Alignment of requirements and services with user feedback

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.It is widely acknowledged that software reuse reduces the cost and effort of software development. Over the years many solutions have emerged that propose methodologies to support software reusability. Service oriented software engineering (SOSE) advocates software reuse while aiming to achieve better alignment of software solutions to business requirements. Service orientation has evolved from Object Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) and Component Based Software Development (CBSD), the major difference being that reusable artefacts are in the form of services rather than objects or packaged components. Although SOSE is considered a new architectural style of software development that addresses some of the shortcomings of previous approaches, it has also inherited some of the challenges of CBSD, and OOAD, in particular in the requirements engineering process. In Service Oriented Requirements Engineering (SORE) an analyst has an additional challenging task of aligning requirements and services to select the optimally matched service from an increasingly large set of available online services. Much of the existing empirical research in SORE has focused mainly on the technical aspects while the human related issues are yet to be fully explored and addressed. The lack of empirical evidence to investigate the human related issues in SORE provides the overall motivation for the research covered in this thesis. User involvement in software development has been the focus of significant research and has been intuitively and axiomatically accepted to play a positive role in users’ satisfaction thus leading to system success. More recently, past users’ feedback, reviews and comments from online sources are considered a form of user involvement. These offer valuable information to assist analysts in increasing their knowledge for making more informed decision for service selection. In service oriented paradigm the full extent of the benefits of this form of user involvement has not been empirically investigated. This thesis addresses three important high level research goals: (1) to investigate and identify the most important challenges of SORE, (2) to design an innovative and flexible method to address the top challenge of SORE, focusing specifically on the important relationship between user involvement and system success, and (3) to evaluate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method in an empirical study. This thesis presents research conducted in three parts for achieving each of the stated goals respectively: problem analysis, solution analysis and implementation analysis. For problem analysis a mixed method approach is used, i.e. literature review, quantitative online survey, and qualitative industrial interview study. For solution analysis a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is conducted to analyse the existing empirical studies about the relationship between user involvement and system success. Inspired by the results of this SLR, I designed the ARISE (Alignment of RequIrement and SErvices) method, following Situational Method Engineering to make it flexible for adoption in various project contexts. The ARISE method aims to exploit the benefits of experiences of past users for service selection. For implementation analysis, the ARISE method was instantiated in a case study with real life data with two objectives in mind: (1) validation of the effectiveness of ARISE in overcoming the challenges of alignment, and (2) improvement and refinement of the ARISE method. Analysis of the results of this validation revealed the need for automated tool support for the ARISE method. This automation is achieved through the design and implementation of software tools created for supporting the analysts in service selection. The systematic and mixed method research approach of the problem analysis phase identified that alignment of requirements and services was the top challenge for practitioners in SORE. It also increased our understanding of why this alignment is considered the most challenging task. The findings of the SLR confirmed that the effective user involvement in software development in general, and in requirements engineering in particular could lead to system success. In SORE, the past users of services can be involved through their feedback and sentiments about the services from online sources. These concepts were the basis for the design of the ARISE method. The results of the case study complemented by the experimentation with the automated tools revealed that past users’ feedback and sentiments are indeed valuable sources of information that can assist analysts in overcoming the challenges of alignment between requirements and services thus making a more informed decision in service selection

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationMedical knowledge learned in medical school can become quickly outdated given the tremendous growth of the biomedical literature. It is the responsibility of medical practitioners to continuously update their knowledge with recent, best available clinical evidence to make informed decisions about patient care. However, clinicians often have little time to spend on reading the primary literature even within their narrow specialty. As a result, they often rely on systematic evidence reviews developed by medical experts to fulfill their information needs. At the present, systematic reviews of clinical research are manually created and updated, which is expensive, slow, and unable to keep up with the rapidly growing pace of medical literature. This dissertation research aims to enhance the traditional systematic review development process using computer-aided solutions. The first study investigates query expansion and scientific quality ranking approaches to enhance literature search on clinical guideline topics. The study showed that unsupervised methods can improve retrieval performance of a popular biomedical search engine (PubMed). The proposed methods improve the comprehensiveness of literature search and increase the ratio of finding relevant studies with reduced screening effort. The second and third studies aim to enhance the traditional manual data extraction process. The second study developed a framework to extract and classify texts from PDF reports. This study demonstrated that a rule-based multipass sieve approach is more effective than a machine-learning approach in categorizing document-level structures and iv that classifying and filtering publication metadata and semistructured texts enhances the performance of an information extraction system. The proposed method could serve as a document processing step in any text mining research on PDF documents. The third study proposed a solution for the computer-aided data extraction by recommending relevant sentences and key phrases extracted from publication reports. This study demonstrated that using a machine-learning classifier to prioritize sentences for specific data elements performs equally or better than an abstract screening approach, and might save time and reduce errors in the full-text screening process. In summary, this dissertation showed that there are promising opportunities for technology enhancement to assist in the development of systematic reviews. In this modern age when computing resources are getting cheaper and more powerful, the failure to apply computer technologies to assist and optimize the manual processes is a lost opportunity to improve the timeliness of systematic reviews. This research provides methodologies and tests hypotheses, which can serve as the basis for further large-scale software engineering projects aimed at fully realizing the prospect of computer-aided systematic reviews

