Title: Automated generation of pervasive systems architectures: a detailed empirical evaluation

Authors: Mostafa A. Hamza; Sherif G. Aly; Maged Elaasar

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The American University in Cairo, Egypt ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The American University in Cairo, Egypt ' Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Abstract: The importance of having mature software development methodologies and tools for the increasingly popular pervasive systems cannot be understated. Focusing on system architectures, we previously conducted a thorough review of over 50 state of the art architectures related to pervasive systems. From the review, we elicited a set of major features that should be supported in pervasive systems, along with best practice architectures for designing such features. We then detailed a methodology, through which designers of new pervasive systems can select a set of desired features and generate a baseline architecture for their system. In this article, we evaluate our methodology with an empirical study that compares generated architectures with ones designed by subject matter experts with sufficient experience in the domain. We used different evaluation suites and measurement techniques in our comparisons. Results show that our automatically generated architectures are very comparable with, and in many cases of higher quality than, the architectures designed by subject matter experts.

Keywords: pervasive systems; component-based architectures; evaluation metrics; software product lines; reference architecture; empirical study; automated generation; software development.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSETA.2015.067531

International Journal of Software Engineering, Technology and Applications, 2015 Vol.1 No.1, pp.64 - 89

Received: 05 Dec 2013
Accepted: 15 Apr 2014
Published online: 18 Mar 2015 *