CS 578
Software Architectures

Spring Semester, 2005
Location: OHE 122
Time: TTh 12:30pm - 1:50pm
Class number: 048-33592D and 034-33594R (DEN)

Instructors

Nenad Medvidovic

Electronic Mail: neno@usc.edu
Office: SAL 338
Office Phone: (213) 740-5579
Office Hours: TTh 11:00am – 12:00pm

Alexander Egyed

Electronic Mail: aegyed@ieee.org
Office: SAL 342
Office Phone: (213) 740-6470
Office Hours: TTh 2:00pm – 3:00pm

Teaching Assistants

Chris Mattmann

Electronic Mail: mattmann@usc.edu
Office: SAL 327
Office Phone: (213) 740-6504
Office Hours: F 3:00pm-5:00pm

Chiyoung Seo

Electronic Mail: cseo@usc.edu
Office: SAL 319
Office Phone: (213) 740-6503
Office Hours: M 11:00am – 1:00pm

Overview

Software architecture has become an area of intense research in the software engineering community. A number of architecture modeling notations and support tools, as well as new architectural styles, have emerged. The focus of architecture-based software development is shifted from lines-of-code to coarser-grained building blocks and their overall interconnection structure. Explicit focus on architecture has shown tremendous potential to improve the current state-of-the-art in software development and alleviate many of its problems.

This course will expose you to the concepts, principles, and state-of- the-art methods in software architectures, including domain-specific software architectures (DSSA), architectural styles, architecture description languages (ADL), software connectors, dynamism in architectures, and architecture-based testing and analysis. In the process of studying these concepts, we will make explicit the boundaries of the field and discuss its relationship to other areas of software engineering, specifically requirements, design (including object-oriented design and related notations, such as UML), and implementation. The course will also examine the practical applicability of architecture research, specifically its relationship to the work in software reuse and component interoperability platforms (such as CORBA, Enterprise JavaBeans, COM/DCOM, and .NET). A series of related homework assignments and two exams will be given to assess your understanding of important concepts, methods, languages, and tools.

Academic Integrity

Students must work independently on all individual assignments; collaborating on individual assignments is considered cheating and will be penalized accordingly. All USC students are responsible for reading and following the USC Student Conduct Code, which prohibits plagiarism. Some examples of behavior that is not allowed are: copying all or part of someone else’s work (by hand or by looking at others’ files, either secretly or if shown), and submitting it as your own; giving another student in the class a copy of your assignment solution; consulting with another student during an exam; and copying text from published literature without proper attribution. If you have questions about what is allowed, please discuss it with the instructor.

Students who violate University standards of academic integrity are subject to disciplinary sanctions, including failure in the course and suspension from the University. Since dishonesty in any form harms the individual, other students, and the University, policies on academic integrity have been and will be strictly enforced.

Textbook and Readings

Textbook:

Mary Shaw and David Garlan,
Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline,
Prentice-Hall, 1996.

Supplemental Readings:

Additional papers (see the Schedule). Copies of all the papers will be available for purchase for the on-site students. The off-site students should contact DEN.
Please note: Linked papers sometimes will require you to be on the USC network in order to download them. The general rule of thumb is: if the paper link takes you to the IEEE Computer Society, or ACM portal site, then you will need to be on the USC network to download it.
To aid your note taking, we will also make the lecture slides available on-line prior to each lecture. You will be able to download them by going to the appropriate Lecture Topic in the Schedule.

Assignments and Examinations

Name	Description	Weight
Examination 1	Assesses your understanding of fundamental software architecture themes and concepts.	25%
Examination 2	Tests your understanding of issues in transferring architectural decisions to designs and implementations. The focus is on research and commercial off-the-shelf (OTS) tools, techniques, and interoperability platforms covered in the latter part of the course.	25%
Homework 1: System architectural recovery	Requires you to provide an initial architectural breakdown of an off-the-shelf system using a third-party technique and/or tool.	10%
Homework 2: Further architectural recovery	Requires you to extend the structural breakdown from Homework 1 with more dynamic relationships	10%
Homework 3: Relating software requirements to architecture	Requires you to devise a partial set of functional and non-functional requirements for the architecture recovered in Homework 1 and clearly relate those requirements to the architecture.	10%
Homework 4: Refining recovered architecture	Requires you to further refine the architecture recovered in Homework 1, with the help of the requirements given in Homework 2 and 3, by introducing notions of high-level components, connectors, and architectural styles and patterns.	10%
Homework 5: Relating architecture to design and implementation	Requires you to reconcile the architecture you arrived at in Homework 4 with the structure and properties of the system’s implementation.	10%

Assignment Submission Guidelines

Please refer to this document for guidelines on submitting your homework assignments.

