What to Fix? Distinguishing between design and non-design rules in automated tools

Technical debt---design shortcuts taken to optimize for delivery speed---is a critical part of long-term software costs. Consequently, automatically detecting technical debt is a high priority for software practitioners. Software quality tool vendors have responded to this need by positioning their tools to detect and manage technical debt. While these tools bundle a number of rules, it is hard for users to understand which rules identify design issues, as opposed to syntactic quality. This is important, since previous studies have revealed the most significant technical debt is related to design issues. Other research has focused on comparing these tools on open source projects, but these comparisons have not looked at whether the rules were relevant to design. We conducted an empirical study using a structured categorization approach, and manually classify 466 software quality rules from three industry tools---CAST, SonarQube, and NDepend. We found that most of these rules were easily labeled as either not design (55%) or design (19%). The remainder (26%) resulted in disagreements among the labelers. Our results are a first step in formalizing a definition of a design rule, in order to support automatic detection.Comment: Long version of accepted short paper at International Conference on Software Architecture 2017 (Gothenburg, SE

Developing an inter-enterprise alignment maturity model: research challenges and solutions

Business-IT alignment is pervasive today, as organizations strive to achieve competitive advantage. Like in other areas, e.g., software development, maintenance and IT services, there are maturity models to assess such alignment. Those models, however, do not specifically address the aspects needed for achieving alignment between business and IT in inter-enterprise settings. In this paper, we present the challenges we face in the development of an inter-enterprise alignment maturity model, as well as the current solutions to counter these problems

Remanufacturing: a key strategy for sustainable development

Remanufacturing is a process of bringing used products to "like-new" functional state with warranty to match. It recovers a substantial proportion of the resource incorporated in a used product in its first manufacture, at low additional cost, thus reducing the price of the resulting product. The key remanufacturing problem is the ambiguity in its definition leading to paucity of knowledge and research in the process. Also, few remanufacturing tools and techniques have been developed to improve its efficiency and effectiveness. This paper addresses these issues by describing the findings of in-depth UK case studies, including, a robust remanufacturing definition and an analytic model of the generic remanufacturing business process for improving remanufacturing knowledge and expertise

Hypermedia support for argumentation-based rationale: 15 years on from gIBIS and QOC

Having developed, used and evaluated some of the early IBIS-based approaches to design rationale (DR) such as gIBIS and QOC in the late 1980s/mid-1990s, we describe the subsequent evolution of the argumentation-based paradigm through software support, and perspectives drawn from modeling and meeting facilitation. Particular attention is given to the challenge of negotiating the overheads of capturing this form of rationale. Our approach has maintained a strong emphasis on keeping the representational scheme as simple as possible to enable real time meeting mediation and capture, attending explicitly to the skills required to use the approach well, particularly for the sort of participatory, multi-stakeholder requirements analysis demanded by many design problems. However, we can then specialize the notation and the way in which the tool is used in the service of specific methodologies, supported by a customizable hypermedia environment, and interoperable with other software tools. After presenting this approach, called Compendium, we present examples to illustrate the capabilities for support security argumentation in requirements engineering, template driven modeling for document generation, and IBIS-based indexing of and navigation around video records of meetings

Validating adequacy and suitability of business-IT alignment criteria in an inter-enterprise maturity model

Aligning requirements of a business with its information technology is currently a major issue in enterprise computing. Existing literature indicates important criteria to judge the level of alignment between business and IT within a single enterprise. However, identifying such criteria in an inter-enterprise setting – or re-thinking the existing ones – is hardly addressed at all. Business-IT alignment in such settings poses new challenges, as in inter-enterprise collaborations, alignment is driven by economic processes instead of centralized decision-making processes. In our research, we develop a maturity model for business-IT alignment in inter-enterprise settings that takes this difference into account. In this paper, we report on a multi-method approach we devised to confront the validation of the business-IT alignment criteria that we included in the maturity model. As independent feedback is critical for our validation, we used a focus group session and a case study as instruments to take the first step in validating the business-IT alignment criteria. We present how we applied our approach, what we learnt, and what the implications were for our model

Designing an online part-time Master of Philosophy with Problem Oriented Engineering

The paper reports on the application of Problem Oriented Engineering (POE) to the design of a highly innovative post-graduate research programme for the Open University, UK, a world leader in supported distance higher education. The new programme, to be launched in October 2009, is a part-time Master of Philosophy (MPhil) to be delivered entirely at a distance, supported by a blend of synchronous, asynchronous and immersive internet and web technologies. POE is a framework for engineering design under development at the Open University. After a brief description of the project and the task at hand, the paper discusses the overall engineering approach taken, key aspects of product design, the mapping between requirements and technology, and the development of one key technological component

Using a Combination of Measurement Tools to Extract Metrics from Open Source Projects

Software measurement can play a major role in ensuring the quality and reliability of software products. The measurement activities require appropriate tools to collect relevant metric data. Currently, there are several such tools available for software measurement. The main objective of this paper is to provide some guidelines in using a combination of multiple measurement tools especially for products built using object-oriented techniques and languages. In this paper, we highlight three tools for collecting metric data, in our case from several Java-based open source projects. Our research is currently based on the work of Card and Glass, who argue that design complexity measures (data complexity and structural complexity) are indicators/predictors of procedural/cyclomatic complexity (decision counts) and errors (discovered from system tests). Their work was centered on structured design and our work is with object-oriented designs and the metrics we use parallel those of Card and Glass, being, Henry and Kafura's Information Flow Metrics, McCabe's Cyclomatic Complexity, and Chidamber and Kemerer Object-oriented Metrics