Enhancing MVC architecture pattern description using its System of Systems model
Article No.: 8, Pages 1 - 11
Abstract
When novice engineers (fresh or recent graduates with little industry experience) join a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) product company, they are tasked with comprehending the product, especially its behavior and dynamics. We believe that they can comprehend more effectively if they know and understand the architecture patterns used in the product.
Are the current architecture pattern descriptions of high quality? Do they fit the needs of novice engineers?
We evaluated the pattern descriptions of Model-View-Controller (MVC) (a popular and important architecture pattern for cloud systems) from a quality and fitment perspective and found gaps. To address these gaps, we have built a System of Systems (SoS) model of MVC that uses a transition systems vocabulary and a set-theoretic notation. In the paper, we show that this SoS model provides a rich set of information about the behavior and dynamics of the MVC components and their interactions. The model bridges the gaps in the MVC pattern description.
One of the contributions of the paper is to provide criteria to evaluate the pattern descriptions for quality and fitment for novice engineers. The paper proposes that we augment the benchmark pattern description of MVC with an SoS model. The paper also demonstrates a general approach to building SoS models for architecture patterns and recommends creating a catalog of SoS models for SaaS architecture patterns. We believe such a catalog will significantly help novice engineers in comprehension and other software engineering activities.
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Index Terms
- Enhancing MVC architecture pattern description using its System of Systems model
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Modeling Model-View-Controller (MVC) Architecture Pattern as System of Systems (SoS) to Aid Comprehension and Reasoning
CompEd 2023: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Global Computing Education Vol 2As software systems become increasingly complex, it is important that students develop software-is-system mindset. Our research aims to help engineers comprehend architecture patterns better using systems approach. We postulate that such an understanding ...
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Published In
February 2024
144 pages
ISBN:9798400717673
DOI:10.1145/3641399
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Published: 22 February 2024
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ISEC 2024
ISEC 2024: 17th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference
February 22 - 24, 2024
Bangalore, India
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