Actor perception in business use case modeling

Mainstream literature recognizes the validity and effectiveness of use cases as a technique for gathering and capturing system requirements. Use cases represent the driver of various modern development methods, mainly of object-oriented extraction, such as the Unified Process. Although the adoption of use cases proliferated in the context of software systems development, they are not as extensively employed in business modeling . The concept of business use case is not a novelty, but only recently did it begin to re-circulate in the literature and in case tools. This paper examines the issues involved in adopting business use cases for capturing the functionality of an organization and proposes guidelines for their identification, packaging, and mapping to system use cases. The proposed guidelines are based on the principle of actor perception described in the paper. The application of this principle is exemplified with a worked example aimed at demonstrating the utility of the proposed guidelines and at clarifying the application of the principle of actor perception. The worked example is based on a series of workshops run at a major UK financial institution

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

ON THE THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF RESEARCH INTO THE UNDERSTANDABILITY OF BUSINESS PROCESS MODELS

Against the background of the growing significance of Business Process Management (BPM) for Information Systems (IS) research and practice, especially the field of Business Process Modeling gains more and more importance. Business process models support communication about as well as the coordination of processes and have become a widely adopted tool in practice. As the understandability of business process models plays a crucial role in communication processes, more and more studies on process model understandability have been conducted in IS research. This article aims at investigating underlying theories of research into business process model understandability by means of an in-depth analysis of 126 systematically retrieved research articles on the topic. It shows in how far process model understandability research is multi-theoretically founded. Identified theories differ regarding addressed subject matters, their coverage, their focus as well as the underlying notion of model understanding, which is exemplarily demonstrated and discussed in this article. Moreover, implications of the findings are discussed and an outlook on future business process model understandability research and on the integration potential of theories in this field is given

Effect of Different UML Diagrams to Evaluate the Size Metric for Different Software Projects

In Software Engineering, an important activity is measuring of the Software in different ways. For Measuring the Software, appropriate metrics are needed. Using Software metrics we are able to attain the various qualitative and quantitative aspects of Software. To measure the Software in terms of quality, size, efforts, efficiency, and reliability, performance etc. we have different metrics available in Software Engineering and it has been an area of interest for the various researchers. Measures of specific attributes of the process, project and product are used to compute Software metrics. This work proposes a similar approach of measuring software using various UML diagrams and applied Software size metric to evaluate the size of the Software. This paper discusses the proposed approach using two different case studies and their source codes. This paper discusses the different results obtained using different perspectives of the Software size metric measurements and maintainability of the Software

A method for mapping XML-based specifications between development methodologies

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is widely used by software engineers as the basis of analysis and design in software development. However, UML ignores human factors in the course of software development because of its strong emphasis on the internal structure and functionality of the application. This thesis presents a method of mapping human-computer interaction (HCI) requirement specifications generated by usability engineering (UE) methodologies (e.g. Putting Usability First (PUF)) into UML specifications. These two sets of requirement specification are specified, using Extensible Markup Language (XML) so that HCI requirement specifications can be integrated into UML ones. A Mapping Tool was developed to facilitate the creation of mappings between PUF XML tags and XMI tags. The Mapping Tool was used to create mappings between PUF and UML requirement specifications. This mapping process and its outputs were evaluated to demonstrate that the tool worked. The results of the evaluation show that the HCI requirement specification represented by the PUF XML tags can improve the UML specification by adding them into the XMI tags

Investigating styles in variability modeling: Hierarchical vs. constrained styles

Context: A common way to represent product lines is with variability modeling. Yet, there are different ways to extract and organize relevant characteristics of variability. Comprehensibility of these models and the ease of creating models are important for the efficiency of any variability management approach. Objective: The goal of this paper is to investigate the comprehensibility of two common styles to organize variability into models - hierarchical and constrained - where the dependencies between choices are specified either through the hierarchy of the model or as cross-cutting constraints, respectively. Method: We conducted a controlled experiment with a sample of 90 participants who were students with prior training in modeling. Each participant was provided with two variability models specified in Common Variability Language (CVL) and was asked to answer questions requiring interpretation of provided models. The models included 9 to 20 nodes and 8 to 19 edges and used the main variability elements. After answering the questions, the participants were asked to create a model based on a textual description. Results: The results indicate that the hierarchical modeling style was easier to comprehend from a subjective point of view, but there was also a significant interaction effect with the degree of dependency in the models, that influenced objective comprehension. With respect to model creation, we found that the use of a constrained modeling style resulted in higher correctness of variability models. Conclusions: Prior exposure to modeling style and the degree of dependency among elements in the model determine what modeling style a participant chose when creating the model from natural language descriptions. Participants tended to choose a hierarchical style for modeling situations with high dependency and a constrained style for situations with low dependency. Furthermore, the degree of dependency also influences the comprehension of the variability model

Towards Diagram Understanding: A Pilot Study Measuring Cognitive Workload Through Eye-Tracking

We investigate model understanding, in particular , how the quality of the UML diagram layout impacts cognitive load. We hypothesize that this w ill have a significant impact on the structure and effectiveness of engineers’ communication. In previous work, we have studied task performance measurements and subjective assessments; here, we also investigate behavioral indicators such as fixation and pupillary dilation. We use such indicators to explore diagram understanding- and reading strategies and how such strategies are impacted, e.g. by diagram type and expertise level. In the pilot eye-tracking experiment run so far, we have only examined a small number of participants (n=4), so our results are preliminary in nature and do not afford far reaching conclusions. They do, however, corroborate findings from earlier experiments, for example, showing that layout quality indeed matters and improves understanding. Our results also give rise to a number of new hypotheses about diagram understanding strategies that we are investigating in an ongoing data acquisition campaign

Conceptual design of deoiling processes : business process reengineering (BPR) and computer support tools

Deoiling of petroleum wastewater is a major concern in petroleum process engineering. The conventional design procedure for deoiling systems consists of nine consecutive stages involving different people or groups. This thesis considers reengineering the conventional procedure, with the aim of increasing the efficiency of the process and productivity of people involved. The thesis then investigates the development of the appropriate computer support tools for the new procedure. The reengineering of the procedure is based on concepts proposed by Hammer (1990). The resulting procedure consists of four stages, where parallelism of the different tasks in the conventional procedure is explicitly considered. A model of the new procedure is described in UML (Unified Modelling Language). The advantage of using UML instead of using just natural language description is that UML uses graphical representation that is easy to use and less prone to ambiguity. Based on the new procedure, a decision support system called CODES (Conceptual DEsign of deoiling Systems) was designed and implemented. CODES supports the stages of wastewater assessment, equipment options at different locations, treatment disposal options and recommendations for final process configuration. Two Case Studies using operating field data are reported. The Case Studies using CODES proved to be straightforward to use and produced appropriate comments on the performance of the existing designs and proposed alternatives to satisfy the design requirements. CODES results agreed with knowledge from previous plant trials. The contribution of this thesis to the deoiling design process is twofold. Firstly, a critical review of the conventional procedure has resulted in a new one, which has potential benefits of improving a company's efficiency by reducing the number of people and activities involved, and shortening the design time. Secondly, the feasibility of applying the new procedure and CODES is successfully demonstrated through the case studies. Limitations and areas of extensions are also identified