After many years in the making, the Palladio book was finally published by MIT Press. I wrote two chapters in the book. The text details the key concepts of Palladio’s domain-specific modeling language for software architecture quality and presents the corresponding development stage. It describes how quality information can be used to calibrate architecture models from which detailed simulation models are automatically derived for quality predictions. It will also be an essential resource for software architects and software engineers and for practitioners who want to apply Palladio in industrial settings. You can also order from Amazon.

We got a paper accepted at the Springer Journal on Empirical Software Engineering: “Corporate organizations sometimes offer similar software products in certain domains due to former company mergers or due to the complexity of the organization. The functional overlap of such products is an opportunity for future systematic reuse to reduce software development and maintenance costs. We report on our experiences and lessons learned from conducting the domain analysis in four application cases with large-scale software products. We learned that the outcome of a domain analysis was often a smaller integration scenario instead of an SPL and that business case calculations were less relevant for the stakeholders and managers from the business units.”

Happy to report that our paper entitled “Customizing Domain Analysis for assessing the Reuse Potential of Industrial Software Systems” received the Best Paper Award of the Industry Track of SPLC 2014, the 18th International Software Product Line Conference in Florence, Italy. We have applied domain analysis on a number of device engineering tools and enterprise information systems from ABB and have reported several lessons learned.

We got a paper accepted at IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering: “During the last decade, researchers have proposed a number of model transformations enabling performance predictions. This paper provides an in-depth comparison and quantitative evaluation of representative model transformations to, e.g., Queueing Petri Nets and Layered Queueing Networks. The semantic gaps between typical source model  abstractions and the different analysis techniques are revealed. The accuracy and efficiency of each transformation are evaluated by considering four case studies representing systems of different size and complexity. The presented results and insights gained from the evaluation help software architects and performance engineers to select the appropriate transformation for a given context.”

A paper on our documentation framework for architecture decisions has been recognized as one of WICSA 2014‘s best papers in Sydney. The implementation of the framework as an add-in to Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect was done in a collaboration of the University of Groningen and ABB.