Managing Standard Components in Large Software Systems

1
Managing Standard Components in Large Software
Systems

• Magnus Larsson Ivica Crnkovic

2
Agenda

• ABB
• STINA
• Background
• CBSE
• Problems
• Configuration Management

3
ABB Worldwide

• 30-billion company
• gt 200,000 employees
• 1000 companies
• 100 countries
• Serving customers with products for
• electrical power generation, transmission and
  distribution
• oil, gas and petrochemicals
• industrial automation

4
ABB Automation Products

• 340-million company
• gt 2000 employees
• Development centers in
• Sweden, USA and Germany
• Real-time control systems for industrial
  automation

5
Characteristics of Products

• Reliability
• High quality
• Compatibility

6
STINA

• Common research project
• Standard Technologies in Industrial Applications
• Cooperation project between ABB and Mälardalen
  University

7
The Goals of STINA

• To increase the knowledge about Component Based
  Software Engineering (CBSE)
• Point out to the possibilities of improvements of
  component management
• Increase co-operation between the industry and
  the academics

8
STINA Research Subjects

• Technologies for using and developing components
• On-line update
• Component Configuration Management
• Components in real-time applications and systems
• Quality assurance and maintainability aspects
• Reusability of components in both real-time and
  non real-time systems

9
Background

• The lifecycle is becoming increasingly shorter
• Customer requires use of standard components
• Building systems from components instead of
  writing all from scratch to decrease time to
  market

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Historical Events at ABB

• Complete monolithic system
• Make everything ourselves.
• In-house software and third party hardware
• Component based and COTS
• Write own code as little as possible.

Time
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Component Based Software Engineering

• Components are put together into products
• Implications
• Improve time to market
• Less maintenance of in-house developed software

12
Important Questions
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Customer Requirements

• The customer requires products which are
• stable, reliable and with good quality
• easily upgraded without impacts on existing
  process
• integrated with other standard technologies

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Problems

• The customer is not aware of what the
  consequences with the use of standard components
  are
• Can be dangerous in distributed real-time and
  safety-critical systems

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A Typical Problem - System Consistency

• Installing a new version might corrupt the system

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How to Deal with the Problems

• Increase the understanding and knowledge of the
  customer
• Introduce technologies and methods to
• utilize positive characteristics
• limit the undesirable effect
• Use configuration management

17
Configuration Management

• Identify and manage different component versions
  in a multi-user environment
• Configure the components and build them
• Keep control of changes
• Identify critical and non-critical parts of the
  system

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CM Activities in Different Phases
Components
Source code
Dynamic libraries
Products
Foo.dll
Foobar
product
Bar.dll
UI
Version management
Build and configuration
Packaging
Configuration
Development
Foobar
Foo.dll
product
Bar.dll
UI
Run-time
Product-2
common.dll
Comp2
On-line Configuration
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Configuration Management for CBSE

• Today there are many tools to manage source code
• We lack tools and methods to manage components
• Source code management is becoming less critical
• The integration part is becoming more important
• An efficient On-line identification and
  configuration is required

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Component Identification

• Which components are installed in the systems?
• What are the relations between the installed
  components?
• Which components will be changed by updating a
  product or a component?
• Which parts of the system will be affected by
  updating a component?

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Compatibility

• Input and output
• E.g. different word processors producing the same
  doc format
• Interface
• Different implementation but the same interface
• Behaviour
• Internal characteristics of the component
• E.g. Performance, requirements or stability

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Conclusion

• Configuration management becomes a more
  significant part of CBSE
• Component identification, component version,
  change and configuration management becomes
  becomes very important
• Methods and tools have to be developed for CBSE