• Dr. Kamran Sartipi
• Room: ITB/125, Ext. 26346
• Email: sartipi@mcmaster.ca
• http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~sartipi/
• Office hours: TBA

Course Web Page:

• http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~sartipi/course/cas747/w06/

• Architectural design and Reverse Engineering of a software system are considered as cornerstones in Software Engineering due to their importance and impact on the design of large software systems. This course is intended to expose the graduate students (Master’s and PhD's) in Software Engineering and Computer Science to a repertoire of methodologies, techniques, and tools for designing, developing, maintaining, and evolving large software systems. Specifically, the subjects for the design of a large system include: software architecture representations, views, components, patterns, languages, evaluation techniques, model driven architecture, and multi-tier architectures; also the subjects for the architectural recovery include: different phases of reverse engineering, pattern based recovery, clustering, and tools. The course includes two types of group projects to cover the design and recovery aspects of a software system.

Students' achievements at the end of the course:

• Knowledge and expertise to critically read different articles in software architecture and reverse engineering literature and make comment on them.
• Ability to analyze large software systems and generate high-level design document to be used by the software system maintenance phase.
• Working experience with state-of-the-practice Software Architecture and Reverse Engineering tools.

• One lecture per week preferably on Tuesday afternoon for 3 hours (the exact date and time will be set in the organization meeting). In the first part of each lecture, the instructor will introduce a scheduled subject with emphasis on the fundamental issues and problems to be addressed. In the second part of the lecture the students will present specific approaches in technical papers found in the related literature and will direct the follow up discussions on the presented approach.

• Software Architecture Overview:
  • Software Crisis: issues in design of large software systems:
    • Software's Chronic Crisis; by Scientific American
    • The Software Crisis
  • Software Architecture Fundamentals: Components; Connectors; Styles
    • An Introduction to Software Architecture
    • Foundations for the Study of Software Architecture
  • High-level software representation techniques:
    • Architectural Blueprints—The “4+1” View Model of Software Architecture
    • Architecture Description Languages: Unicon; Rapide; ACME; Wright; UML
    • Graph eXchange Language (GXL)
  • Reconstructing Software Architecture:
    • Taxonomy of Terms in Reverse Engineering
    • Reverse Engineering: A Roadmap
    
    
• Architectural Analysis Techniques:
  • Techniques for Extracting Entities and Relationships:
    • Towards a Standard Schema for C/C++
    Clustering:
  • Using Clustering Algorithms in Legacy Systems Remodularization
  • A User-assisted Approach to Component Clustering
  • Information-Theoretic Software Clustering
  • Concept Lattice Analysis:
  • Assessing Modular Structure of Legacy Code Based on Mathematical Concept Analysis & 2
  • Identifying Modules via Concept Analysis
  • Visualization:
  • Data Mining:
  • Component Clustering Based on Maximal Association
  • Web Applications:
  • Architecture Recovery of Web Applications
  • Dynamic Analysis:
  • Software Clustering based on Dynamic Dependencies
  • Mining System-User Interaction Traces for Use Case Models
  • Pattern Matching:
  • On modeling software architecture recovery as graph matching
  • Software Reflexion Models: Bridging the Gap Between Source and High-Level Models
  • Software migration and re-engineering techniques:
    • Re-engineering Legacy Systems to Web-enabled Environments
    
    
  Architectural Analysis Tools:
• Portable Book Shelf
• Rigi
• Bunch
• Shrimp
• Refine
• Alborz
• Dali


• Software Architecture Evaluation:
• SAAM, ATAM, Information Retrieval


• Software Architecture Modeling: (TO BE COMPLETED)
  • Architectural Design Patterns
  • Architecture of Web-based Distributed Systems (web services)
  • Middleware Architecture (two and three-tier architectures) of
  • Enterprise SystemsModel Driven Architecture (MDA)
  • Healthcare Systems Architectures

• Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline; by Mary Shaw and David Garlan.
• Papers from: conferences ICSM, CSMR, ICSE, WCRE, IWPC; Journals SPE, JSM, JSEKE.
• Software Architecture in Practice, Second Edition; by L. Bass, P. Clements, R. Kazman.
• Model Driven Architecture--Applying MDA to Enterprise Computing; by David S. Frankel.
• Managing Corporate Information Systems Evolution and Maintenance; editors: K. Khan, Y. Zhang.
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture; by Martin Fowler.
• A System of Patterns (Pattern-oriented Software Architecture); by F. Buschmann et al.
• More texts to be added later on.

• Design of Software Architecture: exercise on high-level design, and partial-development of a non-trivial software system using techniques from software views, software components, MDA, and ADLs.
  • Example software domains include: Information Systems, Telephony Systems, Web
    Applications.
  • Example development environments include: Eclipse, .Net, Rational Rose, available ADLs.
  
