Course Syllabus
COMP 250-04 - Spring 2005

(Last revised: 3/30/2005)

 

 

This syllabus is subject to change as the semester progresses.  Check back regularly.

 

 

WEEK

DATE

READING and STUDY QUESTION

(to be discussed during class)

 

1

Jan 25

1.     Course Intro

2.     Intro to CBSE

3.     Explore Annotated CBSE Bibliography and Choose Initial Readings

 

2

Feb 1

Reading 1: Judy: Intro to Crnkovic and Larsson, "Building Reliable Systems from Components" and Course Bibliography
    Study Questions: Identify one topic that has been a focus for CBSE researchers for more than 5 years


Reading 2: Anna: Lucredio, D.; do Prado, A.F.; Santana de Almeida, E. A survey on software components search and retrieval 30th Euromicro Conference, Rennes, France, August 31 - September 4, 2004 Page(s): 152- 159
     Study question: Discuss what minimal information must be included in component description so that reuser would be able to choose the component.

 

3

Feb 8

Reading 3: KevinG -- [Garlan95] "Arcitectual Mismatch. or Why it's hard to build systems out of existing parts"
     Study question: Choose the problem area that the (Aesop) development team encountered which you think is the toughest of the problems and give a quick reason why you think that.


 

4

Feb 15

Reading 4: Vladimir -- [Muller 97] Peter Muller and Arnd Poetzsch-Heffter " Developing Provably Correct Programs from Object-Oriented Components," in proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Component-Based Systems, Zurich, Switzerland, 1997. In conjunction with European Software Engineering Conference (ESEC) and ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), 1997"
     Study question: Do you believe the suggested specification and verification techniques could provide a feasible solution for the component-based software development industry and why.


 

5

Feb 22

Reading 5: Eddie --
[Szyperski02] Chapter 4, "What a Component is and is Not" and
[Szyperski02] Chapter 11, "What Others Say"
     Study question: Consider Szyperski's definition of a component on page 41 of the reading. Give some examples of software that might be thought of as components (e.g. a database, a math library, a web service, an EJB, a COM object, ...) and discuss whether Szyperski would consider these components. Based on your examples, argue whether Szyperski's definition is a good one.


 

6

Mar 1

Reading 6: KevinS -- [Muskens04] J. Muskens and M. Chaudron. Prediction of Run-Time Resource Consumption in Multi-task Component-Based Software Systems, in Component-Based Software Engineering 7th International Symposium, CBSE 2004, Edinburgh, UK, May 24-25, 2004, Proceedings, Springer Verlag, pp. 162-177.
     Study question: Do you feel any part of the authors' approach is a major over-simplification? In other words, are the authors making assumptions you feel can't be made? Think about their modeling techniques and the complexity of the devices they're dealing with, and discuss.


 

7

Mar 8

Reading 7: Andre -- [Buchi 97a] Martin Buchi and Wolfgang Weck, "A Plea for Grey-Box Components," in proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Component-Based Systems, Zurich, Switzerland, 1997. In conjunction with European Software Engineering Conference (ESEC) and ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), 1997.
     Study question: "What is the author's rationale for the failure of both black box and white box components? How do grey box specifications solve these problems, and what specification approach does the author suggest is best suited to defining grey box components?"


 

8

Mar 15

Reading 8: Matt -- Building Reliable Component-Based Software Systems, Chapter 19, "Industrial Experience with Dassault Systeme Component Model" by Jacky Estublier, Jean-Marie Favre and Remy Sanlaville
     Study question: Given that the authors have described their Object Modeler component model as a layer superimposed on the C++ language (p. 380), what do you think makes this an actual component model versus a structured object-oriented programming paradigm?


 

9

Mar 22

Spring Break

 

 10

Mar 29

Reading 9: KevinG -- [Bron 97] F. Bronsard, D. Bryan, D, W. Kozaczynski,E.S. Liongosari, J.Q. Ning, A. Olafsson and J.W. Wetterstrand. "Toward software plug-and-play", Softw. Eng. Notes (USA), Software Engineering Notes, 22(3), 1997, p. 19-29.
     Study question: Looking at the component replacement method for large systems which the authors discuss, what pitfalls could you envision with it. Can you think of any better ways of doing it?


 

11

Apr 5

Reading 10: Anna -- "A Business Prospective on Component Trading: Criteria, Immaturities and Critical Success Factors", 30th Euromicro Conference, Rennes, France, August 31 - September 4, 2004
     Study question: How do you think, how marketplace operators can convince component vendors to use certain specification framework?


Reading 11: Kagan -- [Sridhar03] Nigamanth Sridhar and Jason O. Hallstrom. "Generating Configurable Containers for Component-Based Software". In Proceedings of the 6th ICSE Workshop on Component-Based Software Engineering, May 2003.
     Study question: Do you think that the model of component containers based on Serf is a viable approach?


 

12

Apr 12

Reading 12: Andre -- [Cervantes03] Humberto Cervantes and Richard S. Hall. Automating Service Dependency Management in a Service-Oriented Component Model", in Proceedings of the 6th ICSE Workshop on Component-Based Software Engineering: Automated Reasoning and Prediction, Portland, Oregon, USA, May 3-4, 2003.
     Study question: In what ways is the service oriented programming approach similar to the component paradigm, and in what ways is it different?


 

13

Apr 19

Reading 13: Kevin S -- OSGi Alliance, "About the OSGi Service Platform."
     Study question: Is there any aspect of the OSGi specification in particular that you think will prevent it from gaining widespread acceptance? Is this problem specific to any type of industry/domain/device type?


 

14

Apr 26

Reading 14: Vladimir -- Y. Ledru, R. Sanlaville, J. Estublier. "Defining an Architecture Description Language for Dassault Systemes".
     Study question: Do you think ADL requirements mentioned in the paper are unique to Dassault Systemes project, or general enough so that Dassault ADL could potentially be used in other component-based systems development?


Reading 15: Kagan -- [Dijkman03] Remco M. Dijkman, Jaoa Paulo Andrade Almeida and Dick A.C Quartet. "Verifying the Correctness of Component-Based Applications that Support Business Processes".
     Study question: Elaborate on the weaknesses/strengths you see with the method to verify the conformance of a component assembly to business process. Do you think that it has a potential to help developing component-based applications that properly support the enterprise?


Course Summarization:


 

15

May 3

Reading Days