Introducing Team Coordination Framework to Support Globally Distributed Teams for Pakistani Software Industry

Collaborative effort is required in DSD (Distributed Software Development) in order to develop software in manageable components. Immense effort is taking place due to the cultural, geographical and temporal distances among project teams in Pakistani Software Industry to this end. The purpose of this study is to propose a solution during DSD that will help the distributed teams in coordinating their activities. Our solution enhances the management associated activities and assists in optimal usage of team coordination in dispersed settings. The method that we used is single case study type, which involved distributed software business to assess the usefulness and efficiency related to Pakistan’s DSD industries, and has shown strong tendency of participants towards the effectiveness of proposed team coordination framework. Results indicate that the predictable solution will look up the group management, which is considered as a vigorous issue of Pakistani DSD industry. Furthermore, it will assist in resolving the problems of team coordination in distributed situation. One of the most significant current discussion about the proposed solution suggested that it helps in human communication methods team coordination in a distributed environment

A tool framework for deriving the application architecture for global software development projects

In order to meet the communication, coordination and control requirements of distributed Global Software Development (GSD) teams, it is necessary to define a proper software architecture. Designing a GSD architecture, however, involves a multitude of design decisions that are related in different ways. As such, it is not trivial for the architect to design a system that meets the different GSD concerns. To assist the architect in designing a suitable GSD architecture we propose the tool framework Global Architect. The tool framework is based on a common meta-model for GSD and a question framework, which includes a predefined set of questions that are related to abstract design rules for designing GSD systems. Based on the answers provided to the questions of the question framework, the tool automatically selects and instantiates the necessary rules and generates the GSD architecture. Global Architect has been applied to design the GSD architecture for a real industrial project of Cybersoft, a leading GSD company in Turkey

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

Applying Genetic Algorithms for Software Design and Project Planning

Today's software systems are growing in size and complexity. This means not only increased complexity in developing software systems, but also increase in the budget and completion time. This trend will lead to a situation where traditional manual software engineering practices are not sufficient to develop and evolve software systems in an economic and timely manner. Automated support can aid software engineers in reducing the time-to-market and improving the quality of the software. This thesis work explores the application of genetic algorithms for automated software architecture design and project planning.Software architecture design and project planning are non-trivial and challenging tasks. This thesis applies genetic algorithms to introduce automation into these tasks. The proposed genetic algorithm exploits reusable solutions, such as design patterns, architecture styles and application specific solutions for transforming a given initial rudimentary model into detailed design. The architectures are evaluated using multiple quality attributes, such as modifiability, efficiency and complexity. The fitness function encompasses the knowledge required for evaluating the architectures according to multiple quality attributes. The output from the genetic algorithm is an architecture proposal optimized with respect to multiple quality attributes.A genetic algorithm has also been devised for assigning work across teams located in distributed sites. The genetic algorithm takes information about the target system and the development organization as input and produces a set of work distribution and schedule plans optimized with respect to cost and duration objectives. The fitness function considers the differences in teams and barriers created by global dispersion into account in evaluating the work assignment. In addition, the genetic algorithm also takes solutions that ease or hamper distributed development into account in allocating the work. The genetic algorithm has been further extended with Pareto optimality to find a set of suitable work distribution proposals in a tradeoff between project cost and duration. In the experiments, an electronic home control system was developed by a set of different organizations structures. The results demonstrate that the proposed genetic algorithm can create reasonable work distribution proposals that conform to the general assumptions about the nature of cost and project completion time, i.e., cost of the project can be reduced at the expense of project completion time and vice-versa.In addition, variations have been made to the genetic algorithm approach to software architecture design. To accelerate the genetic algorithm towards multi-objective solutions, a quality farms approach has been developed. The approach uses the idea of cross breeding, where different individuals that are good with respect to one quality objective are combined for producing software architecture proposals that are good in multiple objectives. Also, to explore the suitability of other methods for software architecture synthesis, a constraint satisfaction approach has been developed. The approach models the software architecture design problem as a constraint satisfaction and optimization problem and solves it using constraint satisfaction techniques. This approach can provide rationale about why certain decisions are chosen in the proposed architecture proposals.Tool support for genetic algorithm-based architecture design and work planning approaches has been proposed. It facilitates an end user to give input, view and analyze the results of the developed genetic algorithm based approaches. The tool also provides support for semi-automated architecture design, where a human architect can guide the genetic algorithm towards optimal solutions. An empirical study has also been performed. It suggests that the quality of the proposals produced through semiautomated architecture design is roughly at the level of senior software engineering students. Furthermore, the project manager can interact with the tool and perform whatif analysis for choosing the suitable work distribution for the project at hand