Guided support for collaborative modeling, enactment and simulation of software development processes

Recently, the awareness of the importance of distributed software development has been growing in the software engineering community. Economic constraints, more and more outsourcing of development activities, and the increasing geographical distribution of companies come along with challenges of how to organize distributed development. In this article, we reason that a common process understanding is mandatory for successful distributed development. Integrated process planning, guidance and enactment are seen as enabling technologies for achieving a unique process view. We present an overview of the software process modeling environment SPEARMINT and the XCHIPS system for web-based process support. SPEARMINT offers extensive capabilities for multi-view modeling and analysis of software development processes. XCHIPS provides capabilities for distributed modeling and offers enactment and simulation functionalities. This article describes the integration of both approaches. The resulting environment provides planners and developers with collaborative planning and enactment support and advanced process guidance via electronic process guides (EPGs). Additionally, experience with the integrated environment is described. We describe, in particular, the usage of this integrated environment in the context of a case study for the development of a learning system. Finally, an overview of related work is given and future research directions are sketched.Facultad de InformáticaLaboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

Business process management: a bird's-eye view and research agenda.

Processes; Management; Research;

Towards a tool-supported approach for collaborative process modeling and enactment

International audienceIn software engineering, as in any collective endeavor, understanding and supporting collaboration is a major concern. Unfortunately, the main concepts of popular process formalisms are not always adequate to describe collaboration. We extend the Software & System Process Engineering Meta-Model (SPEM) by introducing concepts needed to represent precise and dynamic collaboration setups that practitioners create to address ever-changing challenges. Our goal is to give practitioners the ability to express evolving understanding about collaboration in a formalism suited for easy representation and tool-provided assistance. Our work is based on a collaborative process metamodel we have developed. In this paper, we first present a meta-process for process modeling and enactment, which we apply to our collaborative process metamodel. Then we describe the implementation of a suitable process model editor, and a project plan generator from process models

Electronic Enterprise Engineering - An Outline of an Architecture

In this paper we put forth a vision for organizations to fully embrace computer support. We propose a business-process oriented architecture for Electronic Enterprise Engineering (EEE) that will enable enterprises to manage and evolve all technological and organizational processes effectively; integrate and manage all enterprise information electronically; and empower knowledge workers at all levels with broad decision support capabilities. Our goal is for the EEE architecture to empower an enterprise to make the best use of its informational assets to operate effectively in this new era of electronic commerce. As part of this project we are developing a standard-based, customizable, integrated tool set called the Support Environment for Enterprise Engineering (SEEE). This paper presents the current SEEE architecture and shouts how it supports the three EEE goals

Designing Digital Work

Combining theory, methodology and tools, this open access book illustrates how to guide innovation in today’s digitized business environment. Highlighting the importance of human knowledge and experience in implementing business processes, the authors take a conceptual perspective to explore the challenges and issues currently facing organizations. Subsequent chapters put these concepts into practice, discussing instruments that can be used to support the articulation and alignment of knowledge within work processes. A timely and comprehensive set of tools and case studies, this book is essential reading for those researching innovation and digitization, organization and business strategy

Computerization of workflows, guidelines and care pathways: a review of implementation challenges for process-oriented health information systems

There is a need to integrate the various theoretical frameworks and formalisms for modeling clinical guidelines, workflows, and pathways, in order to move beyond providing support for individual clinical decisions and toward the provision of process-oriented, patient-centered, health information systems (HIS). In this review, we analyze the challenges in developing process-oriented HIS that formally model guidelines, workflows, and care pathways. A qualitative meta-synthesis was performed on studies published in English between 1995 and 2010 that addressed the modeling process and reported the exposition of a new methodology, model, system implementation, or system architecture. Thematic analysis, principal component analysis (PCA) and data visualisation techniques were used to identify and cluster the underlying implementation ‘challenge’ themes. One hundred and eight relevant studies were selected for review. Twenty-five underlying ‘challenge’ themes were identified. These were clustered into 10 distinct groups, from which a conceptual model of the implementation process was developed. We found that the development of systems supporting individual clinical decisions is evolving toward the implementation of adaptable care pathways on the semantic web, incorporating formal, clinical, and organizational ontologies, and the use of workflow management systems. These architectures now need to be implemented and evaluated on a wider scale within clinical settings

Overview of a framework to hypermedia process modeling

In this work, we discuss aspects of a framework to support the understanding and the improvement in hypermedia development processes. The framework is built taking into account two modeling approaches and four domain levels. The modeling approaches are called prescriptive and descriptive respectively, and the domain layers are called, namely, enactment, customization, representation, and reuse/knowledge domains. We feed a potential project regarding this framework by applying a mixture of expression and analysis-oriented descriptive process modeling strategy, and expression, analysis and guided-oriented prescriptive process modeling strategy. That is, the actual or desired entities (process, artifact, and resource) are just described, represented, and analyzed in a somewhat formal way. This potentially allows us to understand, communicate, guide and improve different aspects in hypermedia development projects. Ultimately, we summarize some techniques and mechanisms for prescriptive and descriptive software modeling customized to the hypermedia domain. In addition, we present in-progress researchs and developments.Ingeniería de SoftwareRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Working Together: Integrating Computational Modeling Approaches to Investigate Complex Phenomena

Complex systems are made up of many entities, whose interactions emerge into distinct collective patterns. Computational modeling platforms can provide a powerful means to investigate emergent phenomena in complex systems. Some research has been carried out in recent years about promoting students' modeling practices, specifically using technologically advanced tools and approaches that allow students to create, manipulate, and test computational models. However, not much research had been carried out on the integration of several modeling approaches when investigating complex phenomena. In this paper, we describe the design principles used to develop a middle school unit about ants' collective behavior that integrates three modeling approaches: conceptual drawn models, agent-based models, and system dynamics models. We provide results from an initial implementation of an 8th grade curricular unit, indicating that students engaged with several aspects of the modeling practice. Students' conceptual knowledge about ant pheromone communication increased following learning the unit. We also found gains in students' metamodeling knowledge about models as tools for investigating phenomena. We discuss the affordances and challenges of engaging students with several modeling approaches in science classroom