Schedule (subject to change)

Week		Lecture Topic	Readings	Assignments and Exams
1	Jan 11	Course introduction Overview of software engineering principles
1	Jan 13	Origins of software architectures	F. DeRemer and H. H. Kron. Programming-in-the-Large versus Programming-in-the-Small. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, June 1976. F. P. Brooks, Jr. No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering. IEEE Computer, April 1987. B. W. Boehm and W. L. Scherlis. Megaprogramming. Software Technology Conference 1992, Los Angeles, April 1992.
2	Jan 18	Introduction to software architectures	Chapter 1 D. E. Perry and A. L. Wolf. Foundations for the Study of Software Architectures. ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, October 1992.
2	Jan 20	Scope of software architectures: Canonical case studies	Chapter 3
3	Jan 25	Scope of software architectures: C4 case study analysis	Case Study: Call Center Customer Care (C4) System.	Homework 1
3	Jan 27	Scope of software architectures: Distributed flight simulation case study analysis	R. Kazman. Distributed Flight Simulation: A Challenge for Software Architecture. Technical Report, University of Waterloo.
4	Feb 1	Software architects: People and teams	P. Kruchten. The Software Architect – and the Software Architecture Team. 1^st Working IFIP Conference on Software Architectures, San Antonio, TX, February 1999.
4	Feb 3	Arriving at an architecture	Chapter 5 D. L. Parnas. On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules. Communications of the ACM, December 1972. P. Kruchten. Mommy, Where Do Software Architectures Come from? 1^st International Workshop on Architectures for Software Systems, Seattle, WA, April 1995. P. Gruenbacher et al. Reconciling Software Requirements and Architectures with Intermediate Models. Journal on Software and System Modeling, December 2003.
5	Feb 8	Architecture description languages (ADLs)	Chapter 6 Chapter 7: Section 7.1 N. Medvidovic and R. N. Taylor. A Classification and Comparison Framework for Software Architecture Description Languages. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, January 2000.
5	Feb 10	ADL Examples	Chapter 8: Sections 8.1 and 8.3 D. C. Luckham and J. Vera. An Event-Based Architecture Definition Language. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, September 1995. N. Medvidovic et al. A Language and Environment for Architecture-Based Software Development and Evolution. 21st International Conference on Software Engineering, Los Angeles, CA, May 1999. B. Lewis et al. *Developing Evolvable, Embedded, Time-Critical Systems with MetaH. TOOLS 2000.*
6	Feb 15	Domain-specific software architectures (DSSA)	W. Tracz. DSSA (Domain-Specific Software Architecture) Pedagogical Example. ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, July 1995. D. E. Perry. Generic Descriptions for Product Line Architectures. 2^nd International Workshop on Development and Evolution of Software Architectures for Product Families (ARES II), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, February 1998.	HW #1 due (Monday 8am) Homework 2
6	Feb 17	Architectural styles	Chapter 2 Chapter 8: Section 8.2 R. T. Fielding. Software Architectural Styles for Network-based Applications. Unpublished manuscript, June 1999. M. Hauswirth and M. Jazayeri. A Component and Communication Model for Push Systems. 7^th European Software Engineering Conference with 7^th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE’99), Toulouse, France, September 1999.
7	Feb 22	Examples of domain- and style-specific architectures	D. Batory and S. O'Malley. The Design and Implementation of Hierarchical Software Systems with Reusable Components. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, October 1992. R. N. Taylor et al. A Component- and Message-Based Architectural Style for GUI Software. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, June 1996. R. T. Fielding and R. N. Taylor. Principled Design of the Modern Web Architecture. 22^nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2000), Limerick, Ireland, June 2000.
7	Feb 24	Design models and UML	UML OMG Specification
8	March 1	UML and architecture	D. Garlan and A. J. Kompanek. Reconciling the needs of Architectural Description with Object-Modeling Notations. 3rd International Conference on The Unified Modeling Language (UML 2000), 2000. M. Abi-Antoun and N. Medvidovic. Enabling the Refinement of a Software Architecture into a Design. 2^nd International Conference on The Unified Modeling Language (UML’99), Fort Collins, CO, October 1999. N. Medvidovic et al. Modeling Software Architectures in the Unified Modeling Language. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, January 2002.	Homework 3
