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We will demonstrate ArchStudio, an environment for software architecture modeling and meta-modeling. We will also showcase a set of innovative architecturecentric applications that use ArchStudio technologies as their basis.

Fred Brooks in his book "The Mythical Man Month" describes how the inherent properties of software (i.e. complexity, conformity, changeability, and invisibility) make its design an "essential" difficulty. Good design practices are fundamental requisites to address this difficulty. One such good practice is that a software designer should be aware of and address "design smells" that can manifest as a result of his design decisions. However, our study of the vast literature on object-oriented design smells reveals the lack of an effective organization of smells that could better guide a designer in understanding and addressing potential issues in his design. In order to address this gap, we have adopted a novel approach to classify and catalog a number of recurring structural design smells based on how they violate key object oriented (OO) design principles. To evaluate the usefulness of our design smell catalog, we first asked Siemens CT DC AA architects to use it to identify design smells in their projects, and later elicited feedback from them about their experience. The feedback received indicates that these architects found the catalog to be very useful. In this paper, we present our catalog, classification, and naming scheme for design smells and also highlight several interesting observations and insights that result from our work.

Decentralized applications are composed of distributed entities that directly interact with each other and make local autonomous decisions in the absence of a centralized coordinating authority. Such decentralized applications, where entities can join and leave the system at any time, are particularly susceptible to the attacks of malicious entities. Each entity therefore requires protective measures to safeguard itself against these entities. Trust management solutions serve to provide effective protective measures against such malicious attacks. Trust relationships help an entity model and evaluate its confidence in other entities towards securing itself. Trust management is, thus, both an essential and intrinsic ingredient of decentralized applications. However, research in trust management has not focused on how trust models can be composed into a decentralized architecture. The PACE architectural style, described previously [21], provides structured and detailed guidance on the assimilation of trust models into a decentralized entity's architecture. In this paper, we describe our experiments with incorporating four different reputation-based trust models into a decentralized application using the PACE architectural style. Our observations lead us to conclude that PACE not only provides an effective and easy way to integrate trust management into decentralized applications, but also facilitates reuse while supporting different types of trust models. Additionally, PACE serves as a suitable platform to aid the evaluation and comparison of trust models in a fixed setting towards providing a way to choose an appropriate model for the setting.

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