KM-SORE: Knowledge Management for Service Oriented Requirements Engineering

Service-oriented Software Engineering is a new style for creating software using reusable services which are available over the web. The biggest challenge in this process is to discover and select the appropriate services that match system requirements. Currently, none of the proposed approach has been accepted by research community as a standard. There is very little empirical work available that addresses requirements engineering in service oriented paradigm. The aim of this study is to propose a framework for requirements engineering in SOSE. The framework is based on a new idea, that integrating Knowledge Management in Service Oriented development would improve requirement engineering phase as it does for traditional software engineering. The framework is developed in the light of the issues and challenges identified by published literature and the feedback of practitioners and researchers working on service oriented projects

Implementation of Tina service subscription information management using OBDMS

Master of Science in Engineering - EngineeringThe next generation telecommunication networks will offer users a range of services. These future telecommunication services are envisaged to be tailored services that are customizable in order to satisfy specific requirements of a variety of customers. Service subscribers and users should be offered some direct control in managing their services. Customization in a multi-service environment introduces the requirement for multiple service profiles for each user. Having user service profiles enable universal service access. The current telecommunication service subscription model is no longer viable for the next generation or TINA-based services. This work proposes a subscription and service information management system that is integrated into the existing TINA-structured platform in the South African TINA (SATINA) Trial. The system developed here realizes the object-oriented TINA subscription information management model. The information model defines all the information and relationships required to handle users, subscribers and the subscription life cycle. The project employs the emerging Object Database Management System (ODBMS) to manage the object oriented telecommunication subscription data. ODBMS provides a powerful and efficient way to managed these object oriented information as information and the relationships are stored as they are used in the application. The proposed subscription and service information management system is a distributed application based on the widely used three-tier architecture model. The three-tier model enables distributed access to the centrally managed subscription and service information regardless of the implementation adopted. Visual modeling technique is used to develop the application and convey the design principles. Application of the subscription and service information management system in the service provider domain is demonstrated by the domain administrator’s usage of the system’s graphical management console. The integration of the information management system and the SATINA Trial’s service platform is indicated through the usage of the TINA compliant Online Subscription service

A Computational Economy for Grid Computing and its Implementation in the Nimrod-G Resource Brok

Computational Grids, coupling geographically distributed resources such as PCs, workstations, clusters, and scientific instruments, have emerged as a next generation computing platform for solving large-scale problems in science, engineering, and commerce. However, application development, resource management, and scheduling in these environments continue to be a complex undertaking. In this article, we discuss our efforts in developing a resource management system for scheduling computations on resources distributed across the world with varying quality of service. Our service-oriented grid computing system called Nimrod-G manages all operations associated with remote execution including resource discovery, trading, scheduling based on economic principles and a user defined quality of service requirement. The Nimrod-G resource broker is implemented by leveraging existing technologies such as Globus, and provides new services that are essential for constructing industrial-strength Grids. We discuss results of preliminary experiments on scheduling some parametric computations using the Nimrod-G resource broker on a world-wide grid testbed that spans five continents

Alignment of requirements and services with user feedback

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.It is widely acknowledged that software reuse reduces the cost and effort of software development. Over the years many solutions have emerged that propose methodologies to support software reusability. Service oriented software engineering (SOSE) advocates software reuse while aiming to achieve better alignment of software solutions to business requirements. Service orientation has evolved from Object Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) and Component Based Software Development (CBSD), the major difference being that reusable artefacts are in the form of services rather than objects or packaged components. Although SOSE is considered a new architectural style of software development that addresses some of the shortcomings of previous approaches, it has also inherited some of the challenges of CBSD, and OOAD, in particular in the requirements engineering process. In Service Oriented Requirements Engineering (SORE) an analyst has an additional challenging task of aligning requirements and services to select the optimally matched service from an increasingly large set of available online services. Much of the existing empirical research in SORE has focused mainly on the technical aspects while the human related issues are yet to be fully explored and addressed. The lack of empirical evidence to investigate the human related issues in SORE provides the overall motivation for the research covered in this thesis. User involvement in software development has been the focus of significant research and has been intuitively and axiomatically accepted to play a positive role in users’ satisfaction thus leading to system success. More recently, past users’ feedback, reviews and comments from online sources are considered a form of user involvement. These offer valuable information to assist analysts in increasing their knowledge for making more informed decision for service selection. In service oriented paradigm the full extent of the benefits of this form of user involvement has not been empirically investigated. This thesis addresses three important high level research goals: (1) to investigate and identify the most important challenges of SORE, (2) to design an innovative and flexible method to address the top challenge of SORE, focusing specifically on the important relationship between user involvement and system success, and (3) to evaluate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method in an empirical study. This thesis presents research conducted in three parts for achieving each of the stated goals respectively: problem analysis, solution analysis and implementation analysis. For problem analysis a mixed method approach is used, i.e. literature review, quantitative online survey, and qualitative industrial interview study. For solution analysis a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is conducted to analyse the existing empirical studies about the relationship between user involvement and system success. Inspired by the results of this SLR, I designed the ARISE (Alignment of RequIrement and SErvices) method, following Situational Method Engineering to make it flexible for adoption in various project contexts. The ARISE method aims to exploit the benefits of experiences of past users for service selection. For implementation analysis, the ARISE method was instantiated in a case study with real life data with two objectives in mind: (1) validation of the effectiveness of ARISE in overcoming the challenges of alignment, and (2) improvement and refinement of the ARISE method. Analysis of the results of this validation revealed the need for automated tool support for the ARISE method. This automation is achieved through the design and implementation of software tools created for supporting the analysts in service selection. The systematic and mixed method research approach of the problem analysis phase identified that alignment of requirements and services was the top challenge for practitioners in SORE. It also increased our understanding of why this alignment is considered the most challenging task. The findings of the SLR confirmed that the effective user involvement in software development in general, and in requirements engineering in particular could lead to system success. In SORE, the past users of services can be involved through their feedback and sentiments about the services from online sources. These concepts were the basis for the design of the ARISE method. The results of the case study complemented by the experimentation with the automated tools revealed that past users’ feedback and sentiments are indeed valuable sources of information that can assist analysts in overcoming the challenges of alignment between requirements and services thus making a more informed decision in service selection