Simulation in manufacturing and business: A review

Copyright @ 2009 Elsevier B.V.This paper reports the results of a review of simulation applications published within peer-reviewed literature between 1997 and 2006 to provide an up-to-date picture of the role of simulation techniques within manufacturing and business. The review is characterised by three factors: wide coverage, broad scope of the simulation techniques, and a focus on real-world applications. A structured methodology was followed to narrow down the search from around 20,000 papers to 281. Results include interesting trends and patterns. For instance, although discrete event simulation is the most popular technique, it has lower stakeholder engagement than other techniques, such as system dynamics or gaming. This is highly correlated with modelling lead time and purpose. Considering application areas, modelling is mostly used in scheduling. Finally, this review shows an increasing interest in hybrid modelling as an approach to cope with complex enterprise-wide systems

BioMeT and algorithm challenges: A proposed digital standardized evaluation framework

Technology is advancing at an extraordinary rate. Continuous flows of novel data are being generated with the potential to revolutionize how we better identify, treat, manage, and prevent disease across therapeutic areas. However, lack of security of confidence in digital health technologies is hampering adoption, particularly for biometric monitoring technologies (BioMeTs) where frontline healthcare professionals are struggling to determine which BioMeTs are fit-for-purpose and in which context. Here, we discuss the challenges to adoption and offer pragmatic guidance regarding BioMeTs, cumulating in a proposed framework to advance their development and deployment in healthcare, health research, and health promotion. Furthermore, the framework proposes a process to establish an audit trail of BioMeTs (hardware and algorithms), to instill trust amongst multidisciplinary users

A model-driven method for the systematic literature review of qualitative empirical research

This paper explores a model-driven method for systematic literature reviews (SLRs), for use where the empirical studies found in the literature search are based on qualitative research. SLRs are an important component of the evidence-based practice (EBP) paradigm, which is receiving increasing attention in information systems (IS) but has not yet been widely-adopted. We illustrate the model-driven approach to SLRs via an example focused on the use of BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation) in organizations. We discuss in detail the process followed in using the model-driven SLR method, and show how it is based on a hermeneutic cycle of reading and interpreting, in order to develop and refine a model which synthesizes the research findings of previous qualitative studies. This study can serve as an exemplar for other researchers wishing to carry out model-driven SLRs. We conclude with our reflections on the method and some suggestions for further researc

How reliable are systematic reviews in empirical software engineering?

BACKGROUND – the systematic review is becoming a more commonly employed research instrument in empirical software engineering. Before undue reliance is placed on the outcomes of such reviews it would seem useful to consider the robustness of the approach in this particular research context. OBJECTIVE – the aim of this study is to assess the reliability of systematic reviews as a research instrument. In particular we wish to investigate the consistency of process and the stability of outcomes. METHOD – we compare the results of two independent reviews under taken with a common research question. RESULTS – the two reviews find similar answers to the research question, although the means of arriving at those answers vary. CONCLUSIONS – in addressing a well-bounded research question, groups of researchers with similar domain experience can arrive at the same review outcomes, even though they may do so in different ways. This provides evidence that, in this context at least, the systematic review is a robust research method

An Overview of the Feasibility of Achieving Level 2 Building Information Modeling by 2016 in the UK

The aim of this study is to investigate the current status and feasibility of achieving Level 2 BIM (building information modeling) usage that is to be made mandatory by the UK government on its projects by the year 2016. This study assesses the level at which organizational and practitioner knowledge of BIM is currently positioned. The UK government, being the largest public stakeholder client, has realized the benefits and advantages of BIM when used in procuring projects across their lifecycle in the built environment. A critical review of the BIM literature was carried out and the evidence base was created in relation to government targets for 2016. At the current stage, Level 2 BIM adoption is achievable by 2016 for large construction firms but not for SMEs (small medium enterprise). Also, from evidence in this study, the technology needs to be properly tailored to meet SME variables if Level 2 status is to be achieved for the entire industry

A literature review of expert problem solving using analogy

We consider software project cost estimation from a problem solving perspective. Taking a cognitive psychological approach, we argue that the algorithmic basis for CBR tools is not representative of human problem solving and this mismatch could account for inconsistent results. We describe the fundamentals of problem solving, focusing on experts solving ill-defined problems. This is supplemented by a systematic literature review of empirical studies of expert problem solving of non-trivial problems. We identified twelve studies. These studies suggest that analogical reasoning plays an important role in problem solving, but that CBR tools do not model this in a biologically plausible way. For example, the ability to induce structure and therefore find deeper analogies is widely seen as the hallmark of an expert. However, CBR tools fail to provide support for this type of reasoning for prediction. We conclude this mismatch between experts’ cognitive processes and software tools contributes to the erratic performance of analogy-based prediction

Research Findings on Empirical Evaluation of Requirements Specifications Approaches

Numerous software requirements specification (SRS) approaches have been proposed in software engineering. However, there has been little empirical evaluation of the use of these approaches in specific contexts. This paper describes the results of a mapping study, a key instrument of the evidence-based paradigm, in an effort to understand what aspects of SRS are evaluated, in which context, and by using which research method. On the basis of 46 identified and categorized primary studies, we found that understandability is the most commonly evaluated aspect of SRS, experiments are the most commonly used research method, and the academic environment is where most empirical evaluation takes place