Todd Wareham
Department of Computer Science
Memorial University of Newfoundland

On the Computational Complexity of Designing and Reconfiguring Component-based Software Systems

Department of Computer Science
Tuesday, March 14, 2017, 12:00 p.m., Room EN-2022

Abstract

Though Component-Based Development (CBD) is a popular approach to mitigating the costs of creating software systems, it is not clear either to what extent the core component selection and adaptation activities of CBD can be implemented to operate without human intervention in a reliable and efficient manner or to what extent CBD is preferable to other approaches to software engineering. In this talk, we use computational and parameterized complexity analysis to compare the computational characteristics of software system design and reconfiguration by de novo design, component selection, and component selection with adaptation. Our results show that none of these approaches can be implemented to operate both efficiently and reliably either in general or relative to a surprisingly large number of restrictions on software system, component, and component library structure. We also give the first restrictions under which all of these approaches can be implemented to operate both efficiently and reliably.

(Work done in collaboration with Marieke Sweers (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands))