Effort Estimation for Service-Oriented Computing Environments

The concept of service in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) makes possible to introduce other ideas like service composition, governance and virtualization. Each of these ideas, when exercised to an enterprise level, provides benefits in terms of cost and performance. These ideas bring many new opportunities for the project managers in making the estimates of effort required to produce SOA systems. This is because the SOA systems are different from traditional software projects and there is a lack of efficient metrics and models for providing a high level of confidence in effort estimation. Thus, in this paper, an efficient estimation methodology has been presented based on analyzing the development phases of past SOA based software systems. The objective of this paper is twofold: first, to study and analyze the development phases of some past SOA based systems; second, to propose estimation metrics based on these analyzed parameters. The proposed methodology is facilitated from the use of four regression(s) based estimation models. The validation of the proposed methodology is cross checked by comparing the predictive accuracy, using some commonly used performance measurement indicators and box-plots evaluation. The evaluation results of the study (using industrial data collected from 10 SOA based software systems) show that the effort estimates obtained using the multiple linear regression model are more accurate and indicate an improvement in performance than the other used regression models

Revisión sistemática de estudios realizados sobre comparaciones de los métodos de estimación de tamaño funcional IFPUG FPA y COSMIC sobre proyectos SOA

En la Ingeniería de Software, la estimación de proyectos es considerado un tema importante pues ayuda a la mejora del desarrollo del proyecto. Dentro de las diversas variables a estimar, tres son las más relevantes: el tamaño del software, el esfuerzo y el cronograma. Como la estimación de costos radica básicamente en estimar el tamaño de software así como la cantidad de personas necesarias para desarrollar el producto, se ha decidido centrar el estudio en la estimación del tamaño del software. Ahora, el tamaño de software puede ser cuantificado usando diferentes técnicas, como las líneas de código y los métodos de medición de tamaño funcional, etc. Nosotros nos centraremos en analizar los métodos IFPUG FPA y COSMIC. Por esta razón, la presente tesis presentará una revisión sistemática de estudios realizados sobre comparaciones de los métodos de estimación de tamaño funcional IFPUG FPA y COSMIC sobre proyectos SOA. El objetivo será el poder encontrar y analizar los diferentes trabajos que se han realizado para adaptar los métodos de estimación de tamaño funcional IFPUG FPA y COSMIC sobre proyectos SOA. Para lograr ello, se ha desarrollado esta tesis en seis capítulos. En el primero, se plantean las definiciones de los métodos de estimación IFPUG FPA y COSMIC, y el concepto SOA. En el segundo, se incluye la definición de una revisión sistemática así como los trabajos realizados de revisiones sistemáticas aplicadas a proyectos SOA. En el tercero, se presenta la planificación de la aplicación de la revisión sistemática donde se incluyen el desarrollo del protocolo, la formulación de las preguntas de investigación y la estrategia para la búsqueda. En el cuarto, se presenta la aplicación de la revisión sistemática. En el quinto, se presentan los resultados de la revisión, y en el último capítulo se incluyen las conclusiones y los trabajos futuros.Tesi

An exploratory study for investigating the issues and current practices of service-oriented architecture adoption

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach that can be used to integrate different services across operating systems, platforms, languages, and networks which offer some benefits. However, many organizations fail to fully utilize SOA because the adoption processes are still immature. Therefore, an exploratory study was conducted to investigate current issues and practices of SOA adoption, the use of maturity levels for assessing SOA adoption, and the importance of information technology (IT) and business benefits in SOA adoption. Thus, the Grounded Theory approach was adapted in this study which involved seven software development companies in Malaysia. In this study, 14 SOA practitioners with at least three years of experience in SOA development were interviewed. The collected data was analyzed through three main coding stages: open, axial and selective coding. The theory which emerged from this study revealed SOA adoption issues, current practices, maturity levels, IT and business benefits. The study managed to identify five main issues in SOA adoption which were knowledge, infrastructure, costing, readiness, and documentation issues. The study also portrayed five best practices related to technology, framework, platform, standards, and tools. In addition, results from the study showed five IT and business benefits, consecutively. The findings from the study have led to theories formulation on SOA adoption which may assist researchers and SOA assessors to continuously improve the quality and maturity of SOA adoption in the future

A Framework for Scope, Cost and Effort Estimation for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Projects

Determining the scope, size, cost and effort of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) project is important to managing the risk of cost blowout happening during the project, building the business case and securing the funding for the project. Little wor

Enhancing the Quality of Planning of Software Development Projects

As business competition gets tougher, there is much pressure on software development projects to become more productive and efficient. Previous research has shown that quality planning is a key factor in enhancing the success of software development projects. The research method selected for this study was design science research (DSR), and the design science research process (DSRP) model was adopted to conduct the study. This research describes the design and development of the quality of planning (QPLAN) tool and the quality of planning evaluation model (QPEM), which are two innovative artefacts that evaluate the quality of project planning and introduce best planning practices, such as providing references from historical data, suggesting how to manage in an appropriate way and including lessons learnt in the software development process. In particular, the QPEM is based on cognitive maps that represent the project manager’s know-how, project manager’s characteristics and technological expertise, as well as top management support, enterprise environmental factors and the quality of methods and tools in a form that corresponds closely with humans’ perceptions. Data were collected from 66 projects undertaken in 12 organisations from eight types of industries in six countries. The results show that the QPLAN tool has been significantly contributing to enhancing the success rate of projects