297,319 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
The P3 platform: an approach and software system for developing diagrammatic model-based methods in design research
Many issues in design and design management have been explored by building models which capture the relationships between different aspects of the problem at hand. These models require computer support to construct and analyse. However, appropriate modelling tools can be time-consuming to develop in a research environment. Reflecting upon five design research projects, this paper proposes that such projects can be facilitated by recognising the iterative and tightly-coupled nature of research and tool development, and by attempting to minimise the effort of solution prototyping within this process. Our approach is enabled by a software platform which can be rapidly configured to implement many conceivable modelling approaches. This configurability is complemented by an emerging library of modelling and analysis approaches tailored to explore design process systems. The platform-based approach enables any mix of modelling concepts to be easily created. We propose it could thus help researchers to explore a wide range of questions without being constrained to existing conventions for modelling â or for model integration
How software engineering research aligns with design science: A review
Background: Assessing and communicating software engineering research can be
challenging. Design science is recognized as an appropriate research paradigm
for applied research but is seldom referred to in software engineering.
Applying the design science lens to software engineering research may improve
the assessment and communication of research contributions. Aim: The aim of
this study is 1) to understand whether the design science lens helps summarize
and assess software engineering research contributions, and 2) to characterize
different types of design science contributions in the software engineering
literature. Method: In previous research, we developed a visual abstract
template, summarizing the core constructs of the design science paradigm. In
this study, we use this template in a review of a set of 38 top software
engineering publications to extract and analyze their design science
contributions. Results: We identified five clusters of papers, classifying them
according to their alignment with the design science paradigm. Conclusions: The
design science lens helps emphasize the theoretical contribution of research
output---in terms of technological rules---and reflect on the practical
relevance, novelty, and rigor of the rules proposed by the research.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figure
Aligning a Service Provisioning Model of a Service-Oriented System with the ITIL v.3 Life Cycle
Bringing together the ICT and the business layer of a service-oriented system
(SoS) remains a great challenge. Few papers tackle the management of SoS from
the business and organizational point of view. One solution is to use the
well-known ITIL v.3 framework. The latter enables to transform the organization
into a service-oriented organizational which focuses on the value provided to
the service customers. In this paper, we align the steps of the service
provisioning model with the ITIL v.3 processes. The alignment proposed should
help organizations and IT teams to integrate their ICT layer, represented by
the SoS, and their business layer, represented by ITIL v.3. One main advantage
of this combined use of ITIL and a SoS is the full service orientation of the
company.Comment: This document is the technical work of a conference paper submitted
to the International Conference on Exploring Service Science 1.5 (IESS 2015
Recovering Architectural Variability of a Family of Product Variants
A Software Product Line (SPL) aims at applying a pre-planned systematic reuse
of large-grained software artifacts to increase the software productivity and
reduce the development cost. The idea of SPL is to analyze the business domain
of a family of products to identify the common and the variable parts between
the products. However, it is common for companies to develop, in an ad-hoc
manner (e.g. clone and own), a set of products that share common
functionalities and differ in terms of others. Thus, many recent research
contributions are proposed to re-engineer existing product variants to a SPL.
Nevertheless, these contributions are mostly focused on managing the
variability at the requirement level. Very few contributions address the
variability at the architectural level despite its major importance. Starting
from this observation, we propose, in this paper, an approach to reverse
engineer the architecture of a set of product variants. Our goal is to identify
the variability and dependencies among architectural-element variants at the
architectural level. Our work relies on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to
analyze the variability. To validate the proposed approach, we experimented on
two families of open-source product variants; Mobile Media and Health Watcher.
The results show that our approach is able to identify the architectural
variability and the dependencies
An Analysis of Composability and Composition Anomalies
The separation of concerns principle aims at decomposing a given design problem into concerns that are mapped to multiple independent software modules. The application of this principle eases the composition of the concerns and as such supports composability. Unfortunately, a clean separation (and composition of concerns) at the design level does not always imply the composability of the concerns at the implementation level. The composability might be reduced due to limitations of the implementation abstractions and composition mechanisms. The paper introduces the notion of composition anomaly to describe a general set of unexpected composition problems that arise when mapping design concerns to implementation concerns. To distinguish composition anomalies from other composition problems the requirements for composability at the design level is provided. The ideas are illustrated for a distributed newsgroup system
Design Ltd.: Renovated Myths for the Development of Socially Embedded Technologies
This paper argues that traditional and mainstream mythologies, which have
been continually told within the Information Technology domain among designers
and advocators of conceptual modelling since the 1960s in different fields of
computing sciences, could now be renovated or substituted in the mould of more
recent discourses about performativity, complexity and end-user creativity that
have been constructed across different fields in the meanwhile. In the paper,
it is submitted that these discourses could motivate IT professionals in
undertaking alternative approaches toward the co-construction of
socio-technical systems, i.e., social settings where humans cooperate to reach
common goals by means of mediating computational tools. The authors advocate
further discussion about and consolidation of some concepts in design research,
design practice and more generally Information Technology (IT) development,
like those of: task-artifact entanglement, universatility (sic) of End-User
Development (EUD) environments, bricolant/bricoleur end-user, logic of
bricolage, maieuta-designers (sic), and laissez-faire method to socio-technical
construction. Points backing these and similar concepts are made to promote
further discussion on the need to rethink the main assumptions underlying IT
design and development some fifty years later the coming of age of software and
modern IT in the organizational domain.Comment: This is the peer-unreviewed of a manuscript that is to appear in D.
Randall, K. Schmidt, & V. Wulf (Eds.), Designing Socially Embedded
Technologies: A European Challenge (2013, forthcoming) with the title
"Building Socially Embedded Technologies: Implications on Design" within an
EUSSET editorial initiative (www.eusset.eu/
A characteristics framework for Semantic Information Systems Standards
Semantic Information Systems (IS) Standards play a critical role in the development of the networked economy. While their importance is undoubted by all stakeholdersâsuch as businesses, policy makers, researchers, developersâthe current state of research leaves a number of questions unaddressed. Terminological confusion exists around the notions of âbusiness semanticsâ, âbusiness-to-business interoperabilityâ, and âinteroperability standardsâ amongst others. And, moreover, a comprehensive understanding about the characteristics of Semantic IS Standards is missing. The paper addresses this gap in literature by developing a characteristics framework for Semantic IS Standards. Two case studies are used to check the applicability of the framework in a âreal-lifeâ context. The framework lays the foundation for future research in an important field of the IS discipline and supports practitioners in their efforts to analyze, compare, and evaluate Semantic IS Standard
Requirements engineering: a review and research agenda
This paper reviews the area of requirements engineering. It
outlines the key concerns to which attention should be
devoted by both practitioners, who wish to "reengineer" their
development processes, and academics, seeking intellectual
challenges. It presents an assessment of the state-of-the-art
and draws conclusions in the form of a research agenda
- âŚ