From requirements to web applications in an agile model-driven approach

Web applications are hard to build not only because of technical reasons but also because they involve many different kinds of stakeholders. Involving customers in the development process is a must, not only while eliciting requirements but also considering that requirements change fast and they must be validated continuously. However, while model-driven approaches represent a step forward to reduce development time and work at a higher level of abstraction, most of them practically ignore stakeholders' involvement. Agile approaches tend to solve this problem, though they generally focus on programming rather than modeling. In this paper we present an extension to an approach that combines the best of both worlds, allowing a formal and high-level design style with constant involvement of customers, mainly in the definition of navigation, interaction and interface features. We extended it by adding transformation features that allow mapping requirement models into content and navigation ones. We provide a proof of concept in the context of the WebML design method and an empiric validation of the approach's advantages.Publicado en Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, vol. 7387).Facultad de InformáticaLaboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

From requirements to web applications in an agile model-driven approach

Web applications are hard to build not only because of technical reasons but also because they involve many different kinds of stakeholders. Involving customers in the development process is a must, not only while eliciting requirements but also considering that requirements change fast and they must be validated continuously. However, while model-driven approaches represent a step forward to reduce development time and work at a higher level of abstraction, most of them practically ignore stakeholders' involvement. Agile approaches tend to solve this problem, though they generally focus on programming rather than modeling. In this paper we present an extension to an approach that combines the best of both worlds, allowing a formal and high-level design style with constant involvement of customers, mainly in the definition of navigation, interaction and interface features. We extended it by adding transformation features that allow mapping requirement models into content and navigation ones. We provide a proof of concept in the context of the WebML design method and an empiric validation of the approach's advantages.Publicado en Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, vol. 7387).Facultad de InformáticaLaboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

Desain Sistem Seleksi Proposal Program Kreativitas Mahasiswa (PKM) Politeknik Negeri Lampung

The utilization of digitalization-based information technology is currently being developed in all units in an agency. State Polytechnic of Lampung (Polinela) is one of the tertiary institutions that continuously improve the system towards digitalization. One of the most exciting things to develop is the Student Creativity Program Proposal Selection System (PKM). PKM is one of the programs launched by the Directorate General of Higher Education, this activity is an effort to facilitate, foster, and realize students' creative and innovative ideas that can have a positive impact on improving student achievement and university achievement. Based on observations and interviews with the committee directly involved in the Polinela level selection activities, in the last 3 years, the number of students who compiled the proposal has increased, and the selection system for the PKM proposal within the Polinela environment is still being done offline, this is felt by the committee for less efficient and effective in the collection of plans in the form of hardcopy and softcopy sent by email. The process of monitoring the selection of PKM proposal evaluation activities has not been optimal, therefore it is necessary to build a digitizing system based on PKM selection that can improve the performance of this process. The method to be made is tailored to the needs of end-users so that it can accelerate the process of selecting PKM proposals. The advantage of the system to be built is that all plans are uploaded online and reviewers can directly assess them online. This System Development uses the Agile Model, a database that is built using the Normalization Technique by testing the system using black-box testing. Keywords: Agile Model, black box testing,  Normalization Technique, PK

Making Property-Based Testing Easier to Read for Humans

Software stakeholders who do not have a technical profile (i.e. users, clients) but do want to take part in the development and/or quality assurance process of software, have an unmet need for communication on what is being tested during the development life-cycle. The transformation of test properties and models into semi-natural language representations is one way of responding to such need. Our research has demonstrated that these transformations are challenging but feasible, and they have been implemented into a prototype tool called readSpec. The readSpec tool transforms universally-quantified test properties and stateful test models - the two kinds of test artifacts used in property-based testing - into plain text interpretations. The tool has been successfully evaluated on the PBT artifacts produced and used within the FP7 PROWESS project by industrial partners

