Support for collaborative component-based software engineering

Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described. This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject. In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice. Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects. Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools). Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying, assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing. Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation, empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further advances

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 – or for model integration

A Hybrid Approach Using RUP and Scrum as a Software Development Strategy

According to some researchers, a hybrid approach can help optimize the software development lifecycle by combining two or more methodologies. RUP and Scrum are two methodologies that successfully complement each other to improve the software development process. However, the literature has shown only few case studies on exactly how organizations are successfully applying this hybrid methodology and the benefits and issues found during the process. To help fill this literature gap, the main purpose of this thesis is to describe the development of the Lobbyist Registration and Tracking System for the City of Jacksonville case study where a hybrid approach, that integrates RUP and Scrum, was implemented to develop a major application to provide additional empirical evidence and enrich the knowledge in this under-investigated field. The objective of this research was fulfilled since the case study was described in detail with the specific processes implemented using RUP and Scrum within the context of the IBM Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management Solution. The results may help researchers and practitioners who are looking for evidence about conducting a hybrid approach. However, more case studies that successfully combine RUP and Scrum need to be developed in order to have enough empirical evidence

Integrated lifecycle requirements information management in construction

Effective management of information about client requirements in construction projects lifecycle can contribute to high construction productivity; within budget and schedule, and improve the quality of built facilities and service delivery. Traditionally, requirements management has been focused at the early stages of the construction lifecycle process where elicited client requirements information is used as the basis for design. Management of client requirements does not extend to the later phases. Client requirements often evolve and change dramatically over a facility’s life. Changing client requirements is one of the principal factors that contribute to delays and budget overruns of construction projects. This results in claims, disputes and client dissatisfaction. The problems of current requirements management process also include: lack of integrated and collaborative working with requirements; lack of integrated requirements information flow between the various heterogeneous systems used in the lifecycle processes, and between the multiple stakeholders; inefficient and ineffective coordination of changes within the lifecycle processes; manual checking of dependencies between changing requirements to facilitate assessment of cost and time impact of changes. The aim of the research is to specify a better approach to requirements information management to help construction organisations reduce operational cost and time in product development and service delivery; whilst increasing performance and productivity, and realising high quality of built facilities. In order to achieve the aim and the formulated objectives, firstly, a detailed review of literature on related work was conducted. Secondly, the research designed, developed and conducted three case studies to investigate the state-of-the-art of managing client requirements information. A combination of multiple data collection methods was applied which included observations, interviews, focus group and questionnaires. Following this, the data was analysed and problems were identified; the necessity for a lifecycle approach to managing the requirements information emerged. (Continues...)

Chapter 4 Traceability in the Co-evolution of Architectural Requirements and Design

Abstract Requirements and architectural design specifications can be conflicting and inconsistent, especially during the design period when requirements and architectural design are co-evolving. One reason is that stakeholders do not have up-to-date knowledge of each other’s work to fully understand potential conflicts and inconsistencies. Specifications are often documented in a natural language, which also makes it difficult for tracing related information automatically. In this chapter, we introduce a general-purpose ontology that we have developed to address this problem. We demonstrate an implementation of semantic wiki that supports traceability of co-evolving requirements specifications and architecture design. Let us begin by considering a typical software architecting scenario: A team of business analysts and users work on a new software system in an organization. The business analysts and users document the business goals, use-case scenarios, system and data requirements in a requirements document. The team of software and system architects studie

A taxonomy for key performance indicators management

In recent years, research on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) management has grown exponentially, giving rise to a multitude of heterogeneous approaches addressing any aspect concerning it. In this paper, we plot the landscape of published works related with KPIs management, organizing and synthesizing them by means of a unified taxonomy that encompasses the aspects considered by other proposals, and it captures the overall characteristics of KPIs. Since most of the literature centers on the definition of KPIs, we mainly focus on such an aspect of KPIs management. Our work is intended to provide remarkable benefits such as enhancing the understanding of KPIs management, or helping users decide about the most suitable solution for their requirements

DREAMER : a Design Rationale Environment for Argumentation, Modeling and Engineering Requirements

International audienceRequirements engineering for interactive systems remains a cumbersome task still under-supported by notations, development processes and tools. Indeed, in the field of HCI, the most common practice is to perform user testing to assess the compatibility between the designed system and its intended user. Other approaches such as scenario-based design promote a design process based on the analysis of the actual use of a technology in and activities. Some of them also support a critical element in the development of interactive systems: creativity]. However, these approaches do not provide any support for a) the definition of a set of requirements that have to be fulfilled by the system under design and b) as a consequence for assessing which of these requirements are actually embedded in the system and which ones have been discarded (traceability and coverage aspects). This paper proposes a tool-supported notation for addressing these problems of traceability and coverage of both requirements and design options during the development process of interactive systems. These elements are additionally integrated within a more global approach aiming at providing notations and tools for supporting a rationalized design of interactive systems following a model-based approach. Our approach combines and extends previous work on rational design and requirements engineering. The current contribution, DREAMER, makes possible to relate design options with both functional and non functional requirements. The approach is illustrated by real size case study from large civil aircraft cockpit applications