MORALE Glossary
General Terms
Architecture - 1
An organization of automated system components that
meets the requirements for the automated system and the affordances
provided by its environment.
Architecture - 2
a system description, including system components and how
they interact.
Domain
a recognized problem area characterized by a vocabulary, typical
solution strategy (architecture), and literature.
Legacy system
An existing software system that is determined by a
customer to be in need of improvement.
Reengineering
"the examination and alteration of a subject system to
reconstitute it in a new form and the subsequent implementation of the new
form." (Source: Chikofsky and Cross)
Scenario
An imagined set of concrete system behaviors in response
to a state of affairs.
Requirements Terms
- Allocated requirement
- A requirement that has been allocated to a
total system (usually, automated system) component.
- Achievement goal
- A goal that is described in terms of a desired
state of affairs that does not yet hold.
- Architect
- A developer who is responsible for analyzing the requirements
for the automated system, and proposing and analyzing a solution
architecture or modifications to an existing architecture. (Note: This
definition cuts across traditional distinctions between systems and
software engineers and between analysts and software designers.)
- Architectural scenario
- A scenario in which the roles are users and
automated system components.
- Architectural script
- A script for an architectural scenario.
- Automated system
- A system in which one or more components are
devices, software configuration items or other automated systems.
- Component
- A part of a system. A component may be regarded as
a system in its own right or as an atomic agent.
- Context
- Concrete aspects of the system's environment that affect its
likely success.
- Customer
- A stakeholder who represents the organization that is
intended to benefit most from the total system. (Note: the
contractual client may not be a customer in this sense).
- Description
- The activity of representing and documenting some
aspect of a system.
- Developer
- A stakeholder who is a member of an organization responsible
for the development and evolution of the automated system.
- Discussion
- The activity of discussing, analyzing or reviewing
a description.
- Environment
- The totality of things not in a system that interact with
or influence it.
- Goal
- A desired purpose of a system or component.
- Goal web
- A description of a collection of goals and their dependencies.
- Human-Activity System (HAS)
- A system in which the components are
people, teams or organizations. These system components may use
automated tools to help them meet their goals, but the system
does not contain such tools as principal components.
- Inquiry Cycle
- A collection of three kinds of activity involved in
designing and planning a system, viz.: description, discussion
and refinement.
- Maintenance goal
- A goal described in terms of a desired state of
affairs that already holds.
- Obstacle
- A state of affairs that can impede the fulfilment of a
goal.
- Operational requirement
- A requirement that has been allocated to a
software component and that is described in enough detail to be
implemented in source code.
- Owner
- A stakeholder who defines the success or otherwise of the
total system and has the authority to cancel its development.
- Putative architecture
- An architecture put forward by an architect
as a viable design to meet the mission-oriented requirements or as
an explanatory structure for the source code of a legacy system.
- Quality goal
- A goal described in terms of a trajectory of
improvement in some criterion.
- Refinement
- The revision of one or more descriptions as a result
of discussion. Refinements include the creation of new descriptions
that are either subordinate to existing descriptions or otherwise
dependent on them.
- Requirement
- A property of an automated system needed by a
customer stakeholder.
- Script
- A description of a scenario in which the component's
actions are represented in time-ordered sequence.
- Software requirement
- A requirement that has been allocated to a
software system or component.
- Software system
- A system that is to be implemented in software
components.
- Stakeholder
- A person, group of people or with a stake in the success
of the total system.
- System
- A collection of active components whose coordinated
behavior meets a set of goals.
- Target system
- A system that is to be implemented in software and
hardware components.
- Mission-oriented scenario
- A scenario in which the structure of the
scenario is related to the goals of the system or components in
question.
- Mission-oriented script
- A script for a mission-oriented scenario.
- Total System
- A large, complex system including one or more human-
activity systems and one or more automated systems.
- User
- A stakeholder who is a member of a human-activity system in
the environment of the automated system who directly interacts with the
automated system. Direct interaction may take the form of operating
a computer worksation, but could equally involve interaction with
ubiquitous or embedded automated system components or the consumption
of reports or other information digests generated by the automated
system. A user may perform a collection of activities that have no
direct counterpart in the human-activity system that exists prior to
the implementation of the automated system.
Reverse Engineering Terms
- Architectural style
- "defines a family of architectures constrained by
component/connector vocabulary, topology, semantic constraints. (Source:
Garland and Shaw tutorial)
- Cliche (French)
- a pattern describing salient features of a concept that
supports recognition of that concept in some specified context by
application of some specified comparison algorithm.
- Cliche (as far as the Programmer's Apprentice is concerned)
- a collection
of related features or characteristics that provide a shared technical
vocabulary, including inter-feature relationships.
- Concept hierarchy
- a hierarchically organized collection of domain
concepts. The organizing relationship is "part-of".
- Conceptual purpose token
- a domain concept identifier
- Delocalized plan
- "pieces of code that are conceptually related [that] are
physically located in non-contiguous parts of a program." (Source:
Soloway, et al. CACM 11/88)
- Design recovery
- "a subject of reverse engineering in which domain
knowledge, external information, and deduction or fuzzy reasoning are
added to the observations of the subject system to identify meaningful
higher level abstractions beyond those obtained directly by examining the
system itself." (Source: Chikofsky and Cross)
- Domain Specific Software Architecture
- an architecture that denotes how
problems in a specific domain are typically solved.
- Interleaving
-
- Model
- a cognitive abstraction of a software system
- Plan
- "Knowledge structures that are schematic representation of
stereotypical behavior patterns. ... Correspondingly, plans in programs
are stereotypic action structures." (Source: Soloway, et al. CACM 11/88)
- Program Comprehension
- the process of acquiring knowledge about a computer
program. (Source: Rugaber, Encyclopedia article)
- Representation
- tangible (non-cognitive) abstraction of a software system.
- Restructuring
- the transformation of one representation form to another
at the same relative abstraction level, while preserving the subject
system's external behaviour (functionality and semantics)." (Source:
Chikofsky and Cross)
- Reverse Engineering
- "the process of analyzing a subject system to identify
the system's components and their interrelationships and create
representations of the system in another form or at a higher level of
abstraction." (Source: Chikofsky and Cross)
- Role
- a relatively self contained subarchitecture (in the sense that a
subsequence is related to a sequence).
- Signature
- The set of features (e.g., syntax, semantic, graphical) that
together signal the occurrence of a specific concept. (Source:
Biggerstaff, CACM)