Status Report: A Technology Investigation Supporting Software Architecture and Analysis for Evolution

Agreement/Contract Number: F30602-97-2-0031

For the period: July 1997 through September 1997

Principal Investigators: David Garlan and Mary Shaw

Carnegie Mellon University

5000 Forbes Avenue

Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891

E-mail: garlan@cs.cmu.edu, mary.shaw@cs.cmu.edu

WWW Homepage: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~Compose/

Voice: 412-268-5056 (Garlan); 412-268-2589 (Shaw)

FAX: 412-268-5576


1.0 Participants

Carnegie Mellon University

2.0 Ongoing Research & Development

The following are the on-going research and development activities for the Composable Software Systems group.

3.0 Notable Accomplishments & Technology Transition

The following represent the accomplishments and the technology transition activities accomplished by the Composable Software Systems group during the reporting period.

4.0 Progress on Inter/Intra Cluster Collaborations

COLLABORATION WITH INTEGRATORS

Global Transportation Network

Lockheed-Martin incorporated and integrated the following CMU technology:

  • Aesop
  • ACME

into a technology demonstration for the July EDCS meeting.

COLLABORATION WITH OTHER PROJECTS IN ARCHITECTURE CLUSTER

Lockheed-Martin (Creps)

We provided our prototypes to Lockheed-Martin for integration, and worked with them to develop sample applications.

USC/ISI (Balzer)

Wang worked with Bob Balzer and Dave Wile at ISI to produce a software architecture debugging environment.

USC/ISI (Wile)

CMU extended our ADL tools (for Wright, UniCon, and Aesop) to read and write ACME specifications. This work leverages the ACME language definition, the ACMELib infrastructure, and some of the ACME-based tools.

COLLABORATION WITH PROJECTS IN HIGH ASSURANCE CLUSTER

University of Massachussets (Osterweil/Clarke)
CMU continued discussions with UMASS to understand how to combine the static checking capabilities of Wright with those of Flavors/INCA.

University of Washington (Notkin)

Garlan continued collaboration with Notkin to develop formal models for reasoning about Implicit Invocation Architectures.

COLLABORATION WITH PROJECTS IN DYNAMIC LANGUAGES CLUSTER

CMU (Falhman)

CMU is continuing discussions with the Gwydion project on how to incorporate some form of architecture description view and/or formally derived/described properties of software systems into our hypercode system.

Recently, the Gwydion project gave the Composable Systems Group a demonstration of their current toolset capabilities.

5.0 Publications

The following are the papers that have been authored by the members of this contract during the reporting period. They have been organized into groups based on their status as submitted, accepted, or published. They represent transition of our research to the community at large.

6.0 Travel

The following are the talks, presentations, panels, lectures, workshops, and demonstrations given by the members of this contract during the reporting period. They represent transition of our research to the community at large.

7.0 Miscellaneous/Administrative/Problematic Issues

Professor Daniel Jackson has accepted a position at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and has left Carnegie Mellon University.

Jackson was the advisor to three students: Craig Damon, Robert O'Callahan, and Aaron Greenhouse in the CMU School of Computer Science. Professor Jeannette Wing has now become co-advisor for Craig Damon and Robert O'Callahan with Jackson, and Bill Scherlis has now become Aaron Greenhouse's new advisor.

8.0 Plans For The Next Reporting Period

We plan to continue our redesign of the UniCon 2 language and toolset. UniCon 2 improvements will include improved type checking, improved support for adding connector types, evolvable specifications, support for adding component types, and improvements in multi-level definition handling. We plan to re-target UniCon 2 to handle PCs, probably rehosting in the process.

We plan to help Lockheed-Martin identify technology to inporporate into the next demonstration for the EDCS "Demo Days" '98.

We plan to continue our work on applying Wright to HLA, working with DMSO to develop a better architectural standard.

We plan to write up our most recent results on dynamic-Wright, our peformance modelling tools, and our experience with integrating Aesop, UniCon, and ACME.

We plan to continue to develop the Armani constraint language, and investigate the incorporation of that language into a new extension of ACME.

We plan to write up our research in the area of honesty and responsibility checks for Revere.

Three thesis proposals are to be made this next quarter: one based on Craig Damon's Nitpick work, one based on Robert O'Callahan's Lackwit work, and one by Siddhartha Puri on the use of imperative modules for understanding software architectures.