Personalized architectural documentation based on stakeholders' information needs

The stakeholders of a software system are, to a greater or lesser extent, concerned about its software architecture, as an essential artifact for capturing the key design decisions of the system. The architecture is normally documented in the Software Architecture Document (SAD), which tends to be a large and complex technical description, and does not always address the information needs of every stakeholder. Individual stakeholders are interested in dierent, sometimes overlapping, subsets of the SAD and they also require varying levels of detail. As a consequence, stakeholders are aected by an information overload problem, which in practice discourages the usage of the architectural knowledge and diminishes its value for the organization. Along this line, this work presents a semi-automated approach to recommend relevant contents of a given SAD to specific stakeholder profiles. Our approach assumes that SADs are hosted in Wikis, which not only favor communication and interactions among stakeholders, but also enable us to apply User Profiling techniques to infer stakeholders´ interests with respect to particular documents. We have built a recommendation tool implementing our approach, which was tested in two experiments with Wiki-based SADs. Although preliminary, the results have shown that the recommendations of the tool help to nd the architectural documents that best match the stakeholders´ interests.Fil: Tommasel, Antonela. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingenieria del Software; ArgentinaFil: Nicoletti, Matías Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingenieria del Software; ArgentinaFil: Diaz Pace, Jorge Andres. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingenieria del Software; ArgentinaFil: Schiaffino, Silvia Noemi. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingenieria del Software; ArgentinaFil: Godoy, Daniela Lis. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingenieria del Software; Argentin

A user profiling approach to optomize the production of architectural documentation

The Software Architecture Document (SAD) is a key artifact in the early stages of software development, as it serves to share the architectural knowledge among the key project stakeholders and to keep record of the main design decisions for satisfying the stakeholders’ concerns. Even the best architectural solution could fail its purpose if it is not properly documented, distributed and understood by the stakeholders. However, documenting an architecture is a non-trivial and time-consuming activity, usually performed with limited resources. Thus, documenting a SAD should be planned to ensure that the invested efforts are worth the cost in terms of SAD quality. (Párrafo extraído del texto a modo de resumen)Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

A user profiling approach to optomize the production of architectural documentation

The Software Architecture Document (SAD) is a key artifact in the early stages of software development, as it serves to share the architectural knowledge among the key project stakeholders and to keep record of the main design decisions for satisfying the stakeholders’ concerns. Even the best architectural solution could fail its purpose if it is not properly documented, distributed and understood by the stakeholders. However, documenting an architecture is a non-trivial and time-consuming activity, usually performed with limited resources. Thus, documenting a SAD should be planned to ensure that the invested efforts are worth the cost in terms of SAD quality. (Párrafo extraído del texto a modo de resumen)Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

An exploratory case study on reusing architecture decisions in software-intensive system projects

Reusing architecture decisions from previous projects promises to support architects when taking decisions. However, little is known about the state of art of decision-reuse and the benefits and challenges associated with reusing decisions. Therefore, we study how software architects reuse architecture decisions, the stakeholders and their concerns related to decision-reuse, and how architects perceive the ideal future state of decision-reuse. We conducted a qualitative explorative case study in the software-intensive systems industry. The study has shown that architects frequently reuse decisions but are confined to decisions they already know or have heard about. The results also suggest that architects reuse decisions in an ad-hoc manner. Moreover this study presents a conceptual model of decision-reuse and lists stakeholder concerns with regards to decision-reuse. The results of this study indicate that improving the documentation and discoverability of decisions holds a large potential to increase reuse of decisions and that decision documentation is not only important for system understanding or in the context of architecture reviews but also to support architects in upcoming projects

