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Software ecosystems are considered the natural evolution of software product lines. A software ecosystem provides a (software) product within a particular business and organizational context that supports the exchange of activities and services within a domain. However, the increasing degree of autonomy demanded by software ecosystems is elevating the system response to end users, while the existing software ecosystem architectures are not well prepared to deal with the dynamicity of context changes and autonomous behavior needs. In order to provide a transition toward an increased level of autonomy, in this article, we introduce the notion of autonomous dynamic ecosystems as representative of those software ecosystems able to support dynamic, smart, and autonomous features demanded by modern software systems. In this work, we further investigate and provide evidence of four industrial examples that have fully embodied the principles of autonomous dynamic ecosystems, and we characterize the main features and technology requirements of this kind of new ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the state of the art and practice in system and software variability. It describes the trends driving the increasing importance of variability management, proposes a research agenda, and provides an overview of the articles in this special issue. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/80DAUGahNAY is an audio recording of Davide Falessi speaking with Guest Editors Rafael Capilla and Rich Hilliard about the state of the art and practice in system and software variability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Dynamic software product lines address many of the challenges of building highly configurable software and use runtime variability mechanisms to support automatic decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The earliest design decisions often have a significant impact on software quality and are the most costly to revoke. One of the challenges in architecture design is to reduce the frequency of retrofit problems in software designs; not being able to improve the quality of a system cost effectively, a problem which frequently occurs during late stages. Software architecture assessment is essential in the design of a high quality system. However, assessing the effect of individual design decisions with respect to quality is often complicated by the fact that it is hard to identify exactly how particular qualities and quality factors are improved or impaired by design decisions. In this paper we present a framework that formalizes some of the relationships between software architecture and software quality; it compiles existing design knowledge (quality improving patterns) in a format suitable for architecture assessment. This framework may prevent the retrofit problem and can assist in reasoning about intra- and inter- quality tradeoffs. We illustrate our framework by creating an instance for it for the qualities usability, security and safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the results of two case studies we conducted at Baan in the Netherlands. At the time of conducting the case studies, Baan was part of Invensys plc. (Baan is now owned by SSA Global Technologies.) In these case studies we investigated how companies identify design erosion and address this in their software, a practice we call ‘design preservation’. In this study, we selected two sub-systems in Baan products that had recently been subjected to extensive maintenance activities because they were eroded. In this paper, we analyze the problems these systems had, how Baan identified that these systems were problematic, and the remedies that were used to address the problems. In addition to confirming some of our earlier conclusions, we have been able to extract some common causes for design erosion problems as well as a number of recommended design preservation practices, which, at least for Baan, have proven to be very effective in strengthening design preservation. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several approaches to implement the concepts of software product families exist, but there is a tendency towards a revolutionary adoption. A revolutionary adoption of software product families is, however, a high-risk undertaking that may easily fail. Even if an iterative, evolutionary adoption is applied, there is a substantial risk that mismatches may develop in the organization due to a sub-optimal adoption approach. Mismatches between the optimal approach and the one currently used by an organization may lead to several problems, such as a high degree of erosion, mismatches between product needs and shared components, organizational ‘noise’ and inefficient knowledge management. This article (1) presents the problems resulting from the aforementioned mismatch, (2) presents the relevant decision dimensions that define the space of alternatives, (3) discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative and (4) presents a framework for selecting the best alternative for each decision dimension based on a three-stage adoption model. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Usability is increasingly recognized as an essential factor that determines the success of software systems. Practice shows that for current software systems, most usability issues are detected during testing and deployment. Fixing usability issues during this late stage of the development proves to be very costly. Some usability-improving modifications such as usability patterns may have architectural implications. We believe that the software architecture may restrict usability. The high costs associated with fixing usability issues during late-stage development prevent developers from making the necessary adjustments for meeting all the usability requirements. To improve upon this situation, we have investigated the relationship between usability and software architecture to gain a better understanding of how the architecture restricts the level of usability. Our article makes a number of contributions; a framework is presented that expresses the relationship between usability and software architecture. The framework consists of an integrated set of design solutions such as usability patterns and usability properties that have been identified in various cases in industry, modern day software and literature surveys. These solutions, in most cases, have a positive effect on usability but are difficult to retrofit into applications because they have architectural impact. Our framework may be used to guide and inform the architectural design phase. This may decrease development costs by reducing the amount of usability issues that need to be fixed during the later stages of development. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Object-oriented framework technology has become a common reuse technology in software development. As with all software, frameworks evolve over time. Once the framework has been deployed, new versions of a framework potentially cause a high maintenance cost for the products built with the framework. This fact, in combination with the high costs of developing and evolving a framework, make it important for organizations to achieve a controlled and predictable evolution of the framework's functionality and costs. We present a metrics-based framework stability assessment method, which has been applied on two industrial frameworks from the telecommunication and graphical user interface domains. First, we discuss the framework concept and the frameworks studied. Then, the stability assessment method is presented including the metrics used. The results from applying the method, as well as an analysis of each of the frameworks, are described. We continue with a set of observations regarding the method, including framework differences that seem to be invariant with respect to the method. A set of framework stability indicators based on the results is then presented. Finally, we assess the method against issues related to the management and evolution of frameworks, framework deployment, change impact analysis and benchmarking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses service-orientation for mobile computing devices. Increasingly such devices are becoming integral to firms' information technology (IT) infrastructures. Extending a firm's common user interface across these devices poses challenges, including accommodation of varying technical capabilities among mobile devices and their rapid technological obsolescence. Three possible approaches are a client-server method with native client, client-server with a Java client, and the use of browser-based clients on mobile devices. Each has its benefits and drawbacks.

Runtime variability offers a good choice for many systems that experience dynamic changes in their quality and context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]