Renato F. Bulcão-Neto

Breno Cruvinel Marinho, Renato Bulcão-Neto, Valdemar Vicente Graciano Neto

Software architectures play a critical role in software quality assurance. However, small and medium companies (SMC) often suffer from the absence of professionals with skills and expertise in software architecture. That situation potentially affects the final quality of the software products and pressures projects budget with extra costs with consulting. This paper presents a recommender system of architectural design decisions called Archify. The goal is to support SMC companies in part of the effort of architecturally designing their products. Archify implements a wizard-styled interface that guides the developer or project manager through a set of specific questions. While the user answers these questions, Archify buffers a set of corresponding architectural decision recommendations. As the final result, the system recommends a set of architectural decisions matching the project's needs according to the requirements (as provided by the user) of the software under development. Nineteen professionals from academia and industry evaluated Archify through two surveys. The findings reveal that 94.7% of the participants approved Archify as a supporting tool. Respondents also highlighted the lack of tools supporting software architecture design, remarking the relevance of the proposed system.

Taciana Novo Kudo, Renato F. Bulcão-Neto, Auri Marcelo Rizzo Vincenzi

Models are the primary artifacts of model-driven software engineering (MDSD) [1], and a terminal model is a representation that conforms to a given software metamodel [2, 3]. As the quality of a software metamodel directly impacts the quality of terminal models, software metamodel quality is an essential aspect of MDSD. However, the literature reports a few proposals for metamodel quality evaluation, but most lack a general solution for the quality issue. Some efforts focus on quality measures [4], a quality evaluation model [5], or a quality evaluation model with structural measures borrowed from OO design [6, 7, 8]. Thus, we support there is a need for a more thorough solution for metamodel quality evaluation, with potential benefits to MDSD in general. This document describes a metamodel quality evaluation framework called MQuaRE (Metamodel Quality Requirements and Evaluation). MQuaRE is an integrated framework composed of metamodel quality requirements, a metamodel quality model, metamodel quality measures, and an evaluation process, with a great contribution of the ISO/IEC 25000 series [9] for software product quality evaluation.