6 research outputs found
SERVICE-BASED AUTOMATION OF SOFTWARE CONSTRUCTION ACTIVITIES
The reuse of software units, such as classes, components and services require professional
knowledge to be performed. Today a multiplicity of different software unit technologies,
supporting tools, and related activities used in reuse processes exist. Each of these relevant
reuse elements may also include a high number of variations and may differ in the level and
quality of necessary reuse knowledge. In such an environment of increasing variations and,
therefore, an increasing need for knowledge, software engineers must obtain such knowledge
to be able to perform software unit reuse activities. Today many different reuse activities exist
for a software unit. Some typical knowledge intensive activities are: transformation,
integration, and deployment. In addition to the problem of the amount of knowledge required
for such activities, other difficulties also exist. The global industrial environment makes it
challenging to identify sources of, and access to, knowledge. Typically, such sources (e.g.,
repositories) are made to search and retrieve information about software unitsand not about
the required reuse activity knowledge for a special unit. Additionally, the knowledge has to be
learned by inexperienced software engineers and, therefore, to be interpreted. This
interpretation may lead to variations in the reuse result and can differ from the estimated result
of the knowledge creator. This makes it difficult to exchange knowledge between software
engineers or global teams. Additionally, the reuse results of reuse activities have to be
repeatable and sustainable. In such a scenario, the knowledge about software reuse activities
has to be exchanged without the above mentioned problems by an inexperienced software
engineer. The literature shows a lack of techniques to store and subsequently distribute
relevant reuse activity knowledge among software engineers. The central aim of this thesis is
to enable inexperienced software engineers to use knowledge required to perform reuse
activities without experiencing the aforementioned problems. The reuse activities:
transformation, integration, and deployment, have been selected as the foundation for the
research. Based on the construction level of handling a software unit, these activities are
called Software Construction Activities (SCAcs) throughout the research. To achieve the aim,
specialised software construction activity models have been created and combined with an
abstract software unit model. As a result, different SCAc knowledge is described and
combined with different software unit artefacts needed by the SCAcs. Additionally, the
management (e.g., the execution of an SCAc) will be provided in a service-oriented
environment. Because of the focus on reuse activities, an approach which avoids changing the
knowledge level of software engineers and the abstraction view on software units and
activities, the object of the investigation differs from other approaches which aim to solve the
insufficient reuse activity knowledge problem. The research devised novel abstraction models
to describe SCAcs as knowledge models related to the relevant information of software units.
The models and the focused environment have been created using standard technologies. As a
result, these were realised easily in a real world environment. Softwareengineers were able to
perform single SCAcs without having previously acquired the necessary knowledge. The risk
of failing reuse decreases because single activities can be performed. The analysis of the
research results is based on a case study. An example of a reuse environmenthas been created
and tested in a case study to prove the operational capability of the approach. The main result
of the research is a proven concept enabling inexperienced software engineers to reuse
software units by reusing SCAcs. The research shows the reduction in time for reuse and a
decrease of learning effort is significant
Combining SOA and BPM Technologies for Cross-System Process Automation
This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges arising from the transformation
An evaluation of the challenges of Multilingualism in Data Warehouse development
In this paper we discuss Business Intelligence and define what is meant by support for Multilingualism in a Business Intelligence reporting context. We identify support for Multilingualism as a challenging issue which has implications for data warehouse design and reporting performance. Data warehouses are a core component of most Business Intelligence systems and the star schema is the approach most widely used to develop data warehouses and dimensional Data Marts. We discuss the way in which Multilingualism can be supported in the Star Schema and identify that current approaches have serious limitations which include data redundancy and data manipulation, performance and maintenance issues. We propose a new approach to enable the optimal application of multilingualism in Business Intelligence. The proposed approach was found to produce satisfactory results when used in a proof-of-concept environment. Future work will include testing the approach in an enterprise environmen