  
• Recovery of Software Architecture: exercise on architecture recovery of an open source software system (approximately 50 Kilo Lines of Code) written in C, C++, or Java using a software reverse engineering tool such as: Alborz, Shrimp, PBS, Rigi, Bunch, or Refine.


• Project deliverables:
  • Design documents for the developed or recovered architecture, as well as the executable for partially developed systems.
  • Final project presentation/demonstration.

• Project Due Date: March 21, 2006
• Project Initiation Report, March 7, 2006: one page about the selected software system to analyze.
• Deliverable document: 10 pages includine: cover page; table of contents; table of figures; introduction; background; subject software system specification; adopted architecture recovery technique; results; graphs; evaluation; conclusion.
• Project Teams:
• PBS:
  • Antonie Maghamez
  • Salvador Garcia
• Bunch:
  • Marwan Abdeen
  • Lu Azhari
• Shrimp:
  • Jie (Clyde) Gui
  • Huan Wang
• Rigi or Concept Lattice Analysis Tool:
  • Jiacong (Kevin) Zhang
  • Hossein Safyallah
• Alborz:
  • Nima Dezhkam
  • Lei (Larry) Hu

• Template for one page report (March 7):
• Please find a system that is approximately 100KLOC in any domain. The best way is to look at a software system that is similar to the sample systems that have been used for demonstrating the tool in the tool's web site. The report should contain the following parts:
  • Name and a brief information about the tool you use for reverse engineering.
  • Name of the subject software system to be analyzed and its characteristics such as:
    • Application domain, language, and size in KLOC (size approximately 100KLOC)
    • A brief description of its functionality.
    • Its suitability for reverse engineering using the adopted tool.
    • Availability of the system documentation.
    • What type of result you would expect (e.g., component and interconnections where components are ... and interconnections are ...)
    • A timeline for completion of the project.

• (NEW) WebSVN is available to log the versions of your work on Software Architecture recovery project.
  • There is a separate repository for each student, that can be accessed through: https://websvn.mcmaster.ca/cas747/username where:
  • Usernames and passwords are the same as the CAS Unix accounts.
  • A common mistake is that students will try to acess
    https://websvn.mcmaster.ca/cas747, which will not work, you have to
    specify full url: https://websvn.mcmaster.ca/cas747/sartipi (for example)

 

Tentative Marking Scheme:

• Paper presentations: %30
• Particiapation in class discussions: 10%
• Project using a software design or analysis tool: 30%
• Technical paper in a relevant topic to course materials: 30%
  

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Guidelines for Paper/Poster Presentations and writing Technical Papers:

• The National Honor Society in Psychology
• Professors at UWaterloo
• Guideline for writing technical articles

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Course Materials: readings, and slides:

• Week 1 (Jan 3) :
• Organization Meeting: Wednesday January 4 at 9:30 in ITB/222

• Week 2 (Jan 10) :
• Software Architecture Overview: Definition; Styles; Zachman's view; 4+1 view.
• Readings:
  • An Introduction to Software Architecture : Upto Case Study 2; page 22
  • Architectural Blueprints—The “4+1” View Model of Software Architecture
• Presentatioin:
  • K. Sartipi: Introduction to Software Architecture and Software Architecture Views [Slides: PDF]

    

• Week 3 (Jan 17) :
• Software Architecture Description Languages (ADL);
• Readings:
  • Acme: Architectural Description of Component-Based Systems; ABLE Group; Carnegie Mellon Univ.
• Presentations:
  • K. Sartipi: Overview of ADL languages and Graph Represenations [Slides: PDF]
  • Xiang Ling: Acme ADL [Slides: Power Point]
  
  

• Week 4 (Jan 24) :
• Introduction to Software Architecture Analysis and Graph-based Architectural Representation.
• Readings:
  • Reverse Engineering and Design Recovery: a Taxonomy; E.J. Chikofsky and J.H. Cross
  • An Overview of the GXL Graph Exchange Language; A. Winter, et al.
  • TA: The Tuple Attribute Language: Ric Holt
• Presentations:
  • K. Sartipi: Overview of Software Reverse Engineering [Slides: PDF]
  • Lu Azhari: Introduction to TA and XML + GXL paper by Winte [Slides: PPT]
  
  

• Week 5 (Jan 31) :
• Software Architecture Analysis using Clustering.
• Readings:
  • Using Clustering Algorithms in Legacy Systems Remodularization; T.A. Wiggerts
  • Information-Theoretic Software Clustering; P. Andritsos; V. Tzerpos
  • Using Automatic Clustering to Produce High-Level System Organizations of Source Code; S. Mancoridis et al.
• Presentations:
  • K. Sartipi: Introduction to software clustering [Slides: PDF]
  • Marwan: paper by Wiggerts [Slides: PDF]
  • Nima Dezhkam: paper by Andritsos + paper by Mancoridis [Slides: PDF]

