The goal of the Q-ImPrESS project is to bring service orientation to these critical application domains, where predictable and guaranteed end-to-end quality of service is particularly important. The main challenge here is to create a method for quality-driven software development and evolution, where the consequences of design decisions and system resource changes on performance, reliability and maintainability can be foreseen through quality impact analysis and simulation.

THE PROJECT

The methods and tools developed in Q-ImPrESS will allow for cost-effective development and evolution of service-oriented software. Developers will be able to try out different design scenarios and choose the best possible alternative with respect to the impact of these decisions on the quality of the software, before ever writing any single line of code.

The methods and tools developed in Q-ImPrESS will allow for cost-effective development and evolution of service-oriented software. Developers will be able to try out different design scenarios and choose the best possible alternative with respect to the impact of these decisions on the quality of the software, before ever writing any single line of code.

Design is always a compromise, a balance of tradeoffs between the different quality attributes considered – both attributes of external quality (quality of service) such as performance and reliability, but also attributes of internal quality such as maintainability. Choosing the right design from the beginning and thus avoiding later restructuring, tweaking and project delays to get certain quality attributes such as performance under control can easily mean savings of millions of euros in large software projects.

CONSORTIUM

The Q-ImPrESS consortium bundles outstanding European research groups on the field of quality assessment and prediction together with leading case study providers and agile and highly innovative SMEs.

The project is coordinated by the Research Center for Information Technology (FZI) in Karlsruhe Germany, an organization specialized in technology transfer of highly innovative IT solutions, with extensive experience in the fields of quality assessment and prediction of maintainability and performance, as well as model-driven development and reengineering techniques.

The Real-Time Research Centre at Malardalen University is one of Sweden’s centers of excellence and it provides research capabilities in system analysis of various quality attributes.

The Software Engineering Group at Politecnico di Milano brings competences in the area of performance prediction combined with meta-modeling, while the Distributed Systems Research Group at Charles University in Prague is internationally renowned for their work on component models, as well as resource benchmarking and modeling.

The large industrial partners: ABB AG through its Corporate Research Centre in Ladenburg Germany and Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d. provide the industrial validation of the research on two case-studies from the domains of production control systems and telecommunications.

Itemis GmbH and Softeco Sismat S.p.A. are two highly innovative SMEs, involved in industrial consultancy, as well as various open source communities, supporting the public dissemination of the project results.

• FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik (DE)
• ABB AG DE Mälardalen University (SE)
• Politecnico di Milano (IT)
• Charles University Prague (CZ)
• itemis GmbH (DE)
• algoWatt SpA (IT)
• Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d. (HR)