From software architecture descriptions to object-oriented designs

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is becoming a dominant approach for developing distributed enterprise-wide applications. One of the reasons for SOA’s extended use is its capacity to rapidly build applications by assembling alreadyimplemented and Internet-accessible services, which allows software organizations to hasten development of distributed applications and their consequent time-tomarket. However, this approach to develop SOA applications results unsuitable for particular organizations with high-priority and critical demands of internal control, security, flexibility, confidentiality and data integrity of their services, since the development of core functionality may be jeopardized by either uncertainty or changing environment. Although many efforts have focused mainly on facilitating discovering of services, and the outsourcing and reuse of them in SOA-based applications, little attention has been paid to aiding designers in developing services associated with business goals and quality-attribute properties. Moreover, quality-attribute properties of the service assemblies have been disregarded, which often leads to mismatches between the quality-attribute behavior prescribed by the SOA and the one resulting after its implementation. (Párrafo extraído del texto a modo de resumen)Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

From software architecture descriptions to object-oriented designs

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is becoming a dominant approach for developing distributed enterprise-wide applications. One of the reasons for SOA’s extended use is its capacity to rapidly build applications by assembling alreadyimplemented and Internet-accessible services, which allows software organizations to hasten development of distributed applications and their consequent time-tomarket. However, this approach to develop SOA applications results unsuitable for particular organizations with high-priority and critical demands of internal control, security, flexibility, confidentiality and data integrity of their services, since the development of core functionality may be jeopardized by either uncertainty or changing environment. Although many efforts have focused mainly on facilitating discovering of services, and the outsourcing and reuse of them in SOA-based applications, little attention has been paid to aiding designers in developing services associated with business goals and quality-attribute properties. Moreover, quality-attribute properties of the service assemblies have been disregarded, which often leads to mismatches between the quality-attribute behavior prescribed by the SOA and the one resulting after its implementation. (Párrafo extraído del texto a modo de resumen)Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Razonamiento basado en casos para la materialización de arquitecturas orientadas a servicios

La Arquitectura Orientada a Servicios (SOA) se ha convertido en un paradigma dominante para el desarrollo software distribuido. La mayoría de las organizaciones explotan SOA mediante el descubrimiento y la reutilización de servicios accesible a través de Internet. Sin embargo, determinadas organizaciones necesitan el control interno de las aplicaciones e implementarlas con determinados atributos de calidad. La implementación de una SOA teniendo en cuenta atributos de calidad (por ejemplo, performance, interoperabilidad, seguridad, etc.) requiere que los diseñadores exploren soluciones alternativas; esto resulta una tarea que consume mucho tiempo y es propensa a errores, incluso para diseñadores expertos. La elección de una alternativa de implementación que no tiene en cuenta los principales atributos de calidad del sistema puede dar lugar a desajustes entre el comportamiento prescrito por la arquitectura y el exhibido durante su ejecución real, con un impacto negativo en el software. Esta elección es realizada a menudo por expertos que generalmente buscan soluciones ya existentes que han sido adecuadas en contextos similares. Por este motivo, este trabajo propone un enfoque de Razonamiento Basado en Casos (CBR) para asistir a los diseñadores en la exploración de alternativas de diseño de una SOA, que utiliza el conocimiento sobre los atributos de calidad como las principales guías de materialización hacia diseños detallados orientados a objetos. Los resultados preliminares sobre un caso de estudio demuestran la viabilidad del enfoque propuesto.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Razonamiento basado en casos para la materialización de arquitecturas orientadas a servicios