Auto-generation of rich Internet applications from visual mock-ups

Capturing and communicating software requirements accurately and quickly is a challenging activity. This needs expertise of people with unique skills. Traditionally this challenge has been compounded by assigning specialist roles for requirements gathering and analysis, design, and implementations. These multiple roles have resulted in information loss mainly due to miscommunication between requirement specialists, designers and implementers. Large enterprises have managed the information loss by using document centric approaches, leading to delays and cost escalations. But documentation centric and multiple role approaches are not suitable for Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) because they are vulnerable to market competitions. Moreover, SMEs require effective online applications to provide their service. Hence the motivation for carrying out this research is to explore the possibilities of empowering requirement specialists such as Business Analysts’ (BAs) to take on additional responsibilities of designers and implementers to generate web applications. In addition, SME owners and BAs can communicate better if they perceive the application requirements using a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) approach. Hence, this research explores the design and development of mock-up-based auto-generating tool to develop SME applications. A tool that auto-generates an application from a mock-up should have the capacity to extract the essential implementation details from the mock-up. Hence a visual mock-up language was created by extending existing research on meta-models of UIs for a class of popular modern web-based business applications called Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). The popularity of RIAs is due to their distinctive client-side processing power with desktop application like responsiveness and look and feel. The mock-ups drawn with the mock-up language should have sufficient level of details to auto-generate RIAs. To support this, the mock-up language includes constructs for specifying a RIA’s mock-up in terms of layouts and the widgets within them. In addition, the language uses annotations on the mock-up to specify the behaviour of the system. In such an approach the only additional effort required of a Business Analyst is to specify the requirements in terms of a mock-up of the expected interfaces of the SME application. Apart from the mock-up language, a tool was designed and developed to auto-generate the desired application from the mock-up. The tool is powered by algorithms to derive the database structure and the client-side and server-side components required for the auto-generated application. The validation of the mock-up language and auto-generating tool was performed by BAs to demonstrate its usability. The measurement and evaluation results indicate that the mock-up language and the auto-generator can be used successfully to help BAs in the development of SME application and thereby reduce delays, errors and cost overruns. The important contributions of this research are: (i) the design of a mock-up language that makes it easy to capture the structure and behaviour of SME web applications. (ii) algorithms for automatic derivation of the expected database schema from a visual mock-up. (iii) algorithms for automatic derivation of the client and server-side application logic. (iv) application of an existing measurement and evaluation process for the usability testing of the mock-up language and the auto-generated application. This research followed the Design Science Research (DSR) method for Information System to guide the IS design and to capture the knowledge created during the design process. DSR is a research method useful in solving wicked problems requiring innovative solutions for incomplete, contradictory or changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. This research opens new ways of thinking about web application development for future research. Specifically, mock-ups with few easy to understand annotations can be used as powerful active artifacts to capture the structure and behaviour of applications not just of small but also large enterprises. Auto-generating tools can then create fully functional and usable applications holistically from such mock-ups, thereby reducing delays and cost overruns during software engineering

Mockup-Driven Development: introduciendo agilidad en procesos basados en modelos

En este trabajo de tesis se describirá una técnica de modelado centrado en mockups, introduciéndola primero con MockupDD Web. Luego de haber ejemplificado el desarrollo centrado en mockups para metodologías MDWE, se describirá un marco general para el modelado sobre mockups (lo que se referenciará como metodología MockupDD general) y una instanciación particular de esta metodología además de la ya presentada para la Web. Las principales contribuciones de la metodología MockupDD y sus especializaciones son: (1) Mejorar el workflow en cascada de las metodologías MDD tradicionales (en especial, aquellas MDWE) para permitir acortar las iteraciones y permitir a usuarios finales y clientes involucrados interactuar más rápidamente son el software generado, agilizando el proceso. (2) Mejorar la productividad en el modelado de aplicaciones a través de la técnica de modelado de aplicaciones sobre mockups reduciendo sus errores y tiempo requerido, como se mostrará luego en las secciones de validación (3) Introducir a clientes y usuarios finales en el proceso de desarrollo, utilizando artefactos de especificación de requerimientos de fácil comprensión para los mismos en lugar de conceptos de modelado comprensibles sólo para desarrolladores. En este contexto se utilizarán mockups y diferentes técnicas de anotación y especificación de requerimientos formales sobre los mismos. (4) La implementación de un lenguaje de modelado sobre mockups con diferentes vistas, satisfaciendo al mismo tiempo la necesidad de comprensión de requerimientos por parte de los usuarios finales y las capacidades técnicas requeridas por los desarrolladores. (5) Con ayuda de esta versatilidad del lenguaje y del uso de mockups (los cuales son comprensibles en su totalidad por usuarios finales), proveer un método de modelado más trazable desde el punto de vista de los requerimientos.Facultad de Informátic