Effective decision support for semantic web service selection

The objective of this dissertation is to demonstrate the feasibility of the vision of the Internet of Services based on Semantic Web Services by suggesting an approach to end-user mediated Semantic Web Service selection. Our main contribution is an incremental and interactive approach to requirements elicitation and service selection that is inspired by example critiquing recommender systems. It alternates phases of intermediate service recommendation and phases of informal requirements specification. During that process, the user incrementally develops his service requirements and preferences and finally makes a selection decision. We demonstrate how the requirements elicitation and service selection process can be directed and focused to effectively reduce the system's uncertainty about the user's service requirements and thus to contribute to the efficiency of the service selection process. To acquire information about the actual performance of available services and thus about the risk that is associated with their execution, we propose a flexible feedback system, that leverages reported consumer experiences made in past service interactions. In particular, we provide means that allow to detailedly describe a service's performance with respect to its multiple facets. This is supplemented by a user-adaptive method that effectively assists service consumers in providing such feedback as well as a privacy-preserving technique for feedback propagation. We also demonstrate that available consumer feedback can be effectively exploited to assess the degree and kind of risk that is associated with the execution of an offered service and show how the user can be effectively made aware of this risk. In contrast to many other approaches related to Semantic Web Service technology, we performed an extensive and thorough evaluation of our contribution and documented its results. These show the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach

Potential and limitations of the ISBSG dataset in enhancing software engineering research: A mapping review

Context The International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) maintains a software development repository with over 6000 software projects. This dataset makes it possible to estimate a project s size, effort, duration, and cost. Objective The aim of this study was to determine how and to what extent, ISBSG has been used by researchers from 2000, when the first papers were published, until June of 2012. Method A systematic mapping review was used as the research method, which was applied to over 129 papers obtained after the filtering process. Results The papers were published in 19 journals and 40 conferences. Thirty-five percent of the papers published between years 2000 and 2011 have received at least one citation in journals and only five papers have received six or more citations. Effort variable is the focus of 70.5% of the papers, 22.5% center their research in a variable different from effort and 7% do not consider any target variable. Additionally, in as many as 70.5% of papers, effort estimation is the research topic, followed by dataset properties (36.4%). The more frequent methods are Regression (61.2%), Machine Learning (35.7%), and Estimation by Analogy (22.5%). ISBSG is used as the only support in 55% of the papers while the remaining papers use complementary datasets. The ISBSG release 10 is used most frequently with 32 references. Finally, some benefits and drawbacks of the usage of ISBSG have been highlighted. Conclusion This work presents a snapshot of the existing usage of ISBSG in software development research. ISBSG offers a wealth of information regarding practices from a wide range of organizations, applications, and development types, which constitutes its main potential. However, a data preparation process is required before any analysis. Lastly, the potential of ISBSG to develop new research is also outlined.Fernández Diego, M.; González-Ladrón-De-Guevara, F. (2014). Potential and limitations of the ISBSG dataset in enhancing software engineering research: A mapping review. Information and Software Technology. 56(6):527-544. doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2014.01.003S52754456

Pendekatan Kesamaan Semantik dan Struktur dalam Kasus Penggunaan untuk Mendapatkan Kembali Spesifikasi Kebutuhan Perangkat Lunak

Di dalam pengembangan perangkat lunak berskala besar, terdapat jumlah dokumen kebutuhan perangkat lunak yang sangat banyak dalam sekali proses elisitasi yang mungkin dihasilkan untuk domain yang berbeda dari setiap tim pengembang. Dokumen-dokumen ini mungkin digunakan kembali untuk mengurangi biaya dan waktu guna pengembangan perangkat lunak berikutnya. Oleh karena itu dibutuhkan suatu mekanisme untuk mendapatkan dokumen tersebut kembali yang sesuai dengan kebutuhan pengguna secara efektif dan efisien. Tesis ini mengusulkan suatu pendekatan kesamaan semantik dan struktur dalam deskripsi kasus penggunaaan guna mendapatkan kembali dokumen spesifikasi kebutuhan perangkat lunak. Dari kasus penggunaan yang didapatkan kembali tersebut kemudian dibuat suatu urutan atau ranking kesamaan kasus penggunaan berdasar suatu threshold yang telah didapatkan berdasar nilai kesepakatan tertinggi dengan pakar pada proses pengujian. Pendekatan menggunakan kesamaan semantik pada kata dan kalimat ini merupakan pendekatan yang diajukan sebagai pengganti dari pendekatan sebelumnya yaitu menggunakan term frequency dan keyword atau kata kunci. Metode ini diujicobakan pada percobaan dengan menggunakan 20 kueri deskripsi kasus penggunaan. Tiga skenario yang berbeda disusun untuk menginvestigasi nilai threshold yang ideal, mengetahui perbedaan hasil atau result set dengan pendekatan sebelumnya dan untuk mengetahui efek kombinasi struktur deskripsi kasus penggunaan pada masukan kueri terhadap hasil kueri yang didapatkan. =========================================================== In software industry, there are tremendous number of software requirements documents in effect of large scale of software development. This collections of software requirements documents can be reused in order to cut off the development time and reduce the cost. There is a need to retrieve one or more of those documents which is suitable with the user’s specifications for the new software development. So, if we can retrieve many similar software requirements to a new project, development process will be less costly and less error because the retrieved software requirements can be tailored to the new case with fewer modifications. This thesis presents a methodology to retrieve software requirements documents using structured base of use case description similarity computation. A use case description is used as a query to retrieve similar or exactly the same use cases in the collections repository in order to get the requirement documents to be used in the new software project development. We introduce a semantic similarity computation approach as a substitute of term frequency and keyword approach. We validate the usefulness of our method through the experiment using 20 cases. Three experiment scenario are presented to investigate the ideal threshold value, the retrieval result differences with previous approach and to know the effect of various combinations of structural query to the retrieval result

DREQUS: an approach for the Discovery of REQuirements Using Scenarios

ABSTRACT: Requirements engineering is recognized as a complex cognitive problem-solving process that takes place in an unstructured and poorly-understood problem context. Requirements elicitation is the activity generally regarded as the most crucial step in the requirements engineering process. The term “elicitation” is preferred to “capture”, to avoid the suggestion that requirements are out there to be collected. Information gathered during requirements elicitation often has to be interpreted, analyzed, modeled, and validated before the requirements engineer can feel confident that a complete set of requirements of a system have been obtained. Requirements elicitation comprises the set of activities that enable discovering, understanding, and documenting the goals and motives for building a proposed software system. It also involves identifying the requirements that the resulting system must satisfy in to achieve these goals. The requirements to be elicited may range from modifications to well-understood problems and systems (i.e. software upgrades), to hazy understandings of new problems being automated, to relatively unconstrained requirements that are open to innovation (e.g. mass-market software). Requirements elicitation remains problematic; missing or mistaken requirements still delay projects and cause cost overruns. No firm definition has matured for requirements elicitation in comparison to other areas of requirements engineering. This research is aimed to improve the results of the requirements elicitation process directly impacting the quality of the software products derived from them