08331 Abstracts Collection -- Perspectives Workshop: Model Engineering of Complex Systems (MECS)

From 10.08. to 13.08.2008, the Dagstuhl Seminar 08331 ``Perspectives Workshop: Model Engineering of Complex Systems (MECS)\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

A taxonomy of tool-related issues affecting the adoption of model-driven engineering

Although poor tool support is often blamed for the low uptake of model-driven engineering (MDE), recent studies have shown that adoption problems are as likely to be down to social and organizational factors as with tooling issues. This article discusses the impact of tools on MDE adoption and practice and does so while placing tooling within a broader organizational context. The article revisits previous data on MDE use in industry (19 in-depth interviews with MDE practitioners) and reanalyzes that data through the specific lens of MDE tools in an attempt to identify and categorize the issues that users had with the tools they adopted. In addition, the article presents new data: 20 new interviews in two specific companies—and analyzes it through the same lens. A key contribution of the paper is a loose taxonomy of tool-related considerations, based on empirical industry data, which can be used to reflect on the tooling landscape as well as inform future research on MDE tools

Industrialising Software Development in Systems Integration

Compared to other disciplines, software engineering as of today is still dependent on craftsmanship of highly-skilled workers. However, with constantly increasing complexity and efforts, existing software engineering approaches appear more and more inefficient. A paradigm shift towards industrial production methods seems inevitable. Recent advances in academia and practice have lead to the availability of industrial key principles in software development as well. Specialization is represented in software product lines, standardization and systematic reuse are available with component-based development, and automation has become accessible through model-driven engineering. While each of the above is well researched in theory, only few cases of successful implementation in the industry are known. This becomes even more evident in specialized areas of software engineering such as systems integration. Today’s IT systems need to quickly adapt to new business requirements due to mergers and acquisitions and cooperations between enterprises. This certainly leads to integration efforts, i.e. joining different subsystems into a cohesive whole in order to provide new functionality. In such an environment. the application of industrial methods for software development seems even more important. Unfortunately, software development in this field is a highly complex and heterogeneous undertaking, as IT environments differ from customer to customer. In such settings, existing industrialization concepts would never break even due to one-time projects and thus insufficient economies of scale and scope. This present thesis, therefore, describes a novel approach for a more efficient implementation of prior key principles while considering the characteristics of software development for systems integration. After identifying the characteristics of the field and their affects on currently-known industrialization concepts, an organizational model for industrialized systems integration has thus been developed. It takes software product lines and adapts them in a way feasible for a systems integrator active in several business domains. The result is a three-tiered model consolidating recurring activities and reducing the efforts for individual product lines. For the implementation of component-based development, the present thesis assesses current component approaches and applies an integration metamodel to the most suitable one. This ensures a common understanding of systems integration across different product lines and thus alleviates component reuse, even across product line boundaries. The approach is furthermore aligned with the organizational model to depict in which way component-based development may be applied in industrialized systems integration. Automating software development in systems integration with model-driven engineering was found to be insufficient in its current state. The reason herefore lies in insufficient tool chains and a lack of modelling standards. As an alternative, an XML-based configuration of products within a software product line has been developed. It models a product line and its products with the help of a domain-specific language and utilizes stylesheet transformations to generate compliable artefacts. The approach has been tested for its feasibility within an exemplarily implementation following a real-world scenario. As not all aspects of industrialized systems integration could be simulated in a laboratory environment, the concept was furthermore validated during several expert interviews with industry representatives. Here, it was also possible to assess cultural and economic aspects. The thesis concludes with a detailed summary of the contributions to the field and suggests further areas of research in the context of industrialized systems integration

TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION RISK: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

Digital transformation research and industry adoption has been on the rise over the past decade with the majority of organisations viewing it as critical to their survival over the next five years. However, in spite of the benefits of digital transformation, it presents a clear but paradoxical risk to organisations such as the requirement to develop innovative products and services while maintaining a stable customer and employee experience. With an estimated 90% of digital transformation projects resulting in failures, several calls have emerged from within the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) and the wider academy for research exploring digital transformation risks and the methodologies to manage them (Munns et al., 2022; Rowland et al., 2022). This article presents a systematic literature review (SLR) of 117 papers from high quality information systems (IS) research outlets. This research identifies six major risks that must be identified, monitored and evaluated to enable digital transformation success. These risks encompass the culture, organisation, processes, and technologies being transformed, along with the stakeholders involved in the initiative, and the overall digital transformation strategy being developed

Embedded Systems Development Tools: A MODUS-oriented Market Overview

Background: The embedded systems technology has perhaps been the most dominating technology in high-tech industries, in the past decade. The industry has correctly identified the potential of this technology and has put its efforts into exploring its full potential. Objectives: The goal of the paper is to explore the versatility of the application in the embedded system development based on one FP7-SME project. Methods/Approach: Embedded applications normally demand high resilience and quality, as well as conformity to quality standards and rigid performance. As a result embedded system developers have adopted software methods that yield high quality. The qualitative approach to examining embedded systems development tools has been applied in this work. Results: This paper presents a MODUS-oriented market analysis in the domains of Formal Verification tools, HW/SW co-simulation tools, Software Performance Optimization tools and Code Generation tools. Conclusions: The versatility of applications this technology serves is amazing. With all this performance potential, the technology has carried with itself a large number of issues which the industry essentially needs to resolve to be able to harness the full potential contained. The MODUS project toolset addressed four discrete domains of the ESD Software Market, in which corresponding open tools were developed

A Scholarship Approach to Model-Driven Engineering

Model-Driven Engineering is a paradigm for software engineering where software models are the primary artefacts throughout the software life-cycle. The aim is to define suitable representations and processes that enable precise and efficient specification, development and analysis of software. Our contributions to Model-Driven Engineering are structured according to Boyer\u27s four functions of academic activity - the scholarships of teaching, discovery, application and integration. The scholarships share a systematic approach towards seeking new insights and promoting progressive change. Even if the scholarships have their differences they are compatible so that theory, practice and teaching can strengthen each other.Scholarship of Teaching: While teaching Model-Driven Engineering to under-graduate students we introduced two changes to our course. The first change was to introduce a new modelling tool that enabled the execution of software models while the second change was to adapt pair lecturing to encourage the students to actively participate in developing models during lectures. Scholarship of Discovery: By using an existing technology for transforming models into source code we translated class diagrams and high-level action languages into natural language texts. The benefit of our approach is that the translations are applicable to a family of models while the texts are reusable across different low-level representations of the same model.Scholarship of Application: Raising the level of abstraction through models might seem a technical issue but our collaboration with industry details how the success of adopting Model-Driven Engineering depends on organisational and social factors as well as technical. Scholarship of Integration: Building on our insights from the scholarships above and a study at three large companies we show how Model-Driven Engineering empowers new user groups to become software developers but also how engineers can feel isolated due to poor tool support. Our contributions also detail how modelling enables a more agile development process as well as how the validation of models can be facilitated through text generation.The four scholarships allow for different possibilities for insights and explore Model-Driven Engineering from diverse perspectives. As a consequence, we investigate the social, organisational and technological factors of Model-Driven Engineering but also examine the possibilities and challenges of Model-Driven Engineering across disciplines and scholarships