Achieving sustainability: from innovation to valorisation and continuous improvement

The Software Process Improvement methodology plans and implements improvement activities to achieve specific goals, for example, increasing development speed, achieving higher product quality, and reducing costs. The approach paves way for the implementation of SPI innovations in software organisations. Innovation is the successful implementation of novel and appropriate ideas within an organisation. Innovation is underpinned by the concepts of creativity and invention. Often organisations, projects and individuals fail to gain adequate value let alone added value from their innovations. The term valorisation encompasses all activities that maximise the achievements of a project and innovation. The emphasis is on optimising the value of the project and innovation for diverse stakeholders (society, community, institutions, and individuals) and boosting its impact. In this paper, the authors report on the understandings and collective experience gained over several years in industry as well as academia culminating in the design and implementation of the European Union VALO Project which dissemination and exploitation. VALO outputs include the elements of the training and online examination for possible certification to become Valorisation experts. The insights gained from the VALO project, enabled the development of a valorisation strategy which is used, alongside quality strategies to enable the development of a Quality and Valorisation of Projects Framework. The genericity of the framework provides the potential foundations for successful projects of high quality and maximises the valorisation of project and innovation results. Software development projects (and projects in general) fail regularly. These quality failures manifest themselves in late deliveries, over-budget, not satisfying the users’ requirements and more importantly poor reliability. Quality attributes are system qualities (such as availability, modifiability, performance and security), business qualities, (such as time to market, cost and benefit, product lifetime and target market), and architectural qualities (such as conceptual integrity, correctness and completeness). Whenever any of these qualities are compromised a system can be considered a total or partial failure. Moreover, after a project’s completion, there is often evidence that it fails to deliver sustained value to stakeholders. In this paper, we examine the challenges and benefits of sustainability viewed from a STEEPLED multidimensional analysis

Role-based Adaptation of Business Reference Models to Application Models: An Enterprise Modeling Methodology for Software Construction

Large software systems are in need of a construction plan to determine and define every concept and element used in order to not end up in complex, unusable, and cost-intensive systems. Different modeling languages, like UML, support the development of these construction plans and visualize them for the system’s stakeholders. Reference models are a specific kind of construction plan, used as templates for information systems and already capture business domain knowledge for reuse and tailoring. By adaptation, reference models are tailored to enterprise-specific application models, which can be used for software construction and maintenance. However, current adaptation methods suffer from the limitations of pure object-oriented development (e.g., identity issues, large inheritance trees, and inflexibility). In this thesis, the usage of roles as the sole adaptation mechanism is proposed to solve these challenges. With the help of conceptual roles, it is possible to create rich model variations and adaptations from existing (industry standard) reference models, and it is simpler to react to model evolution and changing business logic. Adaptations can be specified with more precision by maintaining or even increasing the model’s expressiveness. As a consequence, the role-enriched final application model can be used to describe software systems in more detail, with different perspectives, and, if available, can be implemented with a role supporting programming language. However, even without this step, the application model itself will provide valuable insights into the overall construction plan of a software system by the combination of structure and behavior and a clear separation of relatively stable domain knowledge from its use case specific adaptation