Systematic evaluation of software product line architectures

The architecture of a software product line is one of its most important artifacts as it represents an abstraction of the products that can be generated. It is crucial to evaluate the quality attributes of a product line architecture in order to: increase the productivity of the product line process and the quality of the products; provide a means to understand the potential behavior of the products and, consequently, decrease their time to market; and, improve the handling of the product line variability. The evaluation of product line architecture can serve as a basis to analyze the managerial and economical values of a product line for software managers and architects. Most of the current research on the evaluation of product line architecture does not take into account metrics directly obtained from UML models and their variabilities; the metrics used instead are difficult to be applied in general and to be used for quantitative analysis. This paper presents a Systematic Evaluation Method for UML-based Software Product Line Architecture, the SystEM-PLA. SystEM-PLA differs from current research as it provides stakeholders with a means to: (i) estimate and analyze potential products; (ii) use predefined basic UML-based metrics to compose quality attribute metrics; (iii) perform feasibility and trade-off analysis of a product line architecture with respect to its quality attributes; and, (iv) make the evaluation of product line architecture more flexible. An example using the SEI’s Arcade Game Maker (AGM) product line is presented as a proof of concept, illustrating SystEM-PLA activities. Metrics for complexity and extensibility quality attributes are defined and used to perform a trade-off analysis

Big data: the potential role of research data management and research data registries

Universities generate and hold increasingly vast quantities of research data – both in the form of large, well-structured datasets but more often in the form of a long tail of small, distributed datasets which collectively amount to ‘Big Data’ and offer significant potential for reuse. However, unlike big data, these collections of small data are often less well curated and are usually very difficult to find thereby reducing their potential reuse value. The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) works to support UK universities to better manage and expose their research data so that its full value may be realised. With a focus on tapping into this long tail of small data, this presentation will cover two main DCC, services: DMPonline which helps researchers to identify potentially valuable research data and to plan for its longer-term retention and reuse; and the UK pilot research data registry and discovery service (RDRDS) which will help to ensure that research data produced in UK HEIs can be found, understood, and reused. Initially we will introduce participants to the role of data management planning to open up dialogue between researchers and library services to ensure potentially valuable research data are managed appropriately and made available for reuse where feasible. DMPs provide institutions with valuable insights into the scale of their data holdings, highlight any ethical and legal requirements that need to be met, and enable planning for dissemination and reuse. We will also introduce the DCC’s DMPonline, a tool to help researchers write DMPs, which can be customised by institutions and integrated with other systems to simplify and enhance the management and reuse of data. In the second part of the presentation we will focus on making selected research data more visible for reuse and explore the potential value of local and national research data registries. In particular we will highlight the Jisc-funded RDRDS pilot to establish a UK national service that aggregates metadata relating to data collections held in research institutions and subject data centres. The session will conclude by exploring some of the opportunities we may collaboratively explore in facilitating the management, aggregation and reuse of research data

A research review of quality assessment for software

Measures were recommended to assess the quality of software submitted to the AdaNet program. The quality factors that are important to software reuse are explored and methods of evaluating those factors are discussed. Quality factors important to software reuse are: correctness, reliability, verifiability, understandability, modifiability, and certifiability. Certifiability is included because the documentation of many factors about a software component such as its efficiency, portability, and development history, constitute a class for factors important to some users, not important at all to other, and impossible for AdaNet to distinguish between a priori. The quality factors may be assessed in different ways. There are a few quantitative measures which have been shown to indicate software quality. However, it is believed that there exists many factors that indicate quality and have not been empirically validated due to their subjective nature. These subjective factors are characterized by the way in which they support the software engineering principles of abstraction, information hiding, modularity, localization, confirmability, uniformity, and completeness

Aligning a Service Provisioning Model of a Service-Oriented System with the ITIL v.3 Life Cycle

Bringing together the ICT and the business layer of a service-oriented system (SoS) remains a great challenge. Few papers tackle the management of SoS from the business and organizational point of view. One solution is to use the well-known ITIL v.3 framework. The latter enables to transform the organization into a service-oriented organizational which focuses on the value provided to the service customers. In this paper, we align the steps of the service provisioning model with the ITIL v.3 processes. The alignment proposed should help organizations and IT teams to integrate their ICT layer, represented by the SoS, and their business layer, represented by ITIL v.3. One main advantage of this combined use of ITIL and a SoS is the full service orientation of the company.Comment: This document is the technical work of a conference paper submitted to the International Conference on Exploring Service Science 1.5 (IESS 2015

Development of the evaluation system for automobile remanufacturing

By 2015, the EU directives required the automobile manufacturers to produce a vehicle that contains reusable and / or recoverable parts at least 95% of total weight. In the developed countries, the legislative issue the take – back policy which requires the manufacturers to consider the end – of – life (EOL) of their products at early design stage. The goal of this paper is to propose a framework of development methodology that focuses on integrated design for remanufacturing evaluation system. This system supports the automobile product design and development at the early design phase. The proposed method is divided into two phases. The first phase aims to identify the suitable EOL process. The second phase aims to verify the most economical EOL process. The proposed method incorporates the Case base Reasoning [CBR] into the remanufacturing techniques. It is expected that the proposed method can provide the EOL with decision support during designing the automobile parts at the early design stage

Intranet and Knowledge Management: Putting the Cart Before the Horse?

This paper explores the use of intranet-technology to support knowledge intensive decision-making in a technical service delivery process of a major oilfield services company. Our findings show that creating, mobilizing, and exchanging knowledge through an intranet-technology based system delivers forms of benefits to both the organization and its clients, and understanding what organizational knowledge is to be managed and the process of managing it define the role of technology that enables knowledge management