Creating Awareness with Subscription Services (CASS) Strategy
Concepts: Home | Awareness Styles | Information Sources | Meta Information | Terminology | Scenarios
Systems: CASSandra Toolkit | Awareness Tools | Download | Documentation
General: Awareness Guages | Flier | People | Acknowledgements
Related Projects:  Yancees - a versatile notification service

Awareness Gauges

Awareness gauges the name we gave a line of work which investigates the use of our awareness environment CASSIUS for maintaining awareness of the status of software, software architectures and on-the-fly software upgrades. The goal is to provide visualizations of diverse aspects of system performance to support the development and deployment of software. When developing software, how do changes made to a system affect performance across different dimensions? When deploying software, such as server upgrades where the server must remain on-line even while being upgraded, how efficiently is the new server running, how smoothly is the transition taking place?

Our focus has been on an AWACS simulator. AWACS software may need to be upgraded without the system experiencing down time. Installing and running a system in a predefined environment is something that developers have a lot of experience at. However, when installing an upgrade to a running system, the state of the system during the upgrade process may not be predefined or predicatable, and the manner in which it interacts with the newly added system components can be difficult to anticipate. Using awareness guages, AWACS experts who are upgrading the system can observe the effects of the upgrade on diverse aspects of system performance.

For more information on this line of work, look at the following resources:

  1. CASSIUS: An awareness environment used for supporting the awareness guages
  2. Flier: The flier presented at a DARPA meeting
  3. ArchStudio: The software architecture design environment for modifying systems on-the-fly.
Research Staff Michael Kantor
Professor David F. Redmiles
Institute for Software Research
Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine CA 92697-3425

E-mail: mkantor@ics.uci.edu E-mail: redmiles@ics.uci.edu