Master thesis underway :)
I have not been blogging a lot as of late. I’ve been rather busy with things on one hand and did not feel like writing much on my blog on the other. My master thesis work for example is keeping me rather busy. But it is starting to pay off: my thesis is nearing completion, the tool I’ve made has now been put online, the technical report about an experiment I did with this tool has almost been cleared so that it can be made public and I’ve helped my supervisor write a paper about my work that has been submitted to QoSA. Now let’s hope it gets accepted :) .
Since I haven’t really yet told a lot about exactly what I’ve been doing I’ll try to explain the scope of my work in short. My assignment takes place within the context of the Griffin project. The Griffin project is all about so-called architectural knowledge (AK in short). AK is knowledge that people use when they design systems and can incorporate all sorts of things, such as requirements, design rationale, decisions… Usually, such knowledge is used implicitly, but it can be very beneficial to make it explicit so that more knowledge and insight about the architecture and the architecting process can be shared.
My assignment specifically looks into the AK involved in quantitative architectural analysis and in this light I’ve done a case study at Astron; a research institute on the moor in Drenthe (nice environment :) ) where they develop really fancy radio telescopes. I’ve researched what kinds of AK are present in their analysis process and have developed a tool with the intention that it helps them with this, preferable by presenting the AK of the analysis model in such a way that more insight into this analysis model is gained.
The tool is a plug-in for Excel that enables the user to make AK explicit by adding semantic information to the cells. This information then can be extracted from the Excel file using a piece of software which puts the AK into a central repository called the knowledge base. Other tools then can connect to this knowledge base to perform all kinds of neat operations on the captured knowledge, such as relate pieces of analysis models to design decisions. The knowledge base namely not only stores information from Excel; all kinds of analysis and architecting tools are envisioned to be connected to it so that one central repository is created from all AK produced in a project. So far, for Word (for architecture documents) and Excel plug-ins have been created and a new master student just got started investigating the development of a plug-in for Python.
The tool is not just about making annotations. As I mentioned, a goal is also to present the AK of an analysis model in a attractive and insightful manner. That’s why the tool offers a fancy visualization which displays a graph that reflects the structure of the analysis model and allows one to investigate which relations exist and which cells actually depend on one another. It can be downloaded from the SEARCH Griffin page (or directly here if you’re lazy). A manual is included, so by all means toy around with it if you like. I’ll probably post up my master thesis within a couple of weeks, blessings until then :) .