Ideas of what could we do

Current state:

• We have a platform
• We need a support of plugins (component, modules) to extend the platform based on different customer's needs

Topics with highest relevance

(A) (automatic) adaptation to evolving APIs? -- see notes from brainstorming

• generating adaptation and modification of third party-components (existing clients) to changes in our API
• what-if scenarios - which clients would I break with such-and-such API change?
• search a repository for a relevant API for an existing client
• metrics to assess API - stability, complexity
• process to support the above - how to assess API, how to evolve it, what to do after it evolved

(B) testing of components based on semi-real data

• monitoring (QoS?) in customer environment, obtaining real usage data
• generating tests (mainly load, performance, reliability) with data based on those monitored
• testing in a simulated environment
• visualization of results and metrics and test results

A previous list of possibly relevant topics (with relevance to IW needs):

• communication of components with each other and communication of components with the platform (high)
  • a unified way of communication
  • an 'universal' bus, events, messaging, ...
  • monitoring of messages coming through
  • filtering of messages
  • authentication of messages
  • role based authorization mechanism
• verification of components compatibility (medium)
  • verification of different version on components
  • replacement of an old components by a new one.
  • verification of compatibility of third-party components
  • (vaclav sykora) I don't fully undestand the point
• visualization of components (low)
  • visualization of considerable wide set of components
  • monitoring of runtime state of components
  • monitoring of customer installation
  • Custom metric visualization (including QoS?)
  • Exploring component dependencies
  • Traceability analysis (including EFP)
• configuration of components based on customer needs (high)
  • product lines
  • components customized based on customer needs.
  • different edition for different prices
  • Tool for dependencies visualization and assembling
  • Visual exploring of variation/extension points
• deployment of components to the running platform (low)
  • updates of running systems
  • Automatic update hints (with/without visualization)
  • seamless update without restart
  • configuration on the fly
• repository of components (medium)
  • a unified storage
  • building up the application from storage
  • mining components based on configuration
• monitoring and testing of components (high)
  • testing in development environment
  • monitoring (QoS?) in customer environment
  • Visualization of results and metrics and test results in diagram
• analysis of platform-plugin-component structure/technology solution
• development, SCM and build support

Visualization can be useful in following points mentioned above:

• verification of components compatibility
• repository of components

Additional ideas:

• Internal component analysis
• Visual comparison of views
• Automatic finding components in code (or macro-components in components)