The future of AOSE: exploiting SME for a new conception of methodologies

In the last years, the software engineering eld has provided developers with dierent methodologies to support their work. Nevertheless, existing methodologies can hardly meet the requirements of all existing scenarios, which are more and more complex and highly dierentiated. This problem can be faced by applying the Situational Method Engineering (SME) approach, which enables to build appropriate methodologies by composing \fragments" of existing ones. We envision this approach as the future of software engineering in general, and in particular if applied in Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE). This approach has also the valuable advantage of reusing models, solutions, experiences and tools of existing and tested methodologies. In this paper we report three examples of application of the Situational Method Engineering approach in AOSE. We show that this approach can be applied following dierent directions, and in particular: entity-driven, metamodel-driven, and characteristic-driven. To concretely show these directions, we present three examples of methodologies for developing agent systems (one regarding self-organising systems), all constructed composing methodology fragments to meet the scenario requirements

A Conceptual Model of Client-driven Agile Requirements Prioritization: Results of a Case Study

ABSTRACT Requirements (re)prioritization is an essential mechanism of agile development approaches to maximize the value for the clients and to accommodate changing requirements. Yet, in the agile Requirements Engineering (RE) literature, very little is known about how agile (re)prioritization happens in practice. Conceptual models about this process are missing, which, in turn, makes it difficult for both practitioners and researchers to reason about requirements decision-making at inter-iteration time. We did a multiple case study on agile requirements prioritization methods to yield a conceptual model for understanding the inter-iteration prioritization process. The model is derived by using interview data from practitioners in 8 development organizations. Such a model makes explicit the concepts that are used tacitly in the agile requirements prioritization practice and can be used for structuring future empirical investigations about this topic, and for analyzing, supporting, and improving the process in real-life projects

Situational Business Model Developer: A Tool-support for Situation-specific Business Model Development

The development of business models is a challenging task that can be supported with software tools. Here, existing approaches and tools do not focus on the company’s situation in which the development takes place (e.g., financial resources, product type). To tackle this challenge, we used design science research to develop a situation-specific business model development approach that contains three stages: First, existing knowledge in terms of tasks to do (e.g., analyze competitive advantage), and decisions to be made (e.g., social media marketing) are stored in repositories. Second, the knowledge is used to compose a development method based on the company’s situation. Third, the development method is enacted to develop a business model. This demonstration paper presents a tool-support called Situational Business Model Developer that supports all stages of our approach. We release the tool under open-source and evaluate it with a case study on developing business models for mobile apps

Context-Aware Digitalization – Adapting solution development to the organizational context of SMEs

In the context of digital transformation, it is mandatory for most organizations to conduct information systems development (ISD) projects as part of their digitalization and business development journey. One reason that many ISD projects fail is lack of knowledge about which ISD method (ISDM) is most suitable for the project at hand and how to adapt it to reflect the respective business development context. These problems especially occur in small and medium enterprises (SMEs), as they often lack specific methodological skills and project governance experience – so they cannot even manage ISD consultancies that promise to support them in their digital transformation. In this conceptual paper, we present the design of a method for selecting and using ISDM for SMEs. It considers both the context dependency and missing project governance skills of SMEs. The main components of the proposed method link the knowledge areas of business development and ISD: business context evaluation, ISDM selection and ISDM management

Microservices Architecture Enables DevOps: an Experience Report on Migration to a Cloud-Native Architecture

This article reports on experiences and lessons learned during incremental migration and architectural refactoring of a commercial mobile back end as a service to microservices architecture. It explains how the researchers adopted DevOps and how this facilitated a smooth migration

Enabling High-Level Application Development for the Internet of Things

Application development in the Internet of Things (IoT) is challenging because it involves dealing with a wide range of related issues such as lack of separation of concerns, and lack of high-level of abstractions to address both the large scale and heterogeneity. Moreover, stakeholders involved in the application development have to address issues that can be attributed to different life-cycles phases. when developing applications. First, the application logic has to be analyzed and then separated into a set of distributed tasks for an underlying network. Then, the tasks have to be implemented for the specific hardware. Apart from handling these issues, they have to deal with other aspects of life-cycle such as changes in application requirements and deployed devices. Several approaches have been proposed in the closely related fields of wireless sensor network, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and software engineering in general to address the above challenges. However, existing approaches only cover limited subsets of the above mentioned challenges when applied to the IoT. This paper proposes an integrated approach for addressing the above mentioned challenges. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) a development methodology that separates IoT application development into different concerns and provides a conceptual framework to develop an application, (2) a development framework that implements the development methodology to support actions of stakeholders. The development framework provides a set of modeling languages to specify each development concern and abstracts the scale and heterogeneity related complexity. It integrates code generation, task-mapping, and linking techniques to provide automation. Code generation supports the application development phase by producing a programming framework that allows stakeholders to focus on the application logic, while our mapping and linking techniques together support the deployment phase by producing device-specific code to result in a distributed system collaboratively hosted by individual devices. Our evaluation based on two realistic scenarios shows that the use of our approach improves the productivity of stakeholders involved in the application development