A Framework for Model-Driven Development of Mobile Applications with Context Support

Model-driven development (MDD) of software systems has been a serious trend in different application domains over the last 15 years. While technologies, platforms, and architectural paradigms have changed several times since model-driven development processes were first introduced, their applicability and usefulness are discussed every time a new technological trend appears. Looking at the rapid market penetration of smartphones, software engineers are curious about how model-driven development technologies can deal with this novel and emergent domain of software engineering (SE). Indeed, software engineering of mobile applications provides many challenges that model-driven development can address. Model-driven development uses a platform independent model as a crucial artifact. Such a model usually follows a domain-specific modeling language and separates the business concerns from the technical concerns. These platform-independent models can be reused for generating native program code for several mobile software platforms. However, a major drawback of model-driven development is that infrastructure developers must provide a fairly sophisticated model-driven development infrastructure before mobile application developers can create mobile applications in a model-driven way. Hence, the first part of this thesis deals with designing a model-driven development infrastructure for mobile applications. We will follow a rigorous design process comprising a domain analysis, the design of a domain-specific modeling language, and the development of the corresponding model editors. To ensure that the code generators produce high-quality application code and the resulting mobile applications follow a proper architectural design, we will analyze several representative reference applications beforehand. Thus, the reader will get an insight into both the features of mobile applications and the steps that are required to design and implement a model-driven development infrastructure. As a result of the domain analysis and the analysis of the reference applications, we identified context-awareness as a further important feature of mobile applications. Current software engineering tools do not sufficiently support designing and implementing of context-aware mobile applications. Although these tools (e.g., middleware approaches) support the definition and the collection of contextual information, the adaptation of the mobile application must often be implemented by hand at a low abstraction level by the mobile application developers. Thus, the second part of this thesis demonstrates how context-aware mobile applications can be designed more easily by using a model-driven development approach. Techniques such as model transformation and model interpretation are used to adapt mobile applications to different contexts at design time or runtime. Moreover, model analysis and model-based simulation help mobile application developers to evaluate a designed mobile application (i.e., app model) prior to its generation and deployment with respected to certain contexts. We demonstrate the usefulness and applicability of the model-driven development infrastructure we developed by seven case examples. These showcases demonstrate the designing of mobile applications in different domains. We demonstrate the scalability of our model-driven development infrastructure with several performance tests, focusing on the generation time of mobile applications, as well as their runtime performance. Moreover, the usability was successfully evaluated during several hands-on training sessions by real mobile application developers with different skill levels

Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering: A Design for a Global Family of Surveys and First Results from Germany

For many years, we have observed industry struggling in defining a high quality requirements engineering (RE) and researchers trying to understand industrial expectations and problems. Although we are investigating the discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, they still do not allow for empirical generalisations. To lay an empirical and externally valid foundation about the state of the practice in RE, we aim at a series of open and reproducible surveys that allow us to steer future research in a problem-driven manner. We designed a globally distributed family of surveys in joint collaborations with different researchers and completed the first run in Germany. The instrument is based on a theory in the form of a set of hypotheses inferred from our experiences and available studies. We test each hypothesis in our theory and identify further candidates to extend the theory by correlation and Grounded Theory analysis. In this article, we report on the design of the family of surveys, its underlying theory, and the full results obtained from Germany with participants from 58 companies. The results reveal, for example, a tendency to improve RE via internally defined qualitative methods rather than relying on normative approaches like CMMI. We also discovered various RE problems that are statistically significant in practice. For instance, we could corroborate communication flaws or moving targets as problems in practice. Our results are not yet fully representative but already give first insights into current practices and problems in RE, and they allow us to draw lessons learnt for future replications. Our results obtained from this first run in Germany make us confident that the survey design and instrument are well-suited to be replicated and, thereby, to create a generalisable empirical basis of RE in practice

Evolution of security engineering artifacts: a state of the art survey

Security is an important quality aspect of modern open software systems. However, it is challenging to keep such systems secure because of evolution. Security evolution can only be managed adequately if it is considered for all artifacts throughout the software development lifecycle. This article provides state of the art on the evolution of security engineering artifacts. The article covers the state of the art on evolution of security requirements, security architectures, secure code, security tests, security models, and security risks as well as security monitoring. For each of these artifacts the authors give an overview of evolution and security aspects and discuss the state of the art on its security evolution in detail. Based on this comprehensive survey, they summarize key issues and discuss directions of future research

Project-Team RMoD 2016 Activity Report

Activity Report 2016 Project-Team RMOD Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolutio

