The cloud paradigm: Are you tuned for the lyrics?

Major players, business angels and opinion-makers are broadcasting beguiled lyrics on the most recent IT hype: your software should ascend to the clouds. There are many clouds and the stake is high. Distractedly, many of us became assiduous users of the cloud, but perhaps due to the legacy systems and legacy knowledge, IT professionals, mainly those many that work in business information systems for the long tail, are not as much plunged into producing cloud-based systems for their clients. This keynote will delve into several aspects of this cloud paradigm, from more generic concerns regarding security and value for money, to more specific worries that reach software engineers in general. Do we need a different software development process? Are development techniques and tools mature enough? What about the role of open-source in the cloud? How do we assess the quality in cloud-based development? Please stay tuned for more!info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Welcome from the Workshop Chairs

Over the last decade, the Information Technology industry has become ever more interested in evaluating Requirements Engineering (RE) approaches, techniques and tools and comparing their usefulness, effectiveness and utility in specific practical contexts. The increasing interest in empirical evaluation resulted in a growing number of industry-university collaborations in the RE community, that have been instrumental to generating empirical data through experiments, surveys, case studies, and action research studies. As empirical studies are recognized as indispensable and valuable ways to assess the actual benefits and cost of applying the RE methods and tools proposed in the RE community, the conversation on adopting systematic research methods and evaluation practices intensified. The overall objective of the EmpiRE workshop series at the annual RE conference is to increase the cross-fertilization of Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) methods and RE by actively encouraging the exchange of knowledge and ideas between the communities of ESE and RE. Since its launch at RE’11 in Trento, the EmpiRE workshop has been serving as the platform promoting the use of new evaluation techniques from ESE in the area of RE as well as the discussion on new domains and problems in RE where involving ESE will make a great difference. Some outcomes of the past editions of EmpiRE include the identification of open research problems and the possible solutions to these problems regarding: (i) the aspects of RE approaches that can be evaluated; (ii) the factors, criteria, and metrics that are appropriate for empirical evaluation purposes; (iii) the replication of empirical RE studies; (iv) the role of the users’ perspectives in empirical RE

Towards a maintenance semantic architecture.

International audienceTechnological and software progress with the evolution of processes within company have highlighted the need to evolve systems of maintenance process from autonomous systems to cooperative and sharing information system based on software platform. However, this need gives rise to various maintenance platforms. The first part of this study investigates the different types of existing industrial platforms and characterizes them compared to two criteria namely : information exchange and relationship intensity. This allowed identifying the e-maintenance architecture as the current most efficient architecture. despite its effectiveness, this latter can only guarantee technical interoperability between various components. Therefore, the second part of this study proposes a semantic-knowledge based architecture, thereby ensuring a higher level of semantic interoperability. To this end, specific maintenance ontology has been developed

Remanufacturing and product design: designing for the 7th generation

The following is taken directly from the research report. This report investigates Design for Remanufacture in terms of both detailed product design and the business context in which Design for Remanufacture may operate. Key Study Objectives • To understand the link between design and remanufacture • To understand how Design for Remanufacture can lead to increased innovation and Sustainable Development (SD) • To identify proactive strategies to further Design for Remanufactur

Benchmarking in the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web technology needs to be thoroughly evaluated for providing objective results and obtaining massive improvement in its quality; thus, the transfer of this technology from research to industry will speed up. This chapter presents software benchmarking, a process that aims to improve the Semantic Web technology and to find the best practices. The chapter also describes a specific software benchmarking methodology and shows how this methodology has been used to benchmark the interoperability of ontology development tools, employing RDF(S) as the interchange language

Learning to teach database design by trial and error

Proceedings of: 4th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2002), Ciudad Real, Spain, April 3-6, 2002The definition of effective pedagogical strategies for coaching and tutoring students according to their needs in each moment is a high handicap in ITS design. In this paper we propose the use of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) model, that allows the system to learn how to teach to each student individually, only based on the acquired experience with other learners with similar characteristics, like a human tutor does. This technique avoids to define the teaching strategies by learning action policies that define what, when and how to teach. The model is applied to a database design ITS system, used as an example to illustrate all the concepts managed in the model

Harmonizing CMMI-DEV 1.2 and XP Method to Improve The Software Development Processes in Small Software Development Firms

Most software development organizations are small firms, and they have realized the need to manage and improve their software development and management activities. Traditional Software Process Improvement (SPI) models and standards are not realistic for these firms because of high cost, limited resources and strict project deadlines. Therefore, these firms need a lightweight software development method and an appropriate SPI model to manage and improve their software development and management processes. This study aims to construct a suitable software development process improvement framework for Small Software Development Firms (SSDFs) based on eXtreme Programming (XP) method and Capability Maturity Model Integration for Development Version 1.2 (CMMI-Dev1.2) model. Four stages are involved in developing the framework: (1) aligning XP practices to the specific goals of CMMI-Dev1.2 Key Process Areas (KPAs); (2) developing the proposed software development process improvement framework based on extending XP method by adapting the Extension-Based Approach (EBA), CMMI-Dev1.2, and generic elements of the SPI framework; (3) verifying the compatibility of the proposed framework to the KPAs of CMMI-Dev1.2 by using focus group method coupled with Delphi technique; and (4) validating the modified framework by using CMMI-Dev1.2 questionnaire as a main item to validate the suitability of the modified framework for SSDFs, and conducting two case studies to validate the applicability and effectiveness of this framework for these firms. The result of aligning XP practices to the KPAs of CMMI-Dev1.2 shows that twelve KPAs are largely supported by XP practices, eight KPAs are partially supported by XP practices, and two KPAs are not-supported by XP practices. The main contributions of this study are: software development process improvement framework for SSDFs, elicit better understanding of how to construct the framework, and quality improvement of the software development processes. There are possible avenues for extending this research to fulfil the missing specific practices of several KPAs, examining other agile practices and using CMMI-Dev1.3 to improve the framework, and conducting more case studie

’The World and the Machine’: a critical perspective on process technology

This short paper sets out a critical perspective process technology. It uses an analytical framework drawn from the work of Jackson as a means of identifying some important concerns and looks at the way research in the broad area of process technology might respond to these concerns. The paper is deliberately open and discursive