45,402 research outputs found

    The organisational goals of social entrepreneurs: how social are they?

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    There is an increasing consensus among academics that the common denominator of ‘social entrepreneurs’ is their adherence to a ‘dominant social mission’. The extent to which social entrepreneurs actually adhere to socially oriented goals and values is largely taken for granted and treated as a black box. Building on established theoretical constructs, this paper develops a number of measures that can potentially contribute to our understanding of how ‘social’ social entrepreneurs really are. More specifically, we empirically test four potential measures of “social proclivity” in a well defined sample of social ventures, performing confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) (N~270). CFA points to high reliability and validity for the measures of each of the four constructs and supports the existence of a higher order construct “social proclivity”. Further, results show that social entrepreneurs display strong social as well as economic motives, providing an empirical base for actually capturing the dual-bottom line that characterises these enterprises

    CloudHealth: A Model-Driven Approach to Watch the Health of Cloud Services

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    Cloud systems are complex and large systems where services provided by different operators must coexist and eventually cooperate. In such a complex environment, controlling the health of both the whole environment and the individual services is extremely important to timely and effectively react to misbehaviours, unexpected events, and failures. Although there are solutions to monitor cloud systems at different granularity levels, how to relate the many KPIs that can be collected about the health of the system and how health information can be properly reported to operators are open questions. This paper reports the early results we achieved in the challenge of monitoring the health of cloud systems. In particular we present CloudHealth, a model-based health monitoring approach that can be used by operators to watch specific quality attributes. The CloudHealth Monitoring Model describes how to operationalize high level monitoring goals by dividing them into subgoals, deriving metrics for the subgoals, and using probes to collect the metrics. We use the CloudHealth Monitoring Model to control the probes that must be deployed on the target system, the KPIs that are dynamically collected, and the visualization of the data in dashboards.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl

    Supporting Requirements Verification Using XSLT

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    In this paper we present a light-weight approach for the automatic verification of requirements. This approach is not based on natural language parsing techniques but on the representation of requirements in XML. In our approach, XSLT stylesheets are used not only to automatically generate requirements documents, but also to provide verification–oriented heuristics as well as to measure the quality of requirements using some verification–oriented metrics. These ideas have been implemented in REM, an experimentalXML– based requirements management tool also described in this paper.Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC 2000–1106–C02–0

    A diversity-based approach to requirements tracing in new product development.

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    Production models emerged in recent times have stressed the need to face complex production contexts, characterized in particular by the rise in internal and environmental variability. In this work, a stylization of some elements concerning analysis and design of new products is given, and in particular those that involve definition and transfer phases in the development of innovative goods, where change and variability in requirements along development process are often high. This analysis has a twofold goal: first, to supply a conceptual frame for the close examination of some dynamics of requirement's integration into an artifact's design, in order to give account of their variability along development cycle; on the other side, to propose an approach based on simple similarity metrics, to be applied to linguistic descriptions of artifacts in the early phases of development process, in order to identify components in an artifact that undergo larger variability and therefore are to be paid more attention in the subsequent phases of life cycle.

    Requirements Elicitation from BPMN Models

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    TarkvarasĂŒsteemi loomiseks on vĂ€ga oluline mĂ”ista, millised on tegelikud vajadused ja nende rahuldamist takistavad piirangud. NĂ”uete tuvastamise kĂ€igus Ă”pitakse tundma ĂŒmbritsevat keskkonda ja tehakse kindlaks kasutajate ning teiste osapoolte vajadused. Üheks peamiseks kohaks, kust nĂ”udeid leida, on hetkel kasutatavad sĂŒsteemid (protsessid, organisatsioon, keskkond ja kasutatavad infosĂŒsteemid). Kasutusel olevaid protsesse kujutatakse tihti graafiliselt mudelitena ja need mudelid kujutavad endast vĂ€ga olulist informatsiooniallikat nĂ”uete tuvastamisel. BPMN mudelid on saanud vĂ€ga populaarseks ja neid kasutatakse tihti sĂŒsteemide kirjeldamiseks, kuid vaatamata sellele, et nad on vÀÀrtuslikud teadmiste allikad, kasutatakse neid nĂ”uete tuvastamisel siiski harva. Üheks selliseks pĂ”hjuseks on asjaolu, et puuduvad konkreetsed ja pĂ”hjalikud juhised, mis aitavad sĂŒstemaatiliselt mudelist nĂ”udeid tuvastada. Selles töös esitletakse meetodit funktsionaalsete nĂ”uete tuvastamiseks BPMN mudelitest. Meetod lĂ€bib sĂŒsteemselt kĂ”iki nĂ”ude komponente ja annab juhised, kuidas BPMN mudelist komponendi kohta informatsiooni leida ning annab lisaks kogumi kĂŒsimusi, mida valdkonna spetsialistidele esitada, et nĂ”ue oleks pĂ”hjalik, jĂ€rjepidev, piiritletud ja nĂ”utava detailsusega. Loodud meetodit rakendati ka juhtumiuuringu kĂ€igus ja tĂ”estati, et uus meetod on rakendatav ning on struktureeritud lĂ€henemine nĂ”uete tuvastamiseks. Meetod tuvastas rohkem nĂ”udeid kui meetod, mis oli algselt kasutusel juhtumi organisatsiooni poolt ja tuvastatud nĂ”uded olid ka parema kvaliteediga. Meetodi rakendamine vĂ”ttis mĂ€rkimisvÀÀrselt vĂ€hem aega, tuvastamise protsess oli hĂ€sti kontrollitav, see vĂ”imaldas tĂ€psemalt hinnata tuvastamisele kuluvat aega ja seelĂ€bi on meetodit kasutades lihtsam protsessi planeerida ja ĂŒlesandeid delegeerida.When building a software system, it is crucial to understand the actual needs and the interfering constraints that apply in the surrounding environment. Elicitation of requirements is all about learning the environment and discovering the needs of users and other stakeholders. One of the primary sources for requirement elicitation is the system (processes, organization, environment and legacy systems) currently being used. The system is often captured in the form of graphical models, which are an important source of information for requirements elicitation. BPMN models are gaining popularity and are frequently used to model systems. Despite the fact that they are a valuable source of knowledge, they are rarely used as a source for eliciting requirements. One reason for this is the lack of concrete and comprehensive guidelines that would assist a systematic requirements elicitation from such models. This thesis presents a method for eliciting functional requirements from BPMN models. The method covers all components of a requirement and gives guidelines where in the BPMN model the information about the components can be found. It also provides a set of questions to be asked from domain experts to make sure that the requirement specification is complete, consistent, bounded and on the required level of granularity. The method was applied on a case study and it was proved that the method is applicable and provides a structured approach to eliciting requirements. The method elicited more requirements than the method previously used by the case organization, and the elicited requirements were also of better quality. The method took considerably less time to apply, it gave better control over the elicitation process, it was easier to evaluate the needed effort, and it enabled to better plan the process. The structured approach makes it easier to delegate work, and there are less situations where something might be overlooked

