Stylebase for Eclipse: An open source tool to support the modeling of quality-driven software architecture

Katja Henttonen

    Research output: Book/ReportReport

    Abstract

    Open source software has gained a lot of well-deserved attention during the last few years. Eclipse is one of the most successful open source communities providing an open development environment and an application lifecycle platform. Eclipse is a vendor-neutral platform for integrating tools and services. My thesis work is a case study on contributing to Eclipse. The contribution is a software architecture tool called "Stylebase for Eclipse" which is implemented as an extension a.k.a. plug-in to Eclipse. Quality-driven architecture design is an approach to software architecture design which emphasizes the importance of qualities. Qualities are non-functional characteristics of a software system such as security or maintainability. Stylebase is a knowledge base of software patterns and architectural styles. It stores information that helps a software architect in selecting patterns that best support the desired quality goals. Stylebase for Eclipse is a tool for browsing and maintaining the stylebase. The purpose of the tool is to improve the quality of design and increase information sharing and re-use of architectural models in development teams. In the case study, the plug-in is first developed and, after that, a new open source community is formed around the plug-in project. In order to comply with the open source development model, modularity is treated as the most important non-functional requirement. In community building phase, efforts are concentrated on marketing the new open source project and creating a good technical infrastructure for it. The most interesting experiences gained during the study are related to various aspects of open source development. They are - among others - re-using code from other projects, licensing issues, tools to facilitate distributed development, and attracting new users and developers.
    Original languageEnglish
    Place of PublicationEspoo
    PublisherVTT Technical Research Centre of Finland
    Number of pages76
    ISBN (Electronic)978-951-38-6925-0
    Publication statusPublished - 2007
    MoE publication typeNot Eligible

    Publication series

    SeriesVTT Tiedotteita - Meddelanden - Research Notes
    Number2387
    ISSN1235-0605

    Keywords

    • Eclipse
    • open source
    • modeling
    • software architecture
    • quality-driven

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