What makes service oriented requirements engineering challenging? A qualitative study

The focus of Service Oriented Software Development (SOSD) is to develop software by integrating reusable services to lower the required cost, time and effort of development and increase reusability, agility, quality and customer satisfaction. It has been recognised in the literature that SOSD faces various challenges especially in requirements engineering (RE). The objective of this study is to investigate these challenges of Service Oriented RE (SORE) from practitioners' perspectives in order to gain a deeper understanding of the related issues and to reveal potential gaps between research and practice in SORE. They present a qualitative study of the challenges and issues in SORE. The data were collected by conducting interviews with practitioners working in IT companies in Sydney, who have had substantial experience with service oriented software projects. The authors findings reveal that most of the challenges of SORE are similar to those that are faced during RE in traditional or component-based software development. According to the practitioners, the research and practice has made some advances in the technical direction but the human related issues in SORE have not been addressed adequately. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2014

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制度:新 ; 報告番号:甲2735号 ; 学位の種類:博士(人間科学) ; 授与年月日:2009/3/15 ; 早大学位記番号:新493

Testing-based process for component substitutability

Software components have emerged to ease the assembly of software systems. However, updates of systems by substitution or upgrades of components demand careful management due to stability risks of deployed systems. Replacement components must be properly evaluated to identify if they provide the expected behaviour affected by substitution. To address this problem, this paper proposes a substitutability assessment process in which the regular compatibility analysis is complemented with the use of black-box testing criteria. The purpose is to observe the components' behaviour by analysing their internal functions of data transformation, which fulfils the observability testing metric. The approach is conceptually based on the technique Back-to-Back testing. When a component should be replaced, a specific Test Suite TS is built in order to represent its behavioural facets, viz. a Component Behaviour TS. This TS is later exercised on candidate upgrades or replacement components with the purpose of identifying the required compatibility. Automation of the process is supported through the testooj tool, which constrains the conditions and steps of the whole process in order to provide a rigorous and reliable approach.Fil: Flores, Andrés Pablo. Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Facultad de Informática. Departamento Ingeniería de Sistemas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Patagonia Confluencia; ArgentinaFil: Polo, Macario. Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha; Españ

Context-Aware Software

With the advent of PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), smart phones, and other forms of mobile and ubiquitous computers, our computing resources are increasingly moving off of our desktops and into our everyday lives. However, the software and user interfaces for these devices are generally very similar to that of their desktop counterparts, despite the radically different and dynamic environments that they face. We propose that to better assist their users, such devices should be able to sense, react to, and utilise, the user's current environment or context. That is, they should become context-aware. In this thesis we investigate context-awareness at three levels: user interfaces, applications, and supporting architectures/frameworks. To promote the use of context-awareness, and to aid its deployment in software, we have developed two supporting frameworks. The first is an application-oriented framework called stick-e notes. Based on an electronic version of the common Post-It Note, stick-e notes enable the attachment of any electronic resource (e.g. a text file, movie, Java program, etc.) to any type of context (e.g. location, temperature, time, etc.). The second framework we devised seeks to provide a more universal support for the capture, manipulation, and representation of context information. We call it the Context Information Service (CIS). It fills a similar role in context-aware software development as GUI libraries do in user interface development. Our applications research explored how context-awareness can be exploited in real environments with real users. In particular, we developed a suite of PDA-based context-aware tools for fieldworkers. These were used extensively by a group of ecologists in Africa to record observations of giraffe and rhinos in a remote Kenyan game reserve. These tools also provided the foundations for our HCI work, in which we developed the concept of the Minimal Attention User Interface (MAUI). The aim of the MAUI is to reduce the attention required by the user in operating a device by carefully selecting input/output modes that are harmonious to their tasks and environment. To evaluate our ideas and applications a field study was conducted in which over forty volunteers used our system for data collection activities over the course of a summer season at the Kenyan game reserve. The PDA-based tools were unanimously preferred to the paper-based alternatives, and the context-aware features were cited as particular reasons for preferring them. In summary, this thesis presents two frameworks to support context-aware software, a set of applications demonstrating how context-awareness can be utilised in the ''real world'', and a set of HCI guidelines and principles that help in creating user interfaces that fit to their context of use

