Section: Other Grants and Activities

International working groups

ERCIM Working Group on Software Evolution

Numerous scientific studies of large-scale software systems have shown that the bulk of the total software-development cost is devoted to software maintenance. This is mainly due to the fact that software systems need to evolve continually to cope with ever-changing software requirements. Today, this is more than ever the case. Nevertheless, existing tools that try to provide support for evolution have many limitations. They are (programming) language dependent, not scalable, difficult to integrate with other tools, and they lack formal foundations.

The main goal of the proposed WG (http://w3.umh.ac.be/evol/ ) is to identify a set of formally-founded techniques and associated tools to support software developers with the common problems they encounter when evolving large and complex software systems. With this initiative, we plan to become a Virtual European Research and Training Centre on Software Evolution.

Triskell contributes to this working group on the following points:

• re-engineering and reverse engineering

• model-driven software engineering and model transformation

• impact analysis, effort estimation, cost prediction, evolution metrics

• traceability analysis and change propagation

• family and product-line engineering

Standardization in Eclipse projects

In 2009, Triskell project participates to discussion around the creation of the MXF eclipse project (http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/mxf/ ). This new Eclipse Modeling Framework Technology (EMFT) sub project proposes ideas similar to those included in Kermeta and can be a good candidate for transferring some Kermeta concepts to an Eclipse project.

Standardization at OMG

In 2009, Triskell project participates to normalization actions at omg (http://www.omg.org/ ). It was involved in the MARTE FTF (Finalization Task Force)and was interrested in the Analysis and Design group which promotes standard modelling techniques including UML and MOF.

Collaboration with foreign research groups

Colorado State University (CSU), USA. In January 2006 we started a “Equipe associée” (a three year program for an associated team) called MATT between CSU and Triskell. In 2009 the Equipe associée has been renewed under the name MoCAA which stands for Model Composition Aspects and Analysis (see http://www.irisa.fr/triskell/matt for details). In this context, Robert France and Benoit Baudry gave lectures at the International School on Model-Driven Design for Distributed, Real time, Embedded Systems MDD4DRES. Romain Delamare, Benoit Baudry, Freddy Munoz and Brice Morin visited CSU in 2009. Minhazur Rahman and David Janovy , currently PhD students in CSU, visited Triskell in summer 2009 as part of the REUSSI program which supports travel for US groups involved in Equipe associées. We have a paper in CACM [14] and one at ICST'09 [27] (selected as one of the best papers).

University of Luxemburg. Since 2009 Triskell is involved in a collaborative project called SPLIT: Combine Software Product Line and Aspect-Oriented Software Development (with Nicolas Guelfi and Jacques Klein), that is funded by both the PICS program of CNRS and the FNR of Luxemburg. This project is providing the backgroud and the funding for Paul Istoan's PhD thesis, done in co-tutelle between University of Rennes and University of Luxemburg. As an initial research result, we showed how aspects can be unwoven, based on a precise traceability metamodel dedicated to aspect model weaving [31] .

Modelling Simulation and Design Lab, Mc Gill University, Montreal Sagar Sen has started a PhD as a co-direction between IRISA and Mc Gill. This PhD is about automatic model synthesis through constraint solving in the context of model transformation testing and automatic exploration of large design spaces.

Since February 2007 Triskell participates to a “FACEPE” project (a two year program with the University of Pernambouco, Brazil) called SIntArch (Safe Introduction of Interaction patterns in Component Based Software Architectures) between Pr Augusto Cesar Alvez Sampaio and the Triskell group on Component Based Software Architecture design using : Model-driven engineering and Aspects Oriented Modeling. In 2009, we have consolidated the model-snippet MDK used in Kermeta and based our models@runtime platform on top of this MDK.

Budapest University of Technology and Economics Since 2008, Benoit Baudry is associate researcher in the IP project SENSORIA (Software Engineering for Service Oriented Overlay Computers). In this context, we collaborate with Daniel Varro from Budapest University of Technology and Economics on testing techniques for model transformations.