Abstract. Context-awareness is becoming a first class attribute of software systems. In fact, applications for mobile devices need to be aware of their context in order to adapt their structure and behavior and offer the best quality of service even in case the (software and hardware) resources are limited. Although performance is a key non-functional property for such applications, existing approaches for performance modeling and analysis fail to capture the characteristics related to the context, thus resulting not suited for this domain.In this paper we introduce a framework for modeling and analyzing the performance of context-aware mobile software systems. The framework allows to model: the software architecture, the context management, the adaptable behaviors and the performance parameters. Such models can then be transformed into performance models for analysis purposes. We tailor an integrated environment for modeling these elements in UML, and we show how to use it for performance analysis purposes. The modeling environment description and the performance analysis are driven by an example in the eHealth domain.

Managing Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) in software projects is challenging, and projects that adopt Model-Driven Development (MDD) are no exception. Although several methods and techniques have been proposed to face this challenge, there is still little evidence on how NFRs are handled in MDD by practitioners. Knowing more about the state of the practice may help researchers to steer their research and practitioners to improve their daily work. Objective: In this paper, we present our findings from an interview-based survey conducted with practitioners working in 18 different companies from 6 European countries. From a practitioner's point of view, the paper shows what barriers and benefits the management of NFRs as part of the MDD process can bring to companies, how NFRs are supported by MDD approaches, and which strategies are followed when (some) types of NFRs are not supported by MDD approaches. Results: Our study shows that practitioners perceive MDD adoption as a complex process with little to no tool support for NFRs, reporting productivity and maintainability as the types of NFRs expected to be supported when MDD is adopted. But in general, companies adapt MDD to deal with NFRs. When NFRs are not supported, the generated code is sometimes changed manually, thus compromising the maintainability of the software developed. However, the interviewed practitioners claim that the benefits of using MDD outweight the extra effort required by these manual adaptations. Conclusion: Overall, the results indicate that it is important for practitioners to handle NFRs in MDD, but further research is necessary in order to lower the barrier for supporting a broad spectrum of NFRs with MDD. Still, much conceptual and tool implementation work seems to be necessary to lower the barrier of integrating the broad spectrum of NFRs in practice.

AutomationML (AML) is an emerging standard in the automation domain to represent and exchange artifacts between heterogeneous engineering tools used in different disciplines, such as mechanical and electrical engineering. The Systems Modeling Language (SysML) is a modeling standard influenced by software modeling languages, such as UML, typically adopted in the early phases of engineering processes. This paper investigates commonalities and differences of the structural modeling parts of AML (CAEX) and SysML (block diagrams) in support of establishing tool-independent interoperability. This support for cross-disciplinary modeling is facilitated by a bridge between AML and SysML built on model-driven interoperability techniques. We demonstrate the interoperability between AML and SysML with a case study concerning a lab-sized production system.

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For developing software systems it is crucial to consider nonfunctional properties already in an early development stage to guarantee that the system will satisfy its non-functional requirements. Following the model-based engineering paradigm facilitates an early analysis of non-functional properties of the system being developed based on the elaborated design models. Although UML is widely used in modelbased engineering, it is not suitable for model-based analysis directly due to its lack of formal semantics. Thus, current model-based analysis approaches transform UML models into formal languages dedicated for analyses purpose, which may introduce accidental complexity of implementing the required model transformations.The recently introduced fUML standard provides a formal semantics of a subset of UML enabling the execution of UML models. In this paper, we show how fUML can be utilized for analyzing UML models directly without having to transform them. We present a reusable framework for performing model-based analyses leveraging execution traces of UML models and integrating UML profiles heretofore unsupported by fUML. A case study in the performance analysis domain is used to illustrate the benefits of our framework.