GWpilot: Enabling multi-level scheduling in distributed infrastructures with GridWay and pilot jobs

Current systems based on pilot jobs are not exploiting all the scheduling advantages that the technique offers, or they lack compatibility or adaptability. To overcome the limitations or drawbacks in existing approaches, this study presents a different general-purpose pilot system, GWpilot. This system provides individual users or institutions with a more easy-to-use, easy-toinstall, scalable, extendable, flexible and adjustable framework to efficiently run legacy applications. The framework is based on the GridWay meta-scheduler and incorporates the powerful features of this system, such as standard interfaces, fair-share policies, ranking, migration, accounting and compatibility with diverse infrastructures. GWpilot goes beyond establishing simple network overlays to overcome the waiting times in remote queues or to improve the reliability in task production. It properly tackles the characterisation problem in current infrastructures, allowing users to arbitrarily incorporate customised monitoring of resources and their running applications into the system. This functionality allows the new framework to implement innovative scheduling algorithms that accomplish the computational needs of a wide range of calculations faster and more efficiently. The system can also be easily stacked under other software layers, such as self-schedulers. The advanced techniques included by default in the framework result in significant performance improvements even when very short tasks are scheduled

Privacy in Mobile Agent Systems: Untraceability

Agent based Internet environments are an interesting alternative to existing approaches of building software systems. The enabling feature of agents is that they allow software development based on the abstraction (a "metaphor") of elements of the real world. In other words, they allow building software systems, which work as human societies, in which members share products and services, cooperate or compete with each other. Organisational, behavioural and functional models etc applied into the systems can be copied from the real world. The growing interest in agent technologies in the European Union was expressed through the foundation of the Coordination Action for Agent-Based Computing, funded under the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). The action, called AgentLink III is run by the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme. The long-term goal of AgentLink is to put Europe at the leading edge of international competitiveness in this increasingly important area. According to AgentLink "Roadmap for Agent Based Computing"; agent-based systems are perceived as "one of the most vibrant and important areas of research and development to have emerged in information technology in recent years, underpinning many aspects of broader information society technologies"; However, with the emergence of the new paradigm, came also new challenges. One of them is that agent environments, especially those which allow for mobility of agents, are much more difficult to protect from intruders than conventional systems. Agent environments still lack sufficient and effective solutions to assure their security. The problem which till now has not been addressed sufficiently in agent-based systems is privacy, and particularly the anonymity of agent users. Although anonymity was studied extensively for traditional message-based communication for which during the past twenty five years various techniques have been proposed, for agent systems this problem has never been directly addressed. The research presented in this report aimed at filling this gap. This report summarises results of studies aiming at the identification of threats to privacy in agent-based systems and the methods of their protection.JRC.G.6-Sensors, radar technologies and cybersecurit

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Mobile services and applications: towards a balanced adoption model

This paper synthesizes prior research to develop a novel model for the study of the adoption of mobile business services and applications incorporating a demand and supply perspective. The model complements and extends existing models while also leveraging data from industry reports; in particular, it focuses on the interrelationships between participants in the mobile services value chain and the impact of these interrelationships on the adoption of new services in a competitive and technology-saturated service market. There has been to date limited research reported that has considered the dynamics of the interrelationships between customers and (layers of) multiple service providers as a factor in the adoption and acceptance process; the proposed model addresses this gap and advocates the use of a combination of design science and service science methodologies. It is concluded that not mobility per se but the way mobility is used to create value plays a significant role as an adoption driver, and that the quality of the service and its relevance to personal or business lifestyle are the most important decision making factors. It is also asserted that while innovative mobile services (i.e., services that are not already offered using a different technology) may be compelling if they meet lifestyle needs, mobile services replacing or complementing existing ones will be favored by customers only if their quality is exceptional and motivates ‘switching’ to the mobile service