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Modeling and Analyzing the Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework Project

(Eclipse/ALF)

Agent and goal modeling and analysis of an Open Source Development Platform design effort

Daniel Gross, Eric YuFaculty of Information Studies

University of Toronto{gross,yu}@fis.utoronto.ca

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Designer Autonomous design effort / decision area

Reduce adoption barrier, ease of

multiple authentications

Ease of use, easy to administer, expressive

execution language

Reduce complexity of design,

Secure user credentials handling,

Tailorable lower-level infrastructure

Minimize changes required

ALF Architecture Landscape

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Research Method• Empirical study of how designers actually work

open source design discussion– On the mailing list– As published online in requirements and design documentation– From weekly conference calls – External reference literature

• Representing their design reasoning in strategic design models

• Evaluating benefits of design representation

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How is Authentication designed

• Authentication for tools accessed during “service flow”– ALF provides Single Sign On solution– ALF requires external identity manager such as

LDAP– ALF works without identity manager

• Passes along user id / passwords• Adds optional user mapping “light” SPI,

implementable by ALF site administrators.

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Actor-oriented analysis: identify relevant stakeholders and respective goals

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Actor-oriented analysis

What if ALF designers decide not to deal with authentication within ALF

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Actor-oriented analysis

What if ALF designers decide to take on all Authentication implementing/adopting a

single sign on facility

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Actor-oriented analysis

What if ALF designers decide to take on some of the Authentication functionality

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Premises of modeling approach

How to deal with distributed decision situations:

• Multiple designers, who are involved in, and/or are affected by, design decision making

• Designers operate out of separate jurisdictions, without the existence of one central authority

• Designers relate through a (social) network of (more or less) common interests

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Distributed decision situations(vs. distributed systems)

• Multiple design decision makers

• Decision makers responsible for different parts/aspects of the system

• Designers have limited or no control over design decisions of others

• Designer depends on favorable design contributions of others

• No guarantee that decisions align favorably

• Common (self) interests and incentives guide decision making

Distributed decision situations are characterized by:

Distributed decision situations occur when developing:

•Monolithic systems•Distributed systems •Software framework or platform

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Supplementary Back-up slides

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Why ALF: The problem

RequirementsManagement

BusinessVisualization

RequirementsDefinition Portfolio

Management ProjectManagement

ResourcePlanning

ModelingPrototyping

ChangeManagement

BuildManagement

TestManagement

ReleaseManagement

DeploymentPerformanceMonitoringProvisioning

IssueManagement

“Point-to-point” integration of n tools can mean

up to n(n-1)/2 combinations; This does not scale!ALF Proposal

Software developers struggle with integrating diverse development tools

Various development tools

http:/www.eclipse.org/alf

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ALF

Why ALF: The solution

RequirementsManagement

BusinessVisualization

RequirementsDefinition Portfolio

Management ProjectManagement

ResourcePlanning

ModelingPrototyping

ChangeManagement

BuildManagement

TestManagement

ReleaseManagement

DeploymentPerformanceMonitoringProvisioning

IssueManagement

Integration of n tools with ALF requires n integrations; linear growth of connections

ALF Proposal

A better approach to tool integration

Various development tools

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ALF based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

• Eclipse ALF is “SOA for Development”– Events, Web services and Web Service Orchestration

• Eclipse ALF is all about tool integration– Service flow definitions

• Tools are integrated and coordinated by defining service flows (development process workflows)

– Events• Development tools raise events by sending web service messages to ALF

– E.g. John has saved his changes or checked in a particular file• ALF response to events by invoking service flows

– Tool action invocation• Development tools expose programmable actions as web services• ALF service flows invoke tools by sending to them web service messages

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Action 1Event 1

Action …Action N

Log

ALFALF Event Manager

Log Log

ALF Service Flow

ALF in Action

OK

Type

Priority

Status

Eclipse based UI toolIssue Mgmt. front-end Plug-in

*Application Lifecycle Management

Dev. Tools exposing actions as web services

Eclipse based UI front end

Issue 1

ALM* SystemsIssue Mgmt. backend

Reqmt 1

Requirement Mgmt. Project Mgmt.

Task 1

web-service message send to tool

Event (web service message) sent to ALF

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ALF Architecture Landscape

ALF Plans to leverage or coordinate with the following projects or proposals:• BIRT – For dashboard reporting• EMF – For textual UIs (initiation of service flows & inspection of results)• GMF – For graphical UIs (designers)• MDDI – Possible coordination or use of the model bus (tentative)• Higgins – Possible use of user identity and credentials for Single Sign-On

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Examples Modeling and analysis

• How is security designed – How is authentication designed– Who designs authentication and under what

constraints