Project-Team-Triskell:Overall Objectives

Project-Team : triskell

Section: Overall Objectives

Keywords: Components, objects, contracts, design patterns, aspects, frameworks, UML, software product lines, MDA, test, validation, requirements engineering, scenarios.

Overall Objectives

Research fields

In its broad acceptation, Software Engineering consists in proposing practical solutions, founded on scientific knowledge, in order to produce and maintain software with constraints on costs, quality and deadlines. In this field, it is admitted that the complexity of a software increases exponentially with its size. However on the one hand, the size itself of the software is on average multiplied by ten every ten years, and on the other hand, the economic pressure resulted reducing the durations of development, and in increasing the rates of modifications made to the software.

To face these problems, today's mainstream approaches build on the concept of component based software. The assembly of these components makes it possible to build families of products (a.k.a. product lines) made of many common parts, while remaining opened to new evolutions. As component based systems grow more complex and mission-critical, there is an increased need to be able to represent and reason on such assemblies of components. This is usually done by building models representing various aspects of such a product line, such as for example the functional variations, the structural aspects (object paradigm), of the dynamic aspects (languages of scenarios), without neglecting of course non-functional aspects like quality of service (performance, reliability, etc.) described in the form of contracts, or the characteristics of deployment, which become even dominating in the field of reactive systems, which are often distributed and real-time. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is then a sub-domain of software engineering focusing on reinforcing design, validation and test methodologies based on multi-dimensional models.

Project-team Presentation Overview

The research domain of the Triskell project is the reliable and efficient design of software product lines by assembling software components described with the UML. Triskell is particularly interested in reactive and distributed systems with quality of service constraints.

Triskell's main objective is to develop model-based methods and tools to help the software designer to obtain a certain degree of confidence in the reliability of component assemblies that may include third-party components. This involves, in particular, investigating modeling languages allowing specification of both functional and non-functional aspects and which are to be deployed on distributed systems. It also involves building a continuum of tools which make use of these specification elements, from off-line verifiers, to test environments and on-line monitors supervising the behavior of the components in a distributed application. Since these modeling languages and associated tools appear quite open-ended and very domain specific, there is a growing need for ``tools for building tools for building software''. Triskell is hence developping KerMeta as an original meta-meta modeling approach allowing the user to fully define his modeling languages (including dynamic semantics) and associated environments (including interpreters, compilers, importers/exporters, etc.) within Eclipse.

To avoid the pitfall of developping ``tools for building tools for the sake of it'', the Triskell project also has the goal of explicitly connecting research results to industrial problems through technology transfer actions. This implies, in particular, taking into account the industrial standards of the field, namely the Eclipse Modeling Framework emf, the OMG's Meta-Object Facility mof and Unified Modeling Language uml, Corba Component Model (ccm), Com+/.Net and Enterprise JavaBeans.

Triskell is at the frontier of two fields of software: the field of specification and formal proof, and that of design which, though informal, is organized around best practices (e.g.; separation of concerns with aspects, design patterns, or the use of off-the-shelf components). We believe that the use of our techniques will make it possible to improve the transition between these two worlds, and will contribute to the fluidity of the processes of design, implementation and testing of software.