Standards Advisor: Activity Modeling and a ModelDriven Web Portal for a Software Engineering Process

1
Standards Advisor Activity Modeling and a
Model-Driven Web Portal for a Software
Engineering ProcessThesis Defense Presentation

• Hong Ma
• 2003-10-21

2
Abstract

• Aerospace systems demand high-quality software
  engineering processes to deliver high-quality
  products
• NASA Marshall Space Flight Centers Avionics
  Flight Software development group (group code
  ED14) seeks to improve their ability to deliver
  space systems that meet all their requirements,
  incorporate prior engineering experience, and are
  delivered on time and on budget.

• We developed a web-based process web portal that
• Provides guidance on software development
  techniques
• Provides associated standards and lessons learned
  at appropriate points in their development
  process
• Captures developers experience with the process
  and incorporates this new experience, as new
  lessons learned, into the web of NASA knowledge
  for subsequent use by other developers.

• The web portal is based on an underlying formal
  model of the software engineering process
  activities and artifacts
• A semantic basis for context-based search and for
  reasoning about the engineering process

• Result information web portal to search for and
  deliver process information to support flight
  software development

3
Approach
The Semantics of the shapes
Document
Multiple documents
Model
Website
Specification
Process
4
Topics

• Initial Web Portal and Assessment
• Initial Activity Model and Assessment
• Refined Activity Model
• Model-Driven Web Portal
• Initial Mapping to PSL
• Conclusion
• Possible Future Work

5
Structure of an Activity Description

• Regular pattern to the structure of an activity
  in ED 14 OWI
• Activity Name
• Activity Description
• Sub-Activities
• Products/Documents Used
• Products/Documents Developed
• Quality-Related Activities
• Quality Records

• So, an activity has
• a description
• sub-activities (described the same way)
• a list of products and documents used
• a list of products and documents developed

6
Initial ED14 Web Portal Prototype

• Focusing on ED14 OWI software design activities,
  we developed a web portal prototype to deliver
  information to activities
• The development of the initial ED14 Web Portal
  prototype used HTML and Javascript as
  hard-coded representations of the engineering
  activities and their use of standards documents
• The web portal prototype is available at
  http//cs.ua.edu/graduate/hma/Advisor/MainMenu.htm
  
• Snapshot from the web site follow

7
Initial Prototype Activity Navigation
8
Assessment for Initial Prototype

• Hard-coding the web pages would make it
  difficult to change the web portal as the OWI
  evolves
• There is no support for capturing comments,
  issues, and annotations for the information in
  the web portal, or for capturing lessons learned
• The implementation of the information is not in
  a form to support query and reasoning about that
  information.

9
UML Model of Activities and Documents(First
Iteration)
10
Activity Models Standards and Formality

• Issues
• Clarify role of document
• - Input, output, guidance (Standard, Guideline,
  Lesson, etc.)
• Document granularity some of the documents are
  large, and the portion that is used or produced
  by an activity is a small portion of the larger
  document.
• Project-specific enactment of generic process
• - Specific documents and activities for a
  specific project

11
Activity Model Standards

• The IDEF family of standards (focus on IDEFØ) are
  used to model manufacturing production systems
  and supporting information systems.
• The OMG Software Process Engineering Metamodel
  (SPEM) standard is used to model processes as a
  configurable assembly of activities and work
  products.
• Business process modeling standards, such as the
  Workflow Management Coalitions reference models
  and the associated OMG Workflow standard,focus on
  the information to support business activities
  (including engineering activities) and the flow
  of control between activities (workflow).
• These standards guide the modeling effort.

12
Activity Definition

• A process is a collection of activities executed
  and coordinated to achieve goals
• Activities produce a result (output) by acting
  upon one or more inputs
• Inputs and outputs are data and/or physical
  objects (materials, documents, etc.) involved in
  an activity
• Inputs serve different roles in the activities
• Some inputs are consumed or transformed to
  produce outputs
• Some inputs are guidance or control on how an
  activity is performed
• Associated with an input is a resource or
  mechanism that performs the activity

Guidance or Controls
Activity
Outputs
Inputs
Resources or Mechanisms
IDEFØ and SPEM
13
ED14 Preliminary Software Design Activity