CLOUD-BASED SOLUTIONS IMPROVING TRANSPARENCY, OPENNESS AND EFFICIENCY OF OPEN GOVERNMENT DATA

A central pillar of open government programs is the disclosure of data held by public agencies using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). This disclosure relies on the creation of open data portals (e.g. Data.gov) and has subsequently been associated with the expression Open Government Data (OGD). The overall goal of these governmental initiatives is not limited to enhance transparency of public sectors but aims to raise awareness of how released data can be put to use in order to enable the creation of new products and services by private sectors. Despite the usage of technological platforms to facilitate access to government data, open data portals continue to be organized in order to serve the goals of public agencies without opening the doors to public accountability, information transparency, public scrutiny, etc. This thesis considers the basic aspects of OGD including the definition of technical models for organizing such complex contexts, the identification of techniques for combining data from several portals and the proposal of user interfaces that focus on citizen-centred usability. In order to deal with the above issues, this thesis presents a holistic approach to OGD that aims to go beyond problems inherent their simple disclosure by providing a tentative answer to the following questions: 1) To what extent do the OGD-based applications contribute towards the creation of innovative, value-added services? 2) What technical solutions could increase the strength of this contribution? 3) Can Web 2.0 and Cloud technologies favour the development of OGD apps? 4) How should be designed a common framework for developing OGD apps that rely on multiple OGD portals and external web resources? In particular, this thesis is focused on devising computational environments that leverage the content of OGD portals (supporting the initial phase of data disclosure) for the creation of new services that add value to the original data. The thesis is organized as follows. In order to offer a general view about OGD, some important aspects about open data initiatives are presented including their state of art, the existing approaches for publishing and consuming OGD across web resources, and the factors shaping the value generated through government data portals. Then, an architectural framework is proposed that gathers OGD from multiple sites and supports the development of cloud-based apps that leverage these data according to potentially different exploitation roots ranging from traditional business to specialized supports for citizens. The proposed framework is validated by two cloud-based apps, namely ODMap (Open Data Mapping) and NESSIE (A Network-based Environment Supporting Spatial Information Exploration). In particular, ODMap supports citizens in searching and accessing OGD from several web sites. NESSIE organizes data captured from real estate agencies and public agencies (i.e. municipalities, cadastral offices and chambers of commerce) in order to provide citizens with a geographic representation of real estate offers and relevant statistics about the price trend.A central pillar of open government programs is the disclosure of data held by public agencies using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). This disclosure relies on the creation of open data portals (e.g. Data.gov) and has subsequently been associated with the expression Open Government Data (OGD). The overall goal of these governmental initiatives is not limited to enhance transparency of public sectors but aims to raise awareness of how released data can be put to use in order to enable the creation of new products and services by private sectors. Despite the usage of technological platforms to facilitate access to government data, open data portals continue to be organized in order to serve the goals of public agencies without opening the doors to public accountability, information transparency, public scrutiny, etc. This thesis considers the basic aspects of OGD including the definition of technical models for organizing such complex contexts, the identification of techniques for combining data from several portals and the proposal of user interfaces that focus on citizen-centred usability. In order to deal with the above issues, this thesis presents a holistic approach to OGD that aims to go beyond problems inherent their simple disclosure by providing a tentative answer to the following questions: 1) To what extent do the OGD-based applications contribute towards the creation of innovative, value-added services? 2) What technical solutions could increase the strength of this contribution? 3) Can Web 2.0 and Cloud technologies favour the development of OGD apps? 4) How should be designed a common framework for developing OGD apps that rely on multiple OGD portals and external web resources? In particular, this thesis is focused on devising computational environments that leverage the content of OGD portals (supporting the initial phase of data disclosure) for the creation of new services that add value to the original data. The thesis is organized as follows. In order to offer a general view about OGD, some important aspects about open data initiatives are presented including their state of art, the existing approaches for publishing and consuming OGD across web resources, and the factors shaping the value generated through government data portals. Then, an architectural framework is proposed that gathers OGD from multiple sites and supports the development of cloud-based apps that leverage these data according to potentially different exploitation roots ranging from traditional business to specialized supports for citizens. The proposed framework is validated by two cloud-based apps, namely ODMap (Open Data Mapping) and NESSIE (A Network-based Environment Supporting Spatial Information Exploration). In particular, ODMap supports citizens in searching and accessing OGD from several web sites. NESSIE organizes data captured from real estate agencies and public agencies (i.e. municipalities, cadastral offices and chambers of commerce) in order to provide citizens with a geographic representation of real estate offers and relevant statistics about the price trend

Collaborative Requirements Engineering Notation for Planning Globally Distributed Projects

Requirements engineering represents a critical phase of the software development lifecycle in which requirements describing the functional and non-functional behaviors of a system are elicited, modeled, analyzed, negotiated, agreed, and specified. In traditional software systems these tasks are typically performed in face-to-face meetings between requirements engineers and the project level stakeholders. However, in today’s global software development environment, it is becoming increasingly commonplace for stakeholders to be dispersed across multiple geographical locations and time zones. Under these circumstances, face-to-face meetings become expensive, and often impossible to facilitate, and as a result the success of the requirements process relies, at least partially, on tools and processes that support distributed communication and collaboration. To investigate the challenges and effective practices for performing requirements activities in distributed environments, we conducted a series of in-depth interviews with project managers and business analysts who have worked with non-co-located stakeholders. Since many project managers fail to plan and deploy the necessary infrastructures to support quality communication, and in practice requirements are often elicited and managed via email exchanges; we introduced a visual modeling notation to help project managers proactively plan the collaboration infrastructures needed to support requirements-related activities in globally distributed projects. An underlying meta-model defines the elements of the modeling language, including locations, stakeholder roles, communication flows, critical documents, and supporting tools and repositories. The interview findings were further analyzed to identify practices that led to success or created significant challenges for the projects; resulting in a set of patterns for globally distributed requirements engineering