Trustworthy Integration: Challenges for the Practitioner
Abstract
The design of trustworthy networked information systems presents profound challenges for system architecture and project planning. While there has been significant research on this topic, there is still limited understanding of the issues. The software development tools, infrastructure components, and standardized interfaces now available encourage the deployment of networked systems and make that lack of understanding an increasing liability. The objective of this note is to summarize the technical issues associated with the assembly of a networked information system that confront the practitioner. It is critical that the practitioner understand the limitations of current techniques and hence maintain a healthy skepticism about the assurance associated with a complex software-intensive system, as well as for any "silver bullets" proposed to mitigate that complexity. Integration techniques that make it easier to customize a deployed system can generate a new class of composition errors. The expanding scope of connectivity for a networked information system in terms of devices, users, and organizations often invalidates the design assumptions that simplified the development of today's legacy systems, but those assumptions may still be guiding new development. This report considers software composition from the perspective of four software artifacts. The artifacts represent four views of a system at different levels of abstraction. The chosen artifacts also provide a way to discuss the impact of distributed information systems on the required software assurance analysis and how commercial development trends such as service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and Web Services may mitigate some problems but exacerbate others. The four artifacts are Specific Interface, Component-Specific Integration, Architecture Integration Mechanisms, and System Behavior: Component Interactions.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2005
- Accession Number
- ADA441241
Entities
People
- Robert J. Ellison
Organizations
- Carnegie Mellon University