• NASA-STD-2201-93
• NASA-STD-8719.13A
• NASA-GB-1740.13-96
• IEEE-1016
• IEEE-1016.1
• IEEE-12207.1

• Software Requirements Spec.
• Hardware Design Concepts
• Interface Control Doc.
• Trade Studies

Prelim. Software Design

• Preliminary Software Design Description
• Trade Studies

• Software Design Team
• Project Development Team

14
Subactivities of ED 14 Software Design Activity
15
Process Definition, Enactment, and Execution
Process Models
Process Design and Definition
Activity Instantiation and Control
Activity Enactment
Engineering Tools and Information
Activity Execution
16
Refined Activity Model

• Toward a formal ontology
• Packages in the ontology

• Based on
• IDEF
• OMG Software Process Engineering Metamodel
• OMG Workflow Management
• Other Software Engineering models

17
Basic Elements Package

• All model elements can have
• Guidance
• External description

PresentationElement is a human
Element
readable textual and graphical
notation for the corresponding model
elements.
subject
ModelElement
presentation
PresentationElement
name Name
0..
0..
0..
0..
1..
1..
annotatedElement
0..
0..
ExternalDescription
- name String
description
- location String
0..
guidance
0..
- content String
kind
guidance
GuidanceKind
Guidance
- medium String
0..
0..
1
1
- language String
GuidanceKind examples technique,
Specializes
directive, checklist, tool mentor, guideline,
"presentation" role of
template, estimate, etc.
location URI (file path, URL, etc.)
ModelElement
medium format (MIMEtype?)
language English, Japanese, etc.
18
EnactmentPackage

• Mechanisms to
• Start and complete a specific instance of an
  activity
• Record history about that activity instance.

19
Activities Package
Models the three key elements of activities
Person(Role) performing an Activity to produce a
Product
20
Model-Driven ED14 Web Portal

• Examples of instantiating the Activity Model for
  the ED14 OWI
• Activity aggregation hierarchy
• Activity descriptions text, web page, and flow
  diagram
• Input and output WorkProducts for Preliminary
  Software Design
• Guidance elements for the ED14 Preliminary
  Software Design activity
• Model-Driven ED14 web pages
• Drive the web portal using the model class
  instances.
• Write scripts to generate web pages with a
  data-driven, dynamic approach.
• The web pages are a visulization of the
  underlying model of roles, activities, and work
  products.
• The underlying semantic model drives the
  user-interactive web pages

21
Activities for ED14 OWI
22
Activity Descriptions
ExternalDescription
Plain text
name Text Description
location file//cs.ua.edu/.
description
content The Preliminary Software
Design phase will begin
format text/plain
language eng
subject
subject
ExternalDescription
name Web Page Description
Web page
subject
location http//cs.ua.edu/.
content lthtmlgt ltheadgt
ltmetagt lt/headgt

• Graphical elements for user interfaces or
  generated documents
• For search and reasoning, knowing the names,
  types, and relationships among the specific
  elements will be valuable

description
format text/html
language eng
Flow diagram
ExternalDescription
name Flow Diagram Web Page
location http//cs.ua.edu/.
content lthtmlgtprelimDesign.jpeg
description
format text/html
language eng
23
Input and Output WorkProducts to an Activity
24
Guidance Elements for an Activity
guidance
guidance
guidance
guidance
guidance
guidance
guidance
annotatedElement
25
Implement Activity Model with XML Data
lttreegt ltbranch iddesigngt ltbranchTextgtSoftware
Designlt/branchTextgt ltleafgt ltleafTextgtDescripti
onlt/leafTextgt ltlinkgt\design.htmllt/linkgt lt/leafgt
ltbranch iddesignsubgt ltbranchTextgtSub
Activitieslt/branchTextgt ltbranch
idPredesigngt ltbranchTextgtPreliminary
Designlt/branchTextgt ltleafgt ltleafTextgtDescriptio
nlt/leafTextgt ltlinkgt\Predesign.htmllt/linkgt lt/lea
fgt ltleafgt ltleafTextgtProduct/Document
Usedlt/leafTextgt ltlinkgt\inputProduct.htmlt/linkgt
lt/leafgt ltleafgt ltleafTextgtProduct/Document
Developedlt/leafTextgt ltlinkgt\outputProduct.htmlt/l
inkgt lt/leafgt lttreegt
The web portal is driven by an XML document
(tree.xml) that implements the activity model
instances.
tree.xml
26
Process Web Site Snapshot 2
Activity name Search