An Interactive Approach of Ontology-based Requirement Elicitation for Software Customization

Software product lines allow reusing a collection of related software engineering assets to develop custom-made high quality software with reduced time and cost. In this thesis, an interactive approach of requirement elicitation for software customization is presented. It first adopts an ontology-based requirement model to represent the commonalities and variabilities among a group of related requirement artefacts. The development of a dialogue system further enables users to interactively customize software products by means of text-based dialogue. While the ontology model directs the dialogue system to perform requirement elicitation, its instantiation is accomplished with the support of decomposition-based requirement refinement in Service-Oriented Architecture. Besides the design details, a case study is presented to demonstrate how customizing an online book shopping system could be achieved with interactive requirement elicitation. Finally, the reliability and efficiency of the proposed method are evaluated with experimental comparison

SERVICE DESIGN AND SERVICE MANAGEMENT WITH THE SERVICE BLUEPRINTING METHODOLOGY

A new application of software technology is the application area of smart living or sustainable living. Within this area application platforms are designed and realized with the goal to support value added services. In this context value added services integrates microelectronics, home automation and services to enhance the attractiveness of flats, homes and buildings. Especially real estate companies or service providers dealing with home services are interested in an effective design and management of their services. Service Engineering is the approved approach for designing customer oriented service processes. Service engineering consists of several phases; from situation analysis to service creation and service design to service management. This article will describe how the method service blueprint can be used to design service processes. Smart living includes all actions to enlarge a flat to a smart home for living. One special requirement of this application domain is the use of local components (actuators, sensors) within service processes. This article will show how this extended method supports service providers to improve the quality of customer oriented service processes and the derivation of needed interfaces of involved actors. For the civil engineering process it will be possible to derive needed information from a built in home automation system. The aim is to show, how to get needed smart local components to fullfill later offered it-supported value added services. Value added services focused on inhabitants are grouped to consulting and information, care and supervision, leisure time activities, repairs, mobility and delivery, safety and security, supply and disposal

Viewpoints and goals: towards an integrated approach

Dissertação de Mestrado em Engenharia InformáticaRequirements elicitation and analysis have been studied according to several approaches that differ mostly on their "orientation", in this case relying on goals or viewpoints. Goal-Oriented approaches such as KAOS rely on goals to direct their process of eliciting requirements: a goal is an objective the system under consideration should achieve and represents a system property that may reflect either a functional (e.g. a service provided by the system) or a non-functional (e.g. security, performance) requirement; its satisfaction may imply the participation of several agents and the resolution of possible obstacles that may arise. The KAOS approach offers an unambiguous method for requirement decomposition and may provide a set of heuristics to approaches where one does not exist. Viewpoint-Oriented approaches such as PREview focus on gathering information pertaining to the problem from several agents that may have different, often equally valid, and incomplete perspectives on the problem. These partial intakes reflect their different responsibilities, roles, goals, or interpretations of the information sources; hence the combination of the agent and its input on the system is called a viewpoint. PREview benefits from a particularly lightweight approach to requirements encapsulation, but fails to provide a set of heuristics for the process of identifying the system's requirements. Considering the issues identified in each approach, it is verifiable that both approaches are complementary: on the one hand, KAOS offers a set of requirements elicitation heuristics through goal decomposition; on the other hand, PREview is a lightweight approach to viewpoint oriented requirements engineering, tailored especially for integration, however lacks a more systematic mechanism to guide the requirements elicitation process. The objective of this dissertation is therefore to propose a hybrid approach that builds on the PREview approach and brings together the benefits of the KAOS approach. The result is synergetic where, for example, completion is better addressed by providing a set of heuristics for requirement elicitation