Date of Award
12-2010
Embargo Period
1-18-2011
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Institute for Software Research
Advisor(s)
William Scherlis
Second Advisor
Len Bass
Third Advisor
David A. Eckhardt
Fourth Advisor
Bruce Horn
Abstract
Clients of reactive systems often change their priorities. For example, a human user of an email viewer may attempt to display a message while a large attachment is downloading. To the user, an email viewer that delayed display of the message would exhibit a failure similar to priority inversion in real-time systems.
We propose a new quality attribute, attentiveness, that provides a unified way to model the forms of redirection offered by application-level reactive systems to accommodate the changing priorities of their clients, which may be either humans or systems components. Modeling attentiveness as a quality attribute provides system designers with a single conceptual framework for policy and architectural decisions to address trade-offs among criteria such as responsiveness, overall performance, behavioral predictability, and state consistency.
Recommended Citation
Hartman, Gregory S., "Attentiveness: Reactivity at Scale" (2010). Dissertations. Paper 15.
http://repository.cmu.edu/dissertations/15