• XML document drives
• Navigation menu structure
• Page content

Process Info in Consistent Structure
27
Implement Activity Model with Relational Databases
The content of the navigation menu is stored in
the Microsoft Access database Activity/subactivi
ty instances are implemented as a
(Parent)folder/subfolder, and the Activity
ExternalDescriptions are implemented as
subfolders under a parent Description
subfolder of the parent activity folder. This
implements the three types of ExternalDescription
instances for an Activity as follows
28
Capture Lessons Learned to be XML Document
29
Capture Lessons Learned as an XML Document

• The structure of a lesson is defined by this XML
  schema
• A Java servlet saves the submitted lesson as an
  XML document conforming to the schema
• XML stylesheets define the web page layout of a
  lesson capture form and a lesson display page

lt?xml version"1.0" ?gt - ltxsdschema
xmlnsxsd"http//www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
elementFormDefault"qualified"gt - ltxsdelement
name"lesson"gt - ltxsdcomplexTypegt -
ltxsdsequencegt   ltxsdelement name"name"
type"xsdstring" /gt   ltxsdelement name"phone"
type"xsdstring" /gt   ltxsdelement name"email"
type"xsdstring" /gt   ltxsdelement name"org"
type"xsdstring" /gt   ltxsdelement
name"facility" type"xsdstring" /gt  
ltxsdelement name"project" type"xsdstring" /gt
  ltxsdelement name"activity" type"xsdstring"
/gt   ltxsdelement name"date" type"xsdstring"
/gt   ltxsdelement name"topic" type"xsdstring"
/gt   ltxsdelement name"keywords"
type"xsdstring" /gt   ltxsdelement
name"summary" type"xsdstring" /gt  
ltxsdelement name"description" type"xsdstring"
/gt   lt/xsdsequencegt   lt/xsdcomplexTypegt  
lt/xsdelementgt   lt/xsdschemagt
30
Capture New Lessons
Capture New Lessons for Later Use
31
Search Lessons Learned

• Besides the lesson instance in the form of XML,
  a separate XML document (lessonslist.xml) is
  maintained for search
• Contains the list of submitted lessons
• Each element in this list represents a submitted
  lesson
• Contains the name of the lesson, lesson number,
  its location and the activity it is associated
  with.

32
Activity Name Search
Search Lessons Learned
The results of searching by activity
name Preliminary Design
33
Improvement to Model-Driven Web Portal

• Dynamic model-driven web pages would make it
  easy to change the web portal content as the
  Software engineering process evolves
• web content also can be changed through user
  interaction
• We have implemented the support for capturing
  lessons learned in the web portal
• Users can search through the lessons learned in
  the web portal by activity name or other key
  words.

34
Initial Conceptual Mapping to PSL
35
Conclusion

• We have prototyped an interactive process web
  portal
• Software engineering process information for a
  flight software development organization
• Link to standards, lessons learned, etc.
• We have prototyped a formal underlying model
  (ontology) of the software engineering process
• Model-driven process web portal
• Enables semantic-based search, process
  automation, process assembly, etc.
• We performed an iterative procedure for modeling
• We demonstrated the use of XML, relational
  databases, Java, and web technologies to
  implement a model-driven web portal.

36
Possible Future Work

• Further implement the model-driven web site
• Implement project-specific tailoring
• Implement the project-specific enactment package
  in the activity model
• Incorporate PSL concepts
• Represent PSL concepts and relationships in UML
• Transform PSL axioms from KIF to UML OCL
• Incorporate PSL concepts to current model
• Move closer to a formal ontology enabling
  automated reasoning, including adoption of
  process modeling standards and semantic web
  standards
• Integrate with Standards Advisor MetaMatch tools
  to search for standards, lessons learned, and
  other information relevant to the process
  activities
• Integrate with the Standards Advisor XML
  repository for storage, retrieval, update and
  search of XML-based documents.

37
Acknowledgements

• Dr. Scott Hawker
• Dr. Randy Smith
• Dr. Gary Moynihan
• Christina Yau
• Swapna Gupta
• Vamshi Gillipalli
• Qin Dong
• Bindumadhuri Arla
• All other students in our group

38
Thank You!! Question/Comments ?