What if engineers built a bridge without first calculating the structural analysis? What if the walls of a high-rise building were suddenly too small to hold up the roof? Why don't we have to ask ourselves such questions? Because bridges and other structures are not built on a trial-and-error basis - before construction, experts design the blueprints and calculate the structural analysis. Load tests are calculated in the computer before laying a single brick.
"Software development is not about whether supporting pillars crumble away. Nevertheless, parallels can be drawn between bridge building and software development," says computer science professor Ralf Reussner. Eight years ago, he noticed what software developers, unlike engineers, lacked at work: a tool that simulates the architecture of software before implementing it. "At the time, such a thing was not considered feasible in any meaningful way, because essential information about the software's flow was missing from the architecture," Reussner recalls. "But we understood that it was not the flow of the software that needed to be simulated, but the speed and reliability of the software." One of the major breakthroughs of his team at KIT and the FZI Research Center for Information Technology is to achieve this analysis effect using only the architecture. The result is the architecture simulator PALLADIO.
Named after one of the most famous and influential "professional architects" in the world, Andrea Palladio, the simulator can analyze the weaknesses and strengths of performance and reliability of complex software architectures or assist in developing new software. FZI department head Klaus Krogmann explains: "PALLADIO simulates the paths of a user request through a software system according to a what-if principle. Software properties such as response times and resource allocation can then be specifically optimized." For companies, two aspects of this are of particular interest: increasing productivity by avoiding unnecessary implementation efforts and quality assurance.
"PALLADIO is a reliable neutral quality assurance instance," explains Christian Popp, who successfully uses PALLADIO as IT manager at Bertelsmann subsidiary arvato infoscore. HIS, a software for the fraud prevention pool of German insurers, is the first test object at arvato and performed well. "With 30 million accesses per year, HIS is a complex piece of software, and the sensitive data make first-class quality assurance mandatory," explains KIT alumnus Popp, who is familiar with the FZI under different management from his student days.
The demand for a simulator is high not only among software houses, but also in secondary industries such as banks and insurance companies - everywhere where particularly secure, complex software is used. For Professor Reussner, this is a clear sign that PALLADIO is catching on in the market: "Ultimately, innovation is always a good idea that is further developed with a view to use and is ultimately used profitably".
SECURE SOFTWARE FOR GERMAN INSURERS
"The company arvato infoscore redeveloped the German insurance industry's hint and information system (HIS) in spring 2011. HIS is used by insurers for risk assessment and auditing in the event of a claim and suspected manipulation. The software is an industry solution that is currently accessed by around 120 clients every day, and prospectively by the entire industry with its more than 480 insurance companies. The high transaction volume, the complexity and the security requirements for the system require reliable quality assurance during development and also later during maintenance. We have used PALLADIO as an initial architecture evaluation with very good results and want to use it again periodically in the future to evaluate the system in further development". - Christian Popp, Head of IT in the Risk Management division at arvato infoscore GmbH
SERVICES FOR TELECOMMUNICATIONS
"Ericsson Nikola Tesla (ENT) and Klaus Krogmann's team at FZI collaborated on the European project Q-ImPrESS 'Quality Impact Prediction for Evolving Software Systems.' The ENT team developed prototype software for creating new Internet protocol-based services for existing telecommunications systems. The FZI team supported the ENT in the modeling and performance analysis of the prototype. PALLADIO and the Q-ImPrESS analysis tool based on it were used for this purpose. The result was very accurate performance predictions, even for carefully constructed system models with a high level of abstraction. In our case, the performance predicted by PALLADIO and the actual performance were only 15 percent apart, a first-class value. Currently, we are using Palladio's potential in software development in new projects." - Ivan Skuliber, Senior Software Architect at Ericcson Nikola Tesla
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Pictures: KIT