INES – National Institute of Science and Technology for Software Engineering

More INES at EASE 2013

The paper “A Systematic Review of Design Diversity-Based Solutions for Fault-Tolerant SOAs” by Amanda Nascimento (IC-UNICAMP), Cecília Mary F. Rubira (IC-UNICAMP), Rachel Burrows (Lancaster University, UK), Fernando Castor (CIn-UFPE), has been accepted for publication at the 17th International Conference on Evalution and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE’2013). The conference will be held in April 14 – 16, 2013 at Porto de Galinhas, Brazil.

This activity is part of the project “Engenharia de Software na Transição para Plataformas Multicore”.

A brief overview of the paper is given below.

Background: Over recent years, software developers have been evaluating the benefits of both Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and software fault tolerance techniques based on design diversity by creating fault-tolerant composite services that leverage functionally equivalent services, or variant services. Three major design issues need to be considered while building fault-tolerant architectures based on design diversity, namely, selection and execution of variants and selection of an adjudication algorithm to determine the correct or adjudicated result from the variants. Each design issue, in turn, might be realized by a set of alternative design solutions, which present different degrees of efficiency (e.g. memory consumption, reliability and response time). Aim: To investigate whether existing approaches for fault-tolerant composite services support the above mentioned design issues and to provide a detailed classication of the analysed approaches. Method: A systematic literature review of diversity-based approaches for fault-tolerant composite services, which compose our primary studies. Results: We found 17 primary studies providing direct evidence about the research question. Our findings reveal that the primary studies support a wide variety of design decisions. For example, (i) variant services may be chosen at different points during the software lifecycle; (ii) both parallel and sequential execution schemes have been addressed; and (iii) a variety of adjudication mechanisms were found amongst the target papers. Conclusions: We build up a broad picture of what design issues have been addressed by existing software diversity-based approaches for fault-tolerant composite services. Finally, practical issues and difficulties are summarized and directions for future work are suggested.

INES at COMPASS Convergence 2013

INES will be participating at the COMPASS Convergence 2013 at Trieste (Italy) from 18/02/2013 to 22/03/2013. Prof. Marcel Oliveira will be presenting the results achieved during his post-doctorate at UFPE at this meeting, in which members of the consortium will be present. The COMPASS consortium is a group of researchers and companies committed to collaborative research on model-based techniques for developing and maintaining Systems of Systems (SoS).

INES implements undergraduate studentship

Undergraduate student Carlos Adriano Beserra da Silva is being hired by INES to work in a project to develop a symbolic model checker based on the Microsoft Research technology known as FORMULA.

INES at 28th Symposium On Applied Computing (SAC’2013) – Programming Languages Track

The paper “Formal Semantics and Expressiveness of a Web Service Composition Language” by Marcelo Guerra Hahn, Microsoft Corp., USA; Regina Motz, INCO – UdelaR, Uruguay; Martin A. Musicante, DIMAp – UFRN, Brasil; Alberto Pardo, INCO – UdelaR, Uruguay has been accepted for publication in the Programming Languages (PL) Technical Track at the 28th Symposium On Applied Computing (SAC’2013).

The conference will be held in March 18 – 22, 2013 at Institute of Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra (ISEC-IPC), Coimbra, Portugal.

This activity is part of the project “Confiabilidade e Segurança em Software Crítico”.

A brief overview of the paper is given next

Web Services have become the standard for exposing services on the Internet. Since many operations require the collaboration between two or more services, the need to have languages to express Web Services compositions has emerged. In this paper, we focus on PEWS, a Web Service composition language. We present an operational semantics of PEWS and propose some minor extensions to it in order to support most common workflow patterns. The extended version of PEWS is able to fully support 36 out of the 43 control-flow patterns as defined in the literature, compared to 17 fully supported by the industry standard BPEL.

INES at MODULARITY-AOSD 2013

INES researcher Sérgio Soares will attend MODULARITY – AOSD 2013 from March 24th to March 30th. Sérgio will be a judge in the ACM SIGPLAN Student Research Competition (SRC) that will be hosted at the conference, held in Fukuoka, Japan on March 24-29, 2013.

INES at EASE 2013

INES researchers members from the project An Investigation of Methods, Processes, Tools, and Metrics for the Development of Software Product Lines (SPL) — in portuguese, Uma Investigação de Processos, Ferramentas e Métricas para o Desenvolvimento de Linhas de Produto de Software, had one accepted paper at 17th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software (EASE).

Information about the paper:

• Yguarata Cavalcanti, Paulo Anselmo Neto, Ivan Machado, Eduardo Almeida, Silvio Meira.Towards Understanding Software Change Request Assignment: A survey with practitioners, 17th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software (EASE), Brazil, 2013