La Arquitectura Orientada a Servicios (SOA) se ha convertido en un paradigma dominante para el desarrollo software distribuido. La mayoría de las organizaciones explotan SOA mediante el descubrimiento y la reutilización de servicios accesible a través de Internet. Sin embargo, determinadas organizaciones necesitan el control interno de las aplicaciones e implementarlas con determinados atributos de calidad. La implementación de una SOA teniendo en cuenta atributos de calidad (por ejemplo, performance, interoperabilidad, seguridad, etc.) requiere que los diseñadores exploren soluciones alternativas; esto resulta una tarea que consume mucho tiempo y es propensa a errores, incluso para diseñadores expertos. La elección de una alternativa de implementación que no tiene en cuenta los principales atributos de calidad del sistema puede dar lugar a desajustes entre el comportamiento prescrito por la arquitectura y el exhibido durante su ejecución real, con un impacto negativo en el software. Esta elección es realizada a menudo por expertos que generalmente buscan soluciones ya existentes que han sido adecuadas en contextos similares. Por este motivo, este trabajo propone un enfoque de Razonamiento Basado en Casos (CBR) para asistir a los diseñadores en la exploración de alternativas de diseño de una SOA, que utiliza el conocimiento sobre los atributos de calidad como las principales guías de materialización hacia diseños detallados orientados a objetos. Los resultados preliminares sobre un caso de estudio demuestran la viabilidad del enfoque propuesto.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

A planning approach to the automated synthesis of template-based process models

The design-time specification of flexible processes can be time-consuming and error-prone, due to the high number of tasks involved and their context-dependent nature. Such processes frequently suffer from potential interference among their constituents, since resources are usually shared by the process participants and it is difficult to foresee all the potential tasks interactions in advance. Concurrent tasks may not be independent from each other (e.g., they could operate on the same data at the same time), resulting in incorrect outcomes. To tackle these issues, we propose an approach for the automated synthesis of a library of template-based process models that achieve goals in dynamic and partially specified environments. The approach is based on a declarative problem definition and partial-order planning algorithms for template generation. The resulting templates guarantee sound concurrency in the execution of their activities and are reusable in a variety of partially specified contextual environments. As running example, a disaster response scenario is given. The approach is backed by a formal model and has been tested in experiment

Avoiding WSDL Bad Practices in Code-First Web Services

Service-Oriented Computing allows software developers to structure applications as a set of standalone and reusable components called services. The common technological choice for materializing these services is Web Services, whose exposed functionality is described by using the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Methodologically, Web Services are often built by first implementing their behavior and then generating the corresponding WSDL document via automatic tools. Good WSDL designs are crucial to derive reusable Web Services. We found that there is a high correlation between well-known Object-Oriented metrics taken in the code implementing services and the occurrences of bad design practices in their WSDL documents. This paper shows that some refactorings performed early when developing Web Services can greatly improve the quality of generated WSDL documents.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ

