Abstract

Modern software engineering processes and lifecycle models ensure that developers can follow systematic approaches to engineer software for functional correctness. The next frontier is to be able to take a similar engineering approach towards the non-functional aspects such as performance, dependability, usability and capability to evolve.

A number of techniques and methods have been evolved over the past 50 years to analyze and test for each of these "ilities", however most software engineers are barely aware that they exist, so approaches to obtaining desired behavior are very ad hoc. One difficulty in taking a systematic engineering approach to determining the system profile is that there are tradeoffs among the attributes, so it is difficult to achieve all the desired engineering and business goals.

This talk will present a framework for taking such a systematic engineering approach. The framework includes an attribute classification, a process, and a basket of technologies for specification, design, analysis and testing. It will briefly indicate the results obtained when this framework was piloted at Motorola India.

Biography

Dr. Swaminathan "Swami" Natarajan's background is in software engineering and real-time systems. He received his PhD from University of Illinois, and taught at Texas A&M for 5 years. His background includes working with Xerox on a real-time operating system, and with Motorola India on software engineering technologies for telecom software. He is currently teaching in the Computer Science Dept at RIT.

This announcement is available for download in PDF format:  A Framework for Behavioral Engineering of Software Systems.