Adopting agile methodologies in distributed software development

From the second half of the '90s, some software engineering practitioners introduced a new group of software development methodologies called Agile Methodologies (Ams): they have been developed to overcome the limits of the traditional approaches in the software development. FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) has been proposed as possible different solution to the software crisis that is afflicting the ICT worldwide business. If the AMs improve the quality code and allow to respond quickly to requirement changes, FLOSS approach decreases the development costs and increases the spreading of competences about the software products. A debate is shaping about the compatibility of these two approaches. Software development teams have been spreading around the world, with users in Europe, management in the USA and programmers in the USA and India. The scattering of team members and functions around the world introduces barriers to productivity, cultural and languages differences can lead to misunderstanding of requirements, time zone differences can delay project schedules. Agile methods can provide a competitive advantage by delivering early, simplifying communication and allowing the business to respond more quickly to the market by changing the software. Trying to distribute a development project in an agile way isn't easy and will involve compromises. The goal of this thesis is to determine the application of the AMs in several contexts so to define which of these can be used effectively in non traditional software projects as the distributed development

Adopting agile methodologies in distributed software development

From the second half of the '90s, some software engineering practitioners introduced a new group of software development methodologies called Agile Methodologies (Ams): they have been developed to overcome the limits of the traditional approaches in the software development. FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) has been proposed as possible different solution to the software crisis that is afflicting the ICT worldwide business. If the AMs improve the quality code and allow to respond quickly to requirement changes, FLOSS approach decreases the development costs and increases the spreading of competences about the software products. A debate is shaping about the compatibility of these two approaches. Software development teams have been spreading around the world, with users in Europe, management in the USA and programmers in the USA and India. The scattering of team members and functions around the world introduces barriers to productivity, cultural and languages differences can lead to misunderstanding of requirements, time zone differences can delay project schedules. Agile methods can provide a competitive advantage by delivering early, simplifying communication and allowing the business to respond more quickly to the market by changing the software. Trying to distribute a development project in an agile way isn't easy and will involve compromises. The goal of this thesis is to determine the application of the AMs in several contexts so to define which of these can be used effectively in non traditional software projects as the distributed development

A Scholarship Approach to Model-Driven Engineering

Model-Driven Engineering is a paradigm for software engineering where software models are the primary artefacts throughout the software life-cycle. The aim is to define suitable representations and processes that enable precise and efficient specification, development and analysis of software. Our contributions to Model-Driven Engineering are structured according to Boyer\u27s four functions of academic activity - the scholarships of teaching, discovery, application and integration. The scholarships share a systematic approach towards seeking new insights and promoting progressive change. Even if the scholarships have their differences they are compatible so that theory, practice and teaching can strengthen each other.Scholarship of Teaching: While teaching Model-Driven Engineering to under-graduate students we introduced two changes to our course. The first change was to introduce a new modelling tool that enabled the execution of software models while the second change was to adapt pair lecturing to encourage the students to actively participate in developing models during lectures. Scholarship of Discovery: By using an existing technology for transforming models into source code we translated class diagrams and high-level action languages into natural language texts. The benefit of our approach is that the translations are applicable to a family of models while the texts are reusable across different low-level representations of the same model.Scholarship of Application: Raising the level of abstraction through models might seem a technical issue but our collaboration with industry details how the success of adopting Model-Driven Engineering depends on organisational and social factors as well as technical. Scholarship of Integration: Building on our insights from the scholarships above and a study at three large companies we show how Model-Driven Engineering empowers new user groups to become software developers but also how engineers can feel isolated due to poor tool support. Our contributions also detail how modelling enables a more agile development process as well as how the validation of models can be facilitated through text generation.The four scholarships allow for different possibilities for insights and explore Model-Driven Engineering from diverse perspectives. As a consequence, we investigate the social, organisational and technological factors of Model-Driven Engineering but also examine the possibilities and challenges of Model-Driven Engineering across disciplines and scholarships