  

• Week 6 (Feb 7) :
• Application of Data Mining (Association Rules & Sequential Patterns) in Software Analysis
• Readings:
  • Fast Algorithms for Mining Association Rules: R. Agrawal and R. Srikant
  • Component Clustering Based on Maximal Association: K. Sartipi and K. Kontogiannis
  • Mining System-User Interaction Traces for Use Case Models: M. El-Ramly et al.
• Presentations:
  • K. Sartipi: Introduction to Data Mining [Slides: PDF]
  • Jie Gui (Clyde): paper "association rules" by Agrawal; and paper by Sartipi [Slides: PPT]
  • Hossein Safyallah: Introduction to sequential pattern mining + paper by El-Ramly [Slides: PDF]
  
  

• Week 7 (Feb 14) :
• Software Migration and Reengineering Techniques
• Readings:
  • Re-engineering Legacy Systems to Web-enabled Environments: Y. Zou; K. Kontogiannis
• Presentations:
  • K. Sartipi: Short Introduction [Slides: PDF]
  • Salvador Garcia [Slides: PPT]
  • Lei Hu (Larry) [Slides: PPT]

  

• Week 8 (Feb 21) :
• READING WEEK (No Class)

• Week 9 (Feb 28) :
• Architecture Recovery of Web Applications
• Readings:
  • Architecture Recovery of Web Applications: A.E. Hassan; R.C. Holt
  • The Web Services Framework: A Survey of WSDL, SOAP and UDDI; part of Master's Thesis: G. Orth
• Presentations:
  • K. Sartipi: Introduction to Web Services [Slides: PDF]
  • Antonie Maghamez; Architecture of Web Applications [Slides: PDF]

• Week 10 (Mar 07) :
• Software Architecture Analysis Tools
• Readings:
  • Practice Patterns for Architecture Reconstruction: C. Stoermer, L. O'Brien, C. Verhoef
  • Portable Bookshelf: Univerity of Waterloo
  • SHriMP: University of Victoria
  • Alborz: McMaster Universtiy
• Presentations:
  • K. Sartipi: Brief Guidelines for Writing Technical Arcticles [Slides: PDF]
  • K. Sartipi: Introduction to Software Analysis Tools and Alborz Toolkit [Slides: PDF]
  • Huan Wang: Software Architectrue Analysis Tools (SAAT): Rigi, PBS and Shrimp [Slides: PDF]

• Week 11 (Mar 14) :
• Model Driven Architecture (MDA)
• Readings:
  • MDA foundations
  • Developing Applications using Model-Driven Environments: K. Balasubramanian et al.
  • What Models Mean: Ed Seidewitz
  • Model Driven Architecture: Official Web Site
• Presentations:
  • K. Sartipi: Introduction to MDA [Slides: PDF]
  • Magdin Stoica: MDA [Slides: PPT]

• Week 12 (Mar 21) :
• Middleware Communication and Interoperability
• Readings:
  • WSMB: a middleware for enhanced Web services interoperability. T.N. Kien, A. Erradi and P. Maheshwari
• Presentations:
  • K. Sartipi: Introduction to Middleware [Slides: PDF]
  • Jicong Zhang (Kevin) [Slides: PDF, this is a draft of the presentation; final version will be posted later]

• Week 13 (Mar 28) :
• Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) Architecture (4:30 - 5:15pm)
• Interoperability of Data and Knowledge in Heterogeneous Systems (5:20 - 6:20pm)
• Readings:
  • Integrating Enterprise Applications: Backgrounder. S. Radhakrishnan
  • Interoperability of Data and Knowledge in Distributed Healthcare Systems. R. Sherafat and K. Sartipi.
• Presentations
  • K. Sartipi: Introducing the Presentations
  • Magdin Stoica: EAI Architecture [Slides: PPT]
  • Reza Sherafat: Interoperability in Healthcare Systems [Slides: PPT]

• Week 14 (April 4) Last Class Session:
• Progress Report on Group Projects and Technical Papers.

• Week 15 (April 11) Extra Session for Project presentation
• Progress Report on Group Projects and Technical Papers; ROOM ITB/222

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Announcements:

1. Check this web page regularly for announcements.

   (Jan 1) Happy New Year 2006!!

2. (Jan 11) Slides for the first lecture Jan 10 have been posted.
3. (Jan 22) Guidelines for class presentations have been posed, above
4. (Mar 5) A template for the report on the selected software system to be analyzed, has been provided above.
5. (Mar 7) A guideline for writing technical articles has been added above.
6. (Mar 11) A web SVN repository system has been provided for you to control the versions of your project, above.
7. (April 11) Today Larry, Nima, and Kevin will present architectural recoery using Alborz. The room will be ITB/222 (not ITB/201).

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