Aligning business processes and IT of multiple collaborating organisations

When multiple organisations want to collaborate with one another they have to integrate their business processes. This requires aligning the collaborative business processes and the underlying IT (Information Technology). Realizing the required alignment is, however, not trivial and is the subject of this thesis. We approached the issue of alignment in three steps. First, we explored business-IT alignment problems in detail in a real-life business case. This is done in order to clarify what alignment of business processes and IT systems across a collaboration network entails. Second, we provided a business-IT alignment framework called BITA* (pronounce bita-star). The framework provides modelling abstractions for alignment. Third, we applied the framework in two real-life case studies, including the real-life business case used in step one. By applying the framework in practice we showed that the framework can, in fact, help to address the business-IT alignment problems that we identified in the first step. The work presented in this thesis is conducted over a number of years in the context of four large EU sponsored research projects. The projects focused on alignment problems in two very distinct application areas. Two projects were about realizing transparency systems for meat supply chains and constitute the first case study. The other two projects were about realizing multidisciplinary modelling collaboration systems and constitute the second case study. Although the projects were conducted sequentially the research questions were addressed iteratively over the years. The research methodology that shows how the framework is designed and how the case studies are applied is discussed in detail in chapter 2. In chapter 3 we present BITA*, a Business-IT Alignment framework for multiple collaborating organisations. The main challenges in designing BITA* have been what models to consider for alignment and how to compare them in order to make explicit statements about alignment. We addressed this problem by introducing allocation and alignment modelling constructs to help the alignment process, and the concept of business collaboration model to represent the models that have to be aligned. We identified three groups of stakeholders for whom we designed explicit design viewpoints and associated allocation and alignment models. The Business Process to Business Process (BP2BP) alignment viewpoint is designed for business analysts who have to align diverse business collaboration process models. The IT to IT (IT2IT) alignment viewpoint is designed for software architects to align the distribution of data and IT systems across a collaboration network. The Business Process to IT (BP2IT) alignment viewpoint is designed for an interdisciplinary team of business analysts and software architects who have to align the different ways of supporting business collaboration processes with distributed IT system. An essential element of this thesis has been elaborating how business-IT alignment problems occur in the context of multi-organisational collaboration. The case studies were used to demonstrate business-IT alignment concerns. Particularly, the details of the first case study presented in chapters 4 and 5 were used in chapter 3 to help derive the alignment framework. The case study presented an ideal problem scenario since realizing transparency across supply chains is intrinsically a collaborative effort. The second case study was used to enhance the validity of our approach. The results of the second case study are presented in chapter 6. The alignment framework was designed during the iterative process we followed when realizing a generic transparency system for meat supply chains. To realize the required generic transparency system we needed a reference architecture. To derive the reference architecture we adapted an already existing and broadly-accepted generic reference architecture. We have to adapt the generic reference architecture in order to address specific requirements of the meat sector that were not considered in the generic reference architecture. The adaptation process made it clear that we needed models for representing business collaborations. We, therefore, introduced the notion of business collaboration model, which we used both to model reference architectures and to adapt them. Adaptation required aligning the generic reference architecture with the diverse business collaboration models adopted by the organisations that have to collaborate. The alignment framework is thus used for adapting a generic reference architecture in order to create a reference architecture that the collaborating organisations can, and are willing to, adopt. We identified three types of business collaboration models: business collaboration process model, business collaboration IT model, and a model for representing the relationship between these two. A business collaboration process model is a business process model that spans a collaboration network. A business collaboration IT model is a model of the distribution of the IT across the collaboration network. A business collaboration process-IT model is a model of the relationships between the elements of the business collaboration processes and the elements of the distributed IT. Each organisation is considered to adopt its own business collaboration models. For instance, different actors in meat supply chains have different views on how chain-wide transparency should be realized. Which business processes and IT systems each organisation has to deploy and use depends on the business collaboration models each food operator adopts. If two different food operators adopt the same set of business collaboration models, they are aligned; otherwise they are misaligned. Hence, alignment entails comparing the different business collaboration models adopted by the participating organisations. The results of the alignment process are explicit statements about how convergent or divergent the organisations are from the chosen generic reference architecture. The explicit statements of alignment guide how best the generic and the corresponding organisational business collaboration models can be adapted to create a better state of alignment. To further enhance the validity of the overall approach the second case study was conducted. The second case study was a retrospective investigation of two past research projects focusing on aligning environmental modelling processes and IT systems. A retrospective case study was chosen because launching a new business-IT alignment project involving multiple collaborating organisations was not feasible. The projects were undertaken to support the European Water Framework Directive, which mandated, among other things, participatory, multidisciplinary, river-basin wide and model-based studies to manage the water resources of Europe. The directive particularly required a collaborative approach to building environmental decision support systems and to deriving methodologies for applying existing decision support systems. We applied BITA* to aligning environmental modelling processes and IT systems in order to evaluate the suitability of the framework to addressing alignment problems in other application areas. The contributions of the thesis are summarized in chapter 7. The contributions include a number of design artefacts, which can be grouped into four categories: constructs, models, methods, and instantiations. The contribution in the first category includes the conceptualization of allocation and alignment. The contributions in the second category include allocation and alignment models, and reference architectures. Allocation models are representations of business collaboration models in a form that can be compared and are the basis for alignment modelling. The main contribution in the third category is the BITA* systematic approach to alignment modelling. The contributions in the fourth category are the software systems developed with the help of the reference architectures.</p