Guiding the participative design process

International audienceIt is traditional to look to any engineering activity from both the product point of view and the process point of view. The product is the desired result, the process is the route followed to reach the result. Methods were classically focused on the product aspect of systems development and have paid less attention to the description of formally defined ways-of-working. Clearly, there is an important demand on methods and tools where process guidance is offered to provide advice on which activities are appropriate to which situations and how to perform them [Rolland95], [Rolland96], [Downson94], [Wynekoop93]. We propose a way-of-working which intents to provide such a guidance

Listening to micro-business operators: what are their social and educational needs?

This paper discusses issues that had been revealed during 15 in-depth interviews and a subsequent questionnaire survey of 91 micro-business (five or fewer employees) operators in Hamilton, New Zealand. ‘How to support micro-business operators in their efforts to achieve successful, sustainable self-employment within this changing social world?’ has been the guiding research theme. The questionnaire was used to gauge opinions on and the extent of attitudes and feelings about being self-employed that had been revealed during the in-depth interviews and small business literature. This work gives voice to the perspectives of micro-business operators rather than that of experts or small business operators in general. Findings from this research suggest that micro-business operators need to be provided with opportunities for support and education to cope with psychological and social factors, particularly with fears, anxiety and isolation. Further, it appears that support is not available to micro-business operators in a way they can readily engage with. Lack of time appears as a reoccurring theme. Given the global trend towards self employment as a career option in the 21st Century, social policy makers need to be aware of the changing social and education needs and provide support to enhance micro-business start-up, survival and growth by encouraging initiatives that facilitate co-operative relationships and build social skills

Exploiting rules and processes for increasing flexibility in service composition

Recent trends in the use of service oriented architecture for designing, developing, managing, and using distributed applications have resulted in an increasing number of independently developed and physically distributed services. These services can be discovered, selected and composed to develop new applications and to meet emerging user requirements. Service composition is generally defined on the basis of business processes in which the underlying composition logic is guided by specifying control and data flows through Web service interfaces. User demands as well as the services themselves may change over time, which leads to replacing or adjusting the composition logic of previously defined processes. Coping with change is still one of the fundamental problems in current process based composition approaches. In this paper, we exploit declarative and imperative design styles to achieve better flexibility in service composition