Business Domain Modelling using an Integrated Framework

This paper presents an application of a “Systematic Soft Domain Driven Design Framework” as a soft systems approach to domain-driven design of information systems development. The framework combining techniques from Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), the Unified Modelling Language (UML), and an implementation pattern known as “Naked Objects”. This framework have been used in action research projects that have involved the investigation and modelling of business processes using object-oriented domain models and the implementation of software systems based on those domain models. Within this framework, Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) is used as a guiding methodology to explore the problem situation and to develop the domain model using UML for the given business domain. The framework is proposed and evaluated in our previous works, and a real case study “Information Retrieval System for academic research” is used, in this paper, to show further practice and evaluation of the framework in different business domain. We argue that there are advantages from combining and using techniques from different methodologies in this way for business domain modelling. The framework is overviewed and justified as multimethodology using Mingers multimethodology ideas

Patterns-based Evaluation of Open Source BPM Systems: The Cases of jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark

In keeping with the proliferation of free software development initiatives and the increased interest in the business process management domain, many open source workflow and business process management systems have appeared during the last few years and are now under active development. This upsurge gives rise to two important questions: what are the capabilities of these systems? and how do they compare to each other and to their closed source counterparts? i.e. in other words what is the state-of-the-art in the area?. To gain an insight into the area, we have conducted an in-depth analysis of three of the major open source workflow management systems - jBPM, OpenWFE and Enhydra Shark, the results of which are reported here. This analysis is based on the workflow patterns framework and provides a continuation of the series of evaluations performed using the same framework on closed source systems, business process modeling languages and web-service composition standards. The results from evaluations of the three open source systems are compared with each other and also with the results from evaluations of three representative closed source systems - Staffware, WebSphere MQ and Oracle BPEL PM, documented in earlier works. The overall conclusion is that open source systems are targeted more toward developers rather than business analysts. They generally provide less support for the patterns than closed source systems, particularly with respect to the resource perspective which describes the various ways in which work is distributed amongst business users and managed through to completion

A definition-by-example approach and visual language for activity patterns in engineering disciplines

Modeling tools are well established in software development. A model is the result of a series of modeling activities. The ability to recognize when a user is working on a certain modeling activity opens up a range of possibilities for context-sensitive support. One possible way to support the user is offering the auto-completion of the current task. The recognition of modeling activities is typically carried out by matching event patterns against events emitted by a user's editing operations. A user that intends to add or customize auto-completions must be able to easily understand and create activity definitions. However, defining the currently required complex event patterns is a challenging and error-prone task even for a person with an intensive knowledge of event-processing languages. In this paper, we propose the visual definition language VisPaRec accompanied by a method that allows creating activity definitions in a semi-automated and graphical way. We evaluate our visual definition language in a comparative user study against the generic event-processing language Rapide. We found that the proposed visual representation increases comprehensibility while reducing time for constructing and modifying activity definitions significantly

How do particle physicists learn the programming concepts they need?

The ability to read, use and develop code efficiently and successfully is a key ingredient in modern particle physics. We report the experience of a training program, identified as "Advanced Programming Concepts", that introduces software concepts, methods and techniques to work effectively on a daily basis in a HEP experiment or other programming intensive fields. This paper illustrates the principles, motivations and methods that shape the "Advanced Computing Concepts" training program, the knowledge base that it conveys, an analysis of the feedback received so far, and the integration of these concepts in the software development process of the experiments as well as its applicability to a wider audience.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, CHEP2015 proceeding

Requirements Catalog for Business Process Modeling Recommender Systems

The manual construction of business process models is a time-consuming and error-prone task. To improve the quality of business process models, several modeling support techniques have been suggested spanning from strict auto-completion of a business process model with pre-defined model elements to suggesting closely matching recommendations. While recommendation systems are widely used and auto-completion functions are a standard feature of programming tools, such techniques have not been exploited for business process modeling although implementation strategies have already been suggested. Therefore, this paper collects requirements from different perspectives (literature and empirical studies) of how to effectively and efficiently assist process modelers in their modeling task. The condensation of requirements represents a comprehensive catalog, which constitutes a solid foundation to implement effective and efficient Process Modeling Recommender Systems (PMRSs). We expect that our contribution will fertilize the field of modeling support techniques to make them a common feature of BPM tools

Design and Implementation of a Conceptual Modeling Assistant (CMA)

This Master's Thesis de nes an architecture for a Conceptual Modeling Assistant (CMA) along with an implementation of a running prototype. Our CMA is a piece of software that runs on top of current modeling tools whose purpose is to collaborate with the conceptual modelers while developing a conceptual schema. The main functions of our CMA are to actively criticize the state of a conceptual schema, to suggest actions to do in order to improve the conceptual schema, and to o er new operations to automatize building a schema. On the one hand, the presented architecture assumes that the CMA has to be adapted to a modeling tool. Thus, the CMA permits the inclusion of new features, such as the detection of new defects to be criticized and new operations a modeler can execute, in a modeling tool. As a result, all modeling tools to which the CMA is adapted bene t of all these features without further work. On the other hand, the construction of our prototype involves three steps: the de nition of a simple, custom modeling tool; the implementation of the CMA; and the adaptation of the CMA to the custom modeling tool. Furthermore, we also present and implement some examples of new features that can be added to the CMA