Maintaining consistency in distributed software engineering environments

Walpole, Jonathan; Blair, Gordon S.; Malik, J.; Nicol, John R.

doi:10.1109/dcs.1988.12544

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Consistency of development knowledge [12] Concurrency control of synchronized activities [9] STARY This paper bridges the gap between conceptual approaches for communication support based on knowledge sharing, such as [13], and pragmatical ones, such as [14]. The paper proceeds as follows: First, large software system development is conceptualized at the design level.…”

Section: Management Of Design Knowledge Comprisingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling collaboration for large-scale software system integration by formal communication models

Stary

1992

Journal of Systems Integration

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Abstract. In the development of large software systems, several synchronization points have to be passed successfully in order to achieve high-end user acceptance of the final system. In particular, the integration of conceptual design entities has turned out to be the most crucial step in software development. At this point, an explicit representation of the organizational knowledge, namely how the integration can be performed, is required. The overall organization of the integration of design entities is a set of knowledge, action (including communication), and time. The knowledge part comprises the integration procedure itself as well as the design entities. Actions are performed by the members of the project team (project leaders, developers). Each integration step has to be performed synchronized, so that each member of the development team knows concurrently the status of the integration procedure. All other individual design activities are usually performed asynchronously. According to the need for an explicit representation of the organizational knowledge for large software system design, this paper attempts to understand the nature of large software system integration and formally describes the coordination of a dispersed set of software developers. The organizational knowledge is represented by processes that occur in an asynchronous development environment. The design knowledge is assigned to logical formulas that are processed as exchanged messages among developers. Hence, the activities for integraiton are based on the transmission of messages. Time-critical events, such as the integration of a particular design entity into the final conceptual design of the software system, have to become common knowledge concurrently for all developers. This organizational constraint has been formalized in the communication model. Not only can the proposed flamework be adapted to organizational changes in a flexible way, it can also be applied to any specific development strategy for the integration of conceptual design entities. Thus, such kind of formal communication models may provide a sound basis for cooperative CASE (computer-aided software engineering) tools.

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Section: Management Of Design Knowledge Comprisingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling collaboration for large-scale software system integration by formal communication models

Stary

1992

Journal of Systems Integration

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“…Data sharing and version control are handled at server. This is good for the sake of data consistency [17], however, at the expense of possible bottleneck at server.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 97%

An agent-assisted document storage for software process environments

Chen

Lin

Proceedings First IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Informatics

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Traditional software process environment stores documents using either centralized or distributed approach. With the assistance of web agent, this paper presents a new document storage structure that combines the two approaches. In this new approach, all the documents are stored centrally in web server. When a developer modifies a document (data), agent detects those developers who currently need to refer to that document, and sends the modified data to them in a distributed manner. The benefits of this approach are: 1) All the clients (developers) are notified as soon as a piece of data is modified, 2) The amount of communication is reduced, as clients do not need to check periodically whether or not their currently referred data is modified, 3) The load of server is reduced, as the load of notifying other clients about modification is switched from server to an agent communication media called white board.

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“…This provides a natural basis on which to build a version management system (see section 5 ) . However, more importantly, immutability helps preserve data consistency by solving two separate, but related, sub-problems of consistency: synchronisation and recovery [21].…”

Section: Fig I : An Atomic Transfornuztion Of An Objectmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…not just groups of replicated data items). This form of consistency is usually maintained by an atomic transactions mechanism [29].…”

Section: Data M O D Lmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Cosmos transaction mechanism [29] is tightly integrated with the history and configuration mechanisms to control the way in which new configurations are produced. Once an object has been named, as described above, the other objects with which it is consistent are contained in the same consistent configuration (and named by the same configuration object).…”

Section: Av- mentioning

confidence: 99%

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A model to support consistency and availability in distributed system architectures

Nicol

Blair

Walpole

[1988] Proceedings. Workshop on the Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems in the 1990s

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In the early days of distributed computing, it seemed certain that local area networks would have a radical effect on system design. It was envisaged that distributed operating systems would be developed which would exhibit such properties as resource sharing, high availability and extensibility.However, major technical difficulties have been encountered. As a result, compromises have had to be made and most proposals provide little more than a level of resource sharing.In this paper, it is argued that this is a consequence of basing designs on an inadequate model. An altemative model, based on the concepts of functional systems and decentralised control, is presented. It is then shown, through a discussion of the model's application to a distributed operating system, how this model simplifies many of the problems encountered in distributed computing. -In the early days of distributed computing, it seemed certain that local area network technology would have a radical effect on systems design. This belief stemmed from the particularly appealing properties of local area networks: i) support for resource sharing --local area networks provide the means of sharing potentially expensive resources such as disks and printers between the various components in a system, ii) extensibility --in a local area network, it is straightforward to add new components to the system, iii) redundancy --in a typical local area network configuration, a high proportion of facilities, e.g. processing power, disks and printers, can be provided by more than one node, and iv) high degree of physical coupling --physical coupling is a property of the interconnection medium. A high degree of physical coupling implies a high data rate, allowing the rapid exchange of large volumes of data between components. ~0228-7/88/0000/0418$01.00 0 1988 IEEE 418It is natural to assume that systems can be built to exploit fully the properties of local area networks. Many attempts have been made to develop distributed operating systems which mirror the benefits of local area networks. In particular, research in distributed operating systems has been directed towards achieving the follow properties:i) resource sharing --the distributed operating system should provide the mechanisms for sharing resources between the various nodes in the system. In more advanced proposals, the location of resources may be transparent to the user; the user is provided with a unified means of accessing resources whether they are local or remote, ii) extensibility --which is defined as the degree to which a system is able to adapt to changing requirements (by allowing the addition of new nodes and hence new services). A high degree of extensibility is clearly desirable in any computer system, and iii) availability --which is defined as the degree to which a system can tolerate the loss of an element or the failure of a component while continuing to provide a (close to) normal service.The latter two properties are the most interesting to the authors. Together, they demand that a dist...

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Maintaining consistency in distributed software engineering environments

Cited by 9 publications

References 19 publications

Modeling collaboration for large-scale software system integration by formal communication models

Modeling collaboration for large-scale software system integration by formal communication models

An agent-assisted document storage for software process environments

A model to support consistency and availability in distributed system architectures

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