8	March 3	Consistency and traceability in transforming requirements to architectures to designs	T. Mens, R. Van Der Straeten, J. Simmonds. Maintaining Consistency between UML Models with Description Logic Tools, Proceedings of 2nd Workshop on Consistency Problems in UML-based Software Development, 2003. A. Egyed and P. Grunbacher. Identifying Requirements Conflicts and Cooperation, IEEE Software, 2004	Homework 2 due (5pm)
9	March 8	Exam 1 review
9	March 10			EXAM 1(Rooms: ZHS 159, ZHS 352, MHP 106)
10	SPRING RECESS
11	March 22	Exam 1 recap	Chapter 7: Section 7.2 N. R. Mehta et al. Towards a Taxonomy of Software Connectors. 22^nd International Conference on Software Engineering, Limerick, Ireland, June 2000. N. Medvidovic et al. The Role of Middleware in Architecture-Based Software Development. International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, August 2003.
11	March 24	Software Connectors	D. Krieger and R.M. Adler. The Emergence of Distributed Component Platforms. IEEE Computer, March 1998. S. P. Reiss. Connecting Tools Using Message Passing in the Field Environment. IEEE Software, July 1990. M. J. Maybee et al. Multilanguage Interoperability in Distributed Systems: Experience Report. 18^th International Conference on Software Engineering, Berlin, Germany, March 1996. E. Di Nitto and D. S. Rosenblum. Exploiting ADLs to Specify Architectural Styles Induced by Middleware Infrastructures. 21^st International Conference on Software Engineering, Los Angeles, CA, May 1999.	Homework 3 due (Friday, March 25, 5pm) Homework 4
12	March 29	Implementing software architectures	S. Vinoski. CORBA: Integrating Diverse Applications within Distributed Heterogeneous Environments. IEEE Communications Magazine, February 1997. On-Line Documentation for CORBA
12	March 31	Middleware – CORBA, COM, DCOM, .NET	R. Natarajan and D. S. Rosenblum. Supporting Architectural Concerns in Component Interoperability Standards. IEE Proceedings – Software, December 2000.
13	April 5	COTS and Legacy Components /Connectors	S. Sedigh-Ali, A. Ghafoor and R. A. Paul. Software Engineering Metrics for COTS Based Systems, IEEE Software, 2001 V. Basili and B . Boehm. COTS-Based Systems Top 10 List, IEEE Software. A. Egyed, and B. Balzer. Integrating COTS Software into Systems through Instrumentation and Reasoning, Journal on Automated Software Engineering (JASE), to appear.
13	April 7	Model-driven architecture (MDA)	MDA Overview	Homework 4 due
14	April 12	Dynamism in software architectures	J. Magee and J. Kramer. Dynamic Structure in Software Architectures. 4th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, San Francisco, CA, October 1996. P. Oreizy et al. Architecture-Based Runtime Software Evolution. 20th International Conference on Software Engineering, Kyoto, Japan, April 1998.
14	April 14	Architecture-based testing and analysis	M. Moriconi et al. Correct Architecture Refinement. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, April 1995. D. Garlan et al. Architectural Mismatch: Why Reuse Is so Hard. IEEE Software, November 1995. C. Gacek and B. W. Boehm. Composing Components: How Does One Detect Potential Architectural Mismatches? Workshop on Compositional Software Architectures, Monterey, CA, January 1998.	Homework 5 (due May 4th) Supplementary Files for HW5
15	April 19	From code and design to architecture	V. Jakobac, A. Egyed and N. Medvidovic. Improving System Understanding via Interactive, Tailorable Source Code Analysis, Proceedings of the Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, 2005. S. Rugaber, T. Shikano and K. Stirewalt. Adequate Reverse Engineering, Proceedings of the Automated Software Engineering Conference, 2001. A. Egyed. Automatically Discovering Transitive Relationships in Class Diagrams, Book Chapter in Model-Driven Software Development (MDSD).
15	April 21	Impact of a change (incremental transformation and analysis)	T. Mens, J. Buckley, M. Zenger, and A. Rashid. Towards a Taxonomy of Software Evolution. A. Egyed and S. Johann. Instant and Incremental Transformation of Models. Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2004.
16	April 26	Exam 2 review
16	April 28			EXAM 2

CS 578 Software Architectures