Modellability of System Characteristics - Using Formal Mark-up Languages for Change Capability by Design

AbstractChange capability enables a production system to cope with external influences in an efficient, fast and self-organized manner. Several approaches have been designed for measuring change capability by specific indicators which represent core characteristics of production systems. On the other hand, formal modelling languages are used for production system design. Unfortunately, these languages do not match with system characteristics and especially with those indicators of change capability. Due to this missing linkage, existent production system models don’t facilitate the implementation of a system's change capability by design. Goal of this contribution is to point out the possibilities of operationalization approaches and their potential to be extended for (formal) modelling of system characteristics and sub properties, exemplified by using the concept of change capability. Additionally, the potential of change capability to be representable in a formal language will be exemplarily outlined by emphasizing on Systems Modelling Language (SysML). For this purpose, a qualitative approach with an emphasis on literature- and content analysis will be applied. Results of this contribution are (1) to pinpoint the research gap (which is also of crucial practical relevance) and (2) to point out possible solution approaches for a formal modellability of system characteristics

Quality in Ubiquitous Information System Design

International audienceInformation systems become ubiquitous. This opens a large spectrum of the possibilities for the end-users, but the design complexity is increasing. Therefore insuring quality during design is more than ever a challenge. In this article, we study this challenge by identifying the specificities of ubiquitous computing design and by considering the influence of these specificities on the quality of the various aspects of information system design (models, languages, processes and tools). For each aspect, we discuss its requirements on quality and present related works valuable for the definition and the evaluation of ubiquitous information system design quality

Technical Debt Prioritization: State of the Art. A Systematic Literature Review

Background. Software companies need to manage and refactor Technical Debt issues. Therefore, it is necessary to understand if and when refactoring Technical Debt should be prioritized with respect to developing features or fixing bugs. Objective. The goal of this study is to investigate the existing body of knowledge in software engineering to understand what Technical Debt prioritization approaches have been proposed in research and industry. Method. We conducted a Systematic Literature Review among 384 unique papers published until 2018, following a consolidated methodology applied in Software Engineering. We included 38 primary studies. Results. Different approaches have been proposed for Technical Debt prioritization, all having different goals and optimizing on different criteria. The proposed measures capture only a small part of the plethora of factors used to prioritize Technical Debt qualitatively in practice. We report an impact map of such factors. However, there is a lack of empirical and validated set of tools. Conclusion. We observed that technical Debt prioritization research is preliminary and there is no consensus on what are the important factors and how to measure them. Consequently, we cannot consider current research conclusive and in this paper, we outline different directions for necessary future investigations