M.Sc. Pietu Pohjalainen will defend his doctoral thesis Self-Organizing Software Architectures  on Friday 13th of December 2013 at 12 o'clock in the University of Helsinki Main Building, Unioninkatu 34, Auditorium XV  (old part), 3rd floor.  His opponent is Professor Kai Koskimies (Tampere University of Technology) and custos Professor Jukka Paakki (University of Helsinki). The defense will be held in Finnish.

Self-Organizing Software Architectures

Looking at engineering productivity is a source for improving the state of software engineering. We present two approaches to improve productivity: bottom-up modeling and self-configuring software components. Productivity, as measured in the ability to produce correctly working software features using limited resources is improved by performing less wasteful activities and by concentrating on the required activities to build sustainable software development organizations.

Bottom-up modeling is a way to combine improved productivity with agile software engineering. Instead of focusing on tools and up-front planning, the models used emerge, as the requirements to the product are unveiled during a project. The idea is to build the modeling formalisms strong enough to be employed in code generation and as runtime models. This brings the benefits of model-driven engineering to agile projects, where the benefits have been rare.

Self-configuring components are a development of bottom-up modeling. The notion of a source model is extended to incorporate the software entities themselves. Using computational reflection and introspection, dependent components of the software can be automatically updated to reflect changes in the dependence. This improves maintainability, thus making software changes faster.

The thesis contains a number of case studies explaining the ways of applying the presented techniques. In addition to constructing the case studies, an empirical validation with test subjects is presented to show the usefulness of the techniques.

Availability of the dissertation

An electronic version of the doctoral dissertation is available on the e-thesis site of the University of Helsinki at http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-10-9425-5.

Printed copies are available on request from Pietu Pohjalainen: pietu.pohjalainen@cs.helsinki.fi.