to the architect. This facilitates programmer-driven architectural change, when validated by the architect, and allows for more timely team-awareness of the actual architectural consistency of the system. Thus, it is anticipated that the tool will decrease architectural inconsistency over time and improve both developers' and architect's knowledge of their software's architecture. The JITTAC demo is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNqhp40PDD4.

The IEEE International Workshop on the Future of Software Engineering for/in the Cloud (FoSEC 2011)aims to bridge the gap between software engineering and cloud computing by specifically addressing the software engineering challenges for software engineering for and in the cloud.

Ambient-PRISMA is an architectural approach for specifying aspect-oriented software architecture and generating code of distributed and mobile systems. Ambient-PRISMA lacks a precise semantics due to the fact that it is based only on a metamodel. In this paper, Ambient-PRISMA is mapped into a formal language called Channel Ambient Calculus, a process algebra for specifying mobile applications that provides channels and ambients as first-class citizens. We argue that the formalization in Channel Ambient Calculus is particularly well-suited for modelling Ambient-PRISMA.

Architectural Knowledge Management (AKM) aims to coordinate the knowledge produced and used during architecting a software system. Managing architectural knowledge effectively is a task that becomes even more critical and complex when operating in a distributed environment. Thus, software architectural practices, processes, and tools that work in collocated software development don't necessarily scale up in a distributed environment. In this paper, we perform a literature review that looks at AKM in a Global Software Development (GSD) context. We attempt to synthesize AKM concepts, practices, tools and challenges important in GSD. In order to provide a common understanding for the central concepts of AKM in GSD in an abstract way, we have created a metamodel which is based on our literature review. The metamodel defines a set of architecture knowledge and global software development entities and their relationships.

In this paper, we present the Global Teaming Model (GTM), which is empirically grounded, and outlines practices that managers need to consider when managing virtual teams. We explain how the model can be adapted to specific areas of software development, and use architectural knowledge management (AKM) as our exemplar. We focus on specific practices relating to how teams collaborate and share essential architectural knowledge across multiple sites. Through a review of the literature, we develop an in-depth view of recommended practices associated with AKM in a global environment. We then consider how we can incorporate these AKM practices into our Global Teaming model to ensure managers are given the necessary support. Our contribution to research therefore is to present AKM practices within the context of all other Global Software Development processes.

In Global Software Development (GSD), distributed stakeholders (e.g. team members, customers, etc) have to collaborate and communicate in an efficient and effective way to share, create and discuss knowledge. Nowadays, a challenge is to provide integrated collaborative tools that implement creativity techniques which allow distributed stakeholders to externalize their knowledge through brainstorming and share and store knowledge in a common repository. The Requirements Elicitation (RE) process is a clear example where this kind of support is needed in the software development process. This paper presents the Spatial Hypertext Wiki as a collaborative tool for supporting creativity in the RE process. The Spatial Hypertext characteristics of the wiki provide a virtual board where distributed stakeholders can share, brainstorm, negotiate, or prioritize the knowledge involved in RE.

Currently most software systems have a distributed nature. The development of distributed and mobile software is a complex task. As a result, it is important to take into account distribution and mobility from the early stages of the development process instead of delaying their considerations to the implementation stage. In this work, we present how to consider distribution and mobility features at the architectural level.