A taxonomy of tool-related issues affecting the adoption of model-driven engineering

Although poor tool support is often blamed for the low uptake of model-driven engineering (MDE), recent studies have shown that adoption problems are as likely to be down to social and organizational factors as with tooling issues. This article discusses the impact of tools on MDE adoption and practice and does so while placing tooling within a broader organizational context. The article revisits previous data on MDE use in industry (19 in-depth interviews with MDE practitioners) and reanalyzes that data through the specific lens of MDE tools in an attempt to identify and categorize the issues that users had with the tools they adopted. In addition, the article presents new data: 20 new interviews in two specific companies—and analyzes it through the same lens. A key contribution of the paper is a loose taxonomy of tool-related considerations, based on empirical industry data, which can be used to reflect on the tooling landscape as well as inform future research on MDE tools

A canonical software process family based on the Unified Process

The Unified Process (UP) is a processes framework widely known and used by the software industry and academic community. UP was developed under the conception of a universal application, but even a single process is not appropriate to address all development projects since optimal process depends on the particularities of each project or organization. Frequently, many process components need to be adapted to the organization or project needs, a complex task because the experience and knowledge required. Perform adaptation in an inappropriate way is prone to error due to the difficulties for taking tailoring decisions. The paper goal is proposing a canonical software processes family based on the Unified Process to support software process tailoring. Our methodology was based on the meta-process CASPER to build a software process family and we use the Case Study method as a strategy for validating the canonical process family empirically. As a result, we show a canonical software processes family, which will serve as a platform for determining a process family based on Unified process in a small software organization. This canonical family has the advantage that uses a tailoring mechanism following a transformation strategy that encapsulates tailoring decisions in order to systematize this activity. In this work, we show the initial results in the applicability of a canonical software process family as base in the building the software process families based on UP in the small companies context, and also we conclude that the UP is a process framework with spread spectrum, which limited its formulation like a general software process family, due to that a process family requires determining carefully the application domain known as software process family scop

Towards a tool-supported approach for collaborative process modeling and enactment

International audienceIn software engineering, as in any collective endeavor, understanding and supporting collaboration is a major concern. Unfortunately, the main concepts of popular process formalisms are not always adequate to describe collaboration. We extend the Software & System Process Engineering Meta-Model (SPEM) by introducing concepts needed to represent precise and dynamic collaboration setups that practitioners create to address ever-changing challenges. Our goal is to give practitioners the ability to express evolving understanding about collaboration in a formalism suited for easy representation and tool-provided assistance. Our work is based on a collaborative process metamodel we have developed. In this paper, we first present a meta-process for process modeling and enactment, which we apply to our collaborative process metamodel. Then we describe the implementation of a suitable process model editor, and a project plan generator from process models

Mining software development process variations

Process tailoring aims to customize a software process to better suit the specific needs of an organization when executing a software project or due to a social context in which the process is inserted. Tailoring happens, in general, through variations in the process elements, such as activities, artifacts, and control flows. This paper aims to introduce a technique that uses process mining to uncover elements from the software process that are candidates for tailoring. The proposed approach analyzes the execution logs from several process instances that share a common standard process. As a result, execution traces that differ from the standard process flow are identified and assessed to uncover their variable elements. The proposed technique was evaluated with data extracted from a real software development scenario when a large system was under development for a set of Brazilian Federal Institutes of Education, Science and Technology.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

User Experience for Model-Driven Engineering : Challenges and Future Directions

Since its infancy, Model Driven Engineering (MDE) research has primarily focused on technical issues. Although it is becoming increasingly common for MDE research papers to evaluate their theoretical and practical solutions, extensive usability studies are still uncommon. We observe a scarcity of User eXperience (UX)-related research in the MDE community, and posit that many existing tools and languages have room for improvement with respect to UX [26], [44], [37], where UX is a key focus area in the software development industry. We consider this gap a fundamental problem that needs to be addressed by the community if MDE is to gain widespread use. In this vision paper, we explore how and where UX fits into MDE by considering motivating use cases that revolve around different dimensions of integration: model integration, tool integration, and integration between process and tool support. Based on the literature and our collective experience in research and industrial collaborations, we propose future directions for addressing these challenges

Using an Architecture Description Language to Model a Large- Scale Information System – An Industrial Experience Report

An organisation that had developed a large Information System wanted to embark on a programme of significant evolution for the system. As a precursor to this, it was decided to create a comprehensive architectural description. T his undertaking faced a number of challenges, including a low general awareness of software modelling and software architecture practices . The approach taken for this project included the definition of a simple, specific, architecture description language. This paper describes the experiences of the project and the ADL created as part of it

Engineering secure systems: Models, patterns and empirical validation

Several development approaches have been proposed to handle the growing complexity of software system design. The most popular methods use models as the main artifacts to construct and maintain. The desired role of such models is to facilitate, systematize and standardize the construction of software-based systems. In our work, we propose a model-driven engineering (MDE) methodological approach associated with a pattern-based approach to support the development of secure software systems. We address the idea of using patterns to describe solutions for security as recurring security problems in specific design contexts and present a well-proven generic scheme for their solutions. The proposed approach is based on metamodeling and model transformation techniques to define patterns at different levels of abstraction and generate different representations according to the target domain concerns, respectively. Moreover, we describe an operational architecture for development tools to support the approach. Finally, an empirical evaluation of the proposed approach is presented through a practical application to a use case in the metrology domain with strong security requirements, which is followed by a description of a survey performed among domain experts to better understand their perceptions regarding our approach

How to increase efficiency with the certification of process compliance

Certification as well as self-assessment of safety-critical systems is an expensive and time-consuming activity due to the necessity of providing numerous deliverables. These deliverables can be process-related or product-related. Process-related deliverables are aimed at showing compliance with normative documents (e.g., safety standards), which impose specific requirements on the development process (e.g., reference models for the safety life-cycles). In this lecture, we limit our attention to process-related deliverables and we propose a solution aimed at reducing time and cost related to their provision. Our solution consists of the combination of three approaches: the safety-oriented process line engineering approach, the process-based argumentation line approach, and the model driven certification-oriented approach. More specifically, we define how these three approaches are combined and which techniques, tools and guidelines should be used to implement the resulting approach. Then, via small-sized but realistic process-fragments, we illustrate it. Finally, we present a roadmap for future research directions.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech