No abstract

Due to significant industrial demands toward software systems with increasing complexity and challenging quality requirements, software architecture design has become an important development activity and the research domain is rapidly evolving. In the last decades, software architecture optimization methods, which aim to automate the search for an optimal architecture design with respect to a (set of) quality attribute(s), have proliferated. However, the reported results are fragmented over different research communities, multiple system domains, and multiple quality attributes. To integrate the existing research results, we have performed a systematic literature review and analyzed the results of 188 research papers from the different research communities. Based on this survey, a taxonomy has been created which is used to classify the existing research. Abstract-Due to significant industrial demands toward software systems with increasing complexity and challenging quality requirements, software architecture design has become an important development activity and the research domain is rapidly evolving. In the last decades, software architecture optimization methods, which aim to automate the search for an optimal architecture design with respect to a (set of) quality attribute(s), have proliferated. However, the reported results are fragmented over different research communities, multiple system domains, and multiple quality attributes. To integrate the existing research results, we have performed a systematic literature review and analyzed the results of 188 research papers from the different research communities. Based on this survey, a taxonomy has been created which is used to classify the existing research. Furthermore, the systematic analysis of the research literature provided in this review aims to help the research community in consolidating the existing research efforts and deriving a research agenda for future developments.

Probabilistic verification techniques are a powerful means to ensure that a software-intensive system fulfills its quality requirements. To apply these techniques an accurate specification of the required properties in a probabilistic temporal logic is necessary. To help practitioners formulate these properties correctly, this paper presents a specification pattern system of common probabilistic properties called ProProST. This pattern system has been a developed based on a survey of 152 properties from academic examples and 48 properties of real-word quality requirements from avionic, defence, and automotive systems. Furthermore, a structured English grammar that can guide in the specification of probabilistic properties is given. Similar to previous specification patterns for traditional and real-time properties, the presented specification pattern system and the structured English grammar captures expert knowledge and helps practitioners to correctly apply formal verification techniques.

Formal methods offer an effective means to assert the correctness of software systems through mathematical reasoning. However, the need to formulate system properties in a purely mathematical fashion can create pragmatic barriers to the application of these techniques. For this reason, Dwyer et al. invented property specification patterns which is a system of recurring solutions to deal with the temporal intricacies that would make the construction of reactive systems very hard otherwise. Today, property specification patterns provide general rules that help practitioners to qualify order and occurrence, to quantify time bounds, and to express probabilities of events. Nevertheless, a comprehensive framework combining qualitative, real-time, and probabilistic property specification patterns has remained elusive. The benefits of such a framework are twofold. First, it would remove the distinction between qualitative and quantitative aspects of events; and second, it would provide a structure to systematically discover new property specification patterns. In this paper, we report on such a framework and present a unified catalogue that combines all known plus 40 newly identified or extended patterns. We also offer a natural language front-end to map patterns to a temporal logic of choice. To demonstrate the virtue of this new framework, we applied it to a variety of industrial requirements, and use PSPWizard, a tool specifically developed to work with our unified pattern catalogue, to automatically render concrete instances of property specification patterns to formulae of an underlying temporal logic of choice.