FIN-DM: finantsteenuste andmekaeve protsessi mudel

Andmekaeve hõlmab reeglite kogumit, protsesse ja algoritme, mis võimaldavad ettevõtetel iga päev kogutud andmetest rakendatavaid teadmisi ammutades suurendada tulusid, vähendada kulusid, optimeerida tooteid ja kliendisuhteid ning saavutada teisi eesmärke. Andmekaeves ja -analüütikas on vaja hästi määratletud metoodikat ja protsesse. Saadaval on mitu andmekaeve ja -analüütika standardset protsessimudelit. Kõige märkimisväärsem ja laialdaselt kasutusele võetud standardmudel on CRISP-DM. Tegu on tegevusalast sõltumatu protsessimudeliga, mida kohandatakse sageli sektorite erinõuetega. CRISP-DMi tegevusalast lähtuvaid kohandusi on pakutud mitmes valdkonnas, kaasa arvatud meditsiini-, haridus-, tööstus-, tarkvaraarendus- ja logistikavaldkonnas. Seni pole aga mudelit kohandatud finantsteenuste sektoris, millel on omad valdkonnapõhised erinõuded. Doktoritöös käsitletakse seda lünka finantsteenuste sektoripõhise andmekaeveprotsessi (FIN-DM) kavandamise, arendamise ja hindamise kaudu. Samuti uuritakse, kuidas kasutatakse andmekaeve standardprotsesse eri tegevussektorites ja finantsteenustes. Uurimise käigus tuvastati mitu tavapärase raamistiku kohandamise stsenaariumit. Lisaks ilmnes, et need meetodid ei keskendu piisavalt sellele, kuidas muuta andmekaevemudelid tarkvaratoodeteks, mida saab integreerida organisatsioonide IT-arhitektuuri ja äriprotsessi. Peamised finantsteenuste valdkonnas tuvastatud kohandamisstsenaariumid olid seotud andmekaeve tehnoloogiakesksete (skaleeritavus), ärikesksete (tegutsemisvõime) ja inimkesksete (diskrimineeriva mõju leevendus) aspektidega. Seejärel korraldati tegelikus finantsteenuste organisatsioonis juhtumiuuring, mis paljastas 18 tajutavat puudujääki CRISP- DMi protsessis. Uuringu andmete ja tulemuste abil esitatakse doktoritöös finantsvaldkonnale kohandatud CRISP-DM nimega FIN-DM ehk finantssektori andmekaeve protsess (Financial Industry Process for Data Mining). FIN-DM laiendab CRISP-DMi nii, et see toetab privaatsust säilitavat andmekaevet, ohjab tehisintellekti eetilisi ohte, täidab riskijuhtimisnõudeid ja hõlmab kvaliteedi tagamist kui osa andmekaeve elutsüklisData mining is a set of rules, processes, and algorithms that allow companies to increase revenues, reduce costs, optimize products and customer relationships, and achieve other business goals, by extracting actionable insights from the data they collect on a day-to-day basis. Data mining and analytics projects require well-defined methodology and processes. Several standard process models for conducting data mining and analytics projects are available. Among them, the most notable and widely adopted standard model is CRISP-DM. It is industry-agnostic and often is adapted to meet sector-specific requirements. Industry- specific adaptations of CRISP-DM have been proposed across several domains, including healthcare, education, industrial and software engineering, logistics, etc. However, until now, there is no existing adaptation of CRISP-DM for the financial services industry, which has its own set of domain-specific requirements. This PhD Thesis addresses this gap by designing, developing, and evaluating a sector-specific data mining process for financial services (FIN-DM). The PhD thesis investigates how standard data mining processes are used across various industry sectors and in financial services. The examination identified number of adaptations scenarios of traditional frameworks. It also suggested that these approaches do not pay sufficient attention to turning data mining models into software products integrated into the organizations' IT architectures and business processes. In the financial services domain, the main discovered adaptation scenarios concerned technology-centric aspects (scalability), business-centric aspects (actionability), and human-centric aspects (mitigating discriminatory effects) of data mining. Next, an examination by means of a case study in the actual financial services organization revealed 18 perceived gaps in the CRISP-DM process. Using the data and results from these studies, the PhD thesis outlines an adaptation of CRISP-DM for the financial sector, named the Financial Industry Process for Data Mining (FIN-DM). FIN-DM extends CRISP-DM to support privacy-compliant data mining, to tackle AI ethics risks, to fulfill risk management requirements, and to embed quality assurance as part of the data mining life-cyclehttps://www.ester.ee/record=b547227

Human Machine Interaction

In this book, the reader will find a set of papers divided into two sections. The first section presents different proposals focused on the human-machine interaction development process. The second section is devoted to different aspects of interaction, with a special emphasis on the physical interaction

An Integrated Formal Task Specification Method for Smart Environments

This thesis is concerned with the development of interactive systems for smart environments. In such scenario different interaction paradigms need to be supported and according methods and development strategies need to be applied to comprise not only explicit interaction (e.g., pressing a button to adjust the light) but also implicit interactions (e.g., walking to the speaker’s desk to give a talk) to assist the user appropriately. A task-based modeling approach is introduced allowing basing the implementing of different interaction paradigms on the same artifact