    An XML-Based Approach for the Automatic Verification of Software Requirements Specifications

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    In this paper, we present an approach for the automatic verification of software requirements specifications. This approach is based on the representation of software requirements in XML and the usage of the XSLT language not only to automatically generate requirements documents, but also to verify some desired quality properties and to automatically compute some metrics. These ideas have been implemented in REM, an experimental requirements management tool that is also described in this paper.Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC 2000–1106–C02–0

    Derivation and consistency checking of models in early software product line engineering

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    Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia InformĂĄticaSoftware Product Line Engineering (SPLE) should offer the ability to express the derivation of product-specific assets, while checking for their consistency. The derivation of product-specific assets is possible using general-purpose programming languages in combination with techniques such as conditional compilation and code generation. On the other hand, consistency checking can be achieved through consistency rules in the form of architectural and design guidelines, programming conventions and well-formedness rules. Current approaches present four shortcomings: (1) focus on code derivation only, (2) ignore consistency problems between the variability model and other complementary specification models used in early SPLE, (3) force developers to learn new, difficult to master, languages to encode the derivation of assets, and (4) offer no tool support. This dissertation presents solutions that contribute to tackle these four shortcomings. These solutions are integrated in the approach Derivation and Consistency Checking of models in early SPLE (DCC4SPL) and its corresponding tool support. The two main components of our approach are the Variability Modelling Language for Requirements(VML4RE), a domain-specific language and derivation infrastructure, and the Variability Consistency Checker (VCC), a verification technique and tool. We validate DCC4SPL demonstrating that it is appropriate to find inconsistencies in early SPL model-based specifications and to specify the derivation of product-specific models.European Project AMPLE, contract IST-33710; Fundação para a CiĂȘncia e Tecnologia - SFRH/BD/46194/2008

    Taming Uncertainty in the Assurance Process of Self-Adaptive Systems: a Goal-Oriented Approach

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    Goals are first-class entities in a self-adaptive system (SAS) as they guide the self-adaptation. A SAS often operates in dynamic and partially unknown environments, which cause uncertainty that the SAS has to address to achieve its goals. Moreover, besides the environment, other classes of uncertainty have been identified. However, these various classes and their sources are not systematically addressed by current approaches throughout the life cycle of the SAS. In general, uncertainty typically makes the assurance provision of SAS goals exclusively at design time not viable. This calls for an assurance process that spans the whole life cycle of the SAS. In this work, we propose a goal-oriented assurance process that supports taming different sources (within different classes) of uncertainty from defining the goals at design time to performing self-adaptation at runtime. Based on a goal model augmented with uncertainty annotations, we automatically generate parametric symbolic formulae with parameterized uncertainties at design time using symbolic model checking. These formulae and the goal model guide the synthesis of adaptation policies by engineers. At runtime, the generated formulae are evaluated to resolve the uncertainty and to steer the self-adaptation using the policies. In this paper, we focus on reliability and cost properties, for which we evaluate our approach on the Body Sensor Network (BSN) implemented in OpenDaVINCI. The results of the validation are promising and show that our approach is able to systematically tame multiple classes of uncertainty, and that it is effective and efficient in providing assurances for the goals of self-adaptive systems
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