A method for enterprise architecture alignment

Business and ICT strategic alignment remains an ongoing challenge facing organizations as they react to changing requirements by adapting or introducing new technologies to existing infrastructure. Enterprise Architecture (EA) has increasingly become relevant to these demands and as a consequence numerous methods and frameworks have emerged. However these approaches remain bloated, time-consuming and lacking in precision. This paper proposes a light-weight method for EA called LEAP and introduces a language for EA simulation that is illustrated with a detailed case study of business change currently being addressed by UK higher education institutions

Requirement validation with enactable descriptions of use cases.

The validation of stakeholder requirements for a software system is a pivotal activity for any nontrivial software development project. Often, differences in knowledge regarding development issues, and knowledge regarding the problem domain, impede the elaboration of requirements amongst developers and stakeholders. A description technique that provides a user perspective of the system behaviour is likely to enhance shared understanding between the developers and stakeholders. The Unified Modelling Language (UML) use case is such a notation. Use cases describe the behaviour of a system (using natural language) in terms of interactions between the external users and the system. Since the standardisation of the UML by the Object Management Group in 1997, much research has been devoted to use cases. Some researchers have focussed on the provision of writing guidelines for use case specifications whereas others have focussed on the application of formal techniques. This thesis investigates the adequacy of the use case description for the specification and validation of software behaviour. In particular, the thesis argues that whereas the user-system interaction scheme underpins the essence of the use case notation, the UML specification of the use case does not provide a mechanism by which use cases can describe dependencies amongst constituent interaction steps. Clarifying these issues is crucial for validating the adequacy of the specification against stakeholder expectations. This thesis proposes a state-based approach (the Educator approach) to use case specification where constituent events are augmented with pre and post states to express both intra-use case and inter-use case dependencies. Use case events are enacted to visualise implied behaviour, thereby enhancing shared understanding among users and developers. Moreover, enaction provides an early "feel" of the behaviour that would result from the implementation of the specification. The Educator approach and the enaction of descriptions are supported by a prototype environment, the EducatorTool, developed to demonstrate the efficacy and novelty of the approach. To validate the work presented in this thesis an industrial study, involving the specification of realtime control software, is reported. The study involves the analysis of use case specifications of the subsystems prior to the application of the proposed approach, and the analysis of the specification where the approach and tool support are applied. This way, it is possible to determine the efficacy of the Educator approach within an industrial setting

Support for Process Oriented Requirements Engineering

Supporting a Process Oriented Requirements Method Process modelling as a way to inform requirements has seen somewhat of a resurgence in recent years, particularly in those methods that utilise a Role Activity Diagram based approach. By using these models within the requirements phase the client needs can be captured effectively in a notation that makes sense to the business user, whilst also providing a rigorous description. However, the move to specification still has pitfalls, notably in ensuring that the understanding gained from process modelling can be transferred effectively to the specification so that alignment of business need and software system is maintained. This talk outlines issues and potential solutions in ensuring such alignment, and incorporates our recent experiences in attempting to provide tool support. In particular, we describe tool support for model driven development (as part of the collaborative EC project VIDE), and the use of process mashups, including work undertaken at SAP research. In both cases our focus has been on providing sets of notations and tools which are accessible to a variety of users, often including those stakeholders who are not IT experts. Mashups are a relatively new approach, and use web 2.0 technologies to combine data from different sources to create valuable information, principally for data aggregation applications. This utilises the potential of the internet and related technologies, to allow users to process tasks collaboratively, and form communities among those with similar interests. We present currently available mashup platforms and demonstrate how situational enterprise applications can be built by combining social software, feeds, widgets, web services, open APIs, and so on. The session does not require any specific technical skills, though experienced process engineers will have the opportunity to share their views. Participants will learn: • How to use simple role based process models • Issues in moving from process model to specification • How to use simple notational devices to ensure alignment • How development tools can help, with a particular focus on the use of mashups • Current process mashup approaches and future directions

Requirement validation with enactable descriptions of use cases

The validation of stakeholder requirements for a software system is a pivotal activity for any nontrivial software development project. Often, differences in knowledge regarding development issues, and knowledge regarding the problem domain, impede the elaboration of requirements amongst developers and stakeholders. A description technique that provides a user perspective of the system behaviour is likely to enhance shared understanding between the developers and stakeholders. The Unified Modelling Language (UML) use case is such a notation. Use cases describe the behaviour of a system (using natural language) in terms of interactions between the external users and the system. Since the standardisation of the UML by the Object Management Group in 1997, much research has been devoted to use cases. Some researchers have focussed on the provision of writing guidelines for use case specifications whereas others have focussed on the application of formal techniques. This thesis investigates the adequacy of the use case description for the specification and validation of software behaviour. In particular, the thesis argues that whereas the user-system interaction scheme underpins the essence of the use case notation, the UML specification of the use case does not provide a mechanism by which use cases can describe dependencies amongst constituent interaction steps. Clarifying these issues is crucial for validating the adequacy of the specification against stakeholder expectations. This thesis proposes a state-based approach (the Educator approach) to use case specification where constituent events are augmented with pre and post states to express both intra-use case and inter-use case dependencies. Use case events are enacted to visualise implied behaviour, thereby enhancing shared understanding among users and developers. Moreover, enaction provides an early "feel" of the behaviour that would result from the implementation of the specification. The Educator approach and the enaction of descriptions are supported by a prototype environment, the EducatorTool, developed to demonstrate the efficacy and novelty of the approach. To validate the work presented in this thesis an industrial study, involving the specification of realtime control software, is reported. The study involves the analysis of use case specifications of the subsystems prior to the application of the proposed approach, and the analysis of the specification where the approach and tool support are applied. This way, it is possible to determine the efficacy of the Educator approach within an industrial setting.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

The Evening Herald (Albuquerque, N.M.), 12-20-1921

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/abq_eh_news/3480/thumbnail.jp

Implemeting a component-based tool for interactive synthesis of UML statechart diagrams

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has an indisputable role in objectoriented software development. It provides several diagram types viewing a system from different perspectives. Currently available systems have relatively modest tool support for comparing, merging, synthesizing, and slicing UML diagrams based on their semantical relationships. Minimally Adequate Synthesizer (MAS) is a tool that synthesizes UML statechart diagrams from sequence diagrams in an interactive manner. It follows Angluin's framework of minimally adequate teacher to infer the desired statechart diagram with the help of membership and equivalence queries. MAS can also synthesize sequence diagrams into an edited or manually constructed statechart diagram. In this paper we discuss problems related to a practical implementation of MAS and its integration with two existing tools (Nokia TED and Rational Rose) supporting UML-based modeling. We also discuss information exchange techniques that could be used to allow the usage of other CASE tools supporting UML