A high-level semiotic trust agent scoring model for collaborative virtual organisations

In this paper, we describe how a semiotic ladder, together with a supportive trust agent, can be used to address “soft” trust issues in the context of collaborative Virtual Organisations (VO). The intention is to offer all parties better support for trust (as reputation) management including the reduction of risk and improved reliability of VO e-services. The semiotic ladder is intended to support the VO e-service lifecycle through the articulation of e-trust at various levels of system abstraction, including trust as measurable confidence. At the social level, reputation and reliability measures of e-trust are the relevant dimensions as regards choice of VO partner and are also relevant to the negotiation of service level agreements between the VO partners. By contrast, at the lower levels of the trust ladder, e-trust measures typically address the degree to which secure sign on and message level security conforms to various tangible technological security protocols. The novel trust agent provides the e-service consumer with an objective measure of the trustworthiness of the e-service at run-time, just prior to its actual consumption. Specifically, VO e-service consumer confidence level is informed, by leveraging third party objective evidence. This evidence comprises a set of Corporate Governance (CG) scores. These scores are used as a trust proxy for the "real" owner of the VO. There are also inherent limitations associated with the use of CG scores. These are duly acknowledged

Hybrid Car Creates Hybrid Organization: Development of Toyota's First Prius Model and Limits that Traditional Development Organization at Toyota confronted

The manager of each function-based department holds private information about his or her respective department's fields of expertise and technological advances. Given this understanding, it may be advisable for the company's headquarters to delegate decision-making authority to the managers of these individual departments. However, if decision-making authority is delegated to individual departments or to the managers representing the interests of each of those departments, those departments may pursue their own interests even at the expense of the company's interests as a whole. By contract, the product manager does not have private information but is thinking about the new product under development as a whole and thus does not have a biased preference. The question then, is, what kind of governance structure will serve as the optimal solution? When each manager possesses a biased preference for his or her own department, it is important to consider the impact that the allocation of formal authority and the information flow within the organizational hierarchy has on the organizational capacity for innovation. This theme is developed and illustrated, using the case of development of Toyota's "Prius". In the case of Toyota Motor, too, this point has been an important issue for a long time when planning its development organization structure. The development of the world's first mass-produced hybrid vehicle, the Prius by Toyota is one of the most successful examples of innovative product development in recent years. However, it has been hardly studied as to how such architectural innovation was possible within the largest organization in Japan. This paper argues at length the development process of the Prius and transfiguration of Toyota's development organization structure from the viewpoint of organizational economics framework. Development of the first Prius model by Toyota set the stage for adoption of a new development organization structure : the term-limited implementation of the new "Big Room" approach, which did bring about lasting changes to Toyota's organizational framework for vehicle development. It will be noted that concept design, or in other words interdepartmental coordination, was more important in the initial phase of development (the first six months), and thus, the "Big Room" structure was the development organization structure of choice for implementation. By contrast, after the initial six months, work on the concept design of the product development had been almost completed and interdepartmental coordination had become less important to the company compared with advances in the technologies for the engine and other component systems. For that reason, the development organization was transitioned to a more decentralized structure of governance, the conventional “chief engineer” structure. The new development organization is a kind of hybrid organization, which lies between "centralization" and "decentralization". Furthermore, we touched upon the point that delay is costly in decision problems because it increases the lag upon which decisions are based, and evaluated the new development organization structure from that viewpoint, too. The arguments made in this paper will presumably be of value as generalized recommendations for the shape of the development organization within large established corporations.

Towards Run-Time Verification of Compositions in the Web of Things using Complex Event Processing

Following the vision of the Internet of Things, physical world entities are integrated into virtual world things. Things are expected to become active participants in business and social processes. Then, the Internet of Things could benefit from the Web Service architecture like today’s Web does, so Future ser-vice-oriented Internet things will offer their functionality via service-enabled in-terfaces. In previous work, we demonstrated the need of considering the behav-iour of things to develop applications in a more rigorous way, and we proposed a lightweight model for representing such behaviour. Our methodology relies on the service-oriented paradigm and extends the DPWS profile to specify the order with which things can receive messages. We also proposed a static verifi-cation technique to check whether a mashup of things respects the behaviour, specified at design-time, of the composed things. However, a change in the be-haviour of a thing may cause that some compositions do not fulfill its behaviour anymore. Moreover, given that a thing can receive requests from instances of different mashups at run-time, these requests could violate the behaviour of that thing, even though each mashup fulfills such behaviour, due to the change of state of the thing. To address these issues, we present a proposal based on me-diation techniques and complex event processing to detect and inhibit invalid invocations, so things only receive requests compatible with their behaviour.Work partially supported by projects TIN2008-05932, TIN2012-35669, CSD2007-0004 funded by Spanish Ministry MINECO and FEDER; P11-TIC-7659 funded by Andalusian Government; and Universidad de Málaga, Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Microservice Transition and its Granularity Problem: A Systematic Mapping Study

Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more reliable computing. The transition to microservices has been highly motivated by the need for better alignment of technical design decisions with improving value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper, we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates various views, approaches and activities that commonly assist in the transition to microservices. The study aims to provide a better understanding of the transition; it also contributes a working definition of the transition and technical activities underlying it. We term the transition and technical activities leading to microservice architectures as microservitization. We then shed light on a fundamental problem of microservitization: microservice granularity and reasoning about its adaptation as first-class entities. This study reviews state-of-the-art and -practice related to reasoning about microservice granularity; it reviews modelling approaches, aspects considered, guidelines and processes used to reason about microservice granularity. This study identifies opportunities for future research and development related to reasoning about microservice granularity.Comment: 36 pages including references, 6 figures, and 3 table

Comparative Study on Agile software development methodologies

Today-s business environment is very much dynamic, and organisations are constantly changing their software requirements to adjust with new environment. They also demand for fast delivery of software products as well as for accepting changing requirements. In this aspect, traditional plan-driven developments fail to meet up these requirements. Though traditional software development methodologies, such as life cycle-based structured and object oriented approaches, continue to dominate the systems development few decades and much research has done in traditional methodologies, Agile software development brings its own set of novel challenges that must be addressed to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of the valuable software. It is a set of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development process, where requirements and development evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams that allows rapid delivery of high quality software to meet customer needs and also accommodate changes in the requirements. In this paper, we significantly identify and describe the major factors, that Agile development approach improves software development process to meet the rapid changing business environments. We also provide a brief comparison of agile development methodologies with traditional systems development methodologies, and discuss current state of adopting agile methodologies. We speculate that from the need to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of the valuable software, Agile software development is emerged as an alternative to traditional plan-based software development methods. The purpose of this paper, is to provide an in-depth understanding, the major benefits of agile development approach to software development industry, as well as provide a comparison study report of ASDM over TSDM.Comment: 25 pages, 25 images, 86 references used, with authors biographie

Distributed software development in a financial services organisation

The outsourcing of IS functionality to offshore development firms has been a growth industry that has blossomed over the last 10 years. This is as a result of organisations, seeking to optimise costs, mitigate risks, and achieve greater return on shareholder value by delegating the delivery of business information systems and applications to third party vendors. At the same time, distributed approaches to software development has arisen, there has been a growing interest in the applicability of lightweight or Agile development methodologies. As such, this paper this paper discusses experiences of a European Financial Services firm in outsourcing, and subsequently offshoring, two of its IT projects to vendor firms in India, where Agile approaches were used. The authors provide a model of the financial firm’s critical success factors presented as a frame of reference for others interested and involved in this topical area