Public defense: Robbert Jongeling’s doctoral thesis

The public defense of Robbert Jongeling’s doctoral thesis in Computer Science will take place at Mälardalen University, room Gamma (Västerås Campus) at 13:30 on 2^nd December 2022, title:

Lightweight consistency checking for advancing continuous model-based development in industry

The faculty examiner is Professor Antonio Vallecillo, UMA, Spain.

The examining committee consists of Professor Ileana Ober, IRIT/University of Toulouse, France; Dr Henrik Lönn, Volvo, Sweden and Professor Manuel Wimmer, JKU, Austria.

Reserve is Professor Alessandro Papadopoulos, MDU, Sweden.

Summary

The engineering of modern software‐intensive systems requires collaboration between many people in many different disciplines. To effectively design and communicate, these engineers create a large number of development artefacts throughout the system development, such as models, informal diagrams, and textual
descriptions. These artefacts describe the intended structure and behaviour of systems. Contradictions between the artefacts or misunderstandings based on the understandings of engineers and what is captured in the artefacts can lead to unmet requirements, bugs, overruns of development budget and time, or even system
failures.

Inconsistencies between these development artefacts occur continuously throughout the system’s development and maintenance, simply due to the incremental nature of the development of artefacts. To prevent the inconsistencies causing the earlier mentioned bad outcomes, it is often desirable to check to what extent various development artefacts are consistent with each other, that is, if they contain contradicting information about the same aspects of the system.

The potential informality and incompleteness of models and other development artefacts, in combination with a strife for shorter development iterations, presents challenges to consistency checking approaches. In this thesis, we consider model‐based development settings in which short development cycles are aspired. We show a tight coupling between introducing short development cycles and the need for increased support for consistency checking across models and other artefacts. In particular, we identify the need for lightweight consistency
checking approaches, which we break down into four required aspects.

This thesis supplements the literature on consistency checking by providing industrial perspectives in the following two ways. First, we survey industrial settings and present the various needs for consistency checking based on a broad range of settings and scenarios. Moreover, we use these industrial settings to define in what aspects a consistency checking approach should be lightweight to enable its industrial adoption. Second, we include detailed experiences of iintroducing lightweight consistency checks in industrial settings. In summary, this thesis presents contributions to consistency management in complex industrial settings to facilitate the adoption of continuous model-based development.

Read more at the MDU web site:
https://www.mdu.se/en/malardalen-university/calendar/2022/the-public-defense-of-robbert-jongelings-doctoral-thesis-in-computer-science

Video: “From informal architecture diagrams to flexible blended models” by Robbert Jongeling

This video is a short summary of the paper “From informal architecture diagrams to flexible blended models” by Robbert Jongeling from Mälardalen University. Authors are Robbert Jongeling, Federico Ciccozzi, Antonio Cicchetti, and Jan Carlson. The paper was published at the 16th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA 2022) and awarded the Best paper award.

View the video here: https://youtu.be/Pia7zZFp9RE