| EPSRC Reference: |
GR/J08928/01 |
| Title: |
EVOLUTION OF LARGE SOFTWARE SYSTEMS |
| Principal Investigator: |
Henderson, Professor P |
| Other Investigators: |
|
| Researcher Co-Investigators: |
|
| Project Partners: |
|
| Department: |
Electronics and Computer Science |
| Organisation: |
University of Southampton |
| Scheme: |
Standard Research (Pre-FEC) |
| Starts: |
01 October 1993 |
Ends: |
30 September 1996 |
Value (£): |
112,567
|
| EPSRC Research Topic Classifications: |
|
| EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications: |
|
| Related Grants: |
|
| Panel History: |
|
|
Summary on Grant Application Form |
|
The primary objective is to develop methods for handling the evolution of large software systems. Our case study is an electronic retail system and thus a secondary objective is to understand common legacy components for such an application. In the first year our objective has been to create a model retail system to study. This has been achieved. We are now embarked on studying its evaluationProgress:Our work to date can be categorised under four separate headings: Retail Processes, Rapid Prototyping, Software Architectures and Evolutionary Support. We present progress under each of these categories in turn.An analysis of IT support required by retailers has been performed. The results of the analysis led to the specification of essential business processes within a retailing organisation. Various relationships between the process objects were identified. For example, a PRICES server related to multiple MANUFACTURERS. The mapping across differently distributed organisations has also specified. A set of models, executors and visualisers has been developed for the rapid prototyping of distributed systems. The executors (also called steppers) use rules adapted from CSP-like semantics. Models are based on structures common to most distributed IT systems as well as the aforementioned retail specifications. In general, they involve establishing a client-server or process-group algorithm from the underlying primitives provided by an executor.A basic retail system has been implemented in C++ on a platform of socket, semaphore and file classes. It was derived by an informal transformation of some prototyped models. Implementations based on X-window, RPC generation and SUN threads were investigated as alternative software architectures to the UNIX processes-sockets approach. We have refined and tested a lifecycle for evolutionary software development proposed by our collaborators at Manchester University. The proposed lifecycle assumes evolution overwhelms initial development. In order to preempt required changes to our retail system, we have started populating the lifecycles data sets: models , classes etc. Constraints embedded by the lifecycle are imposed by a customised software engineering tool and some initial requirements are currently being handled. We have published the models and the C++ implementation. They are available by following the appropriate links on page http://louis.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~ph/cv.html. A longer progress report is also accessible from that page as are and will be various technical reports.
|
|
Key Findings |
|
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
|
|
Potential use in non-academic contexts |
|
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
|
|
Impacts |
|
| Description |
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk |
| Summary |
|
| Date Materialised |
|
|
|
|
Sectors submitted by the Researcher |
|
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
|
| Project URL: |
|
| Further Information: |
|
| Organisation Website: |
http://www.soton.ac.uk |