International conference on software engineering and knowledge engineering: Session chair

The Thirtieth International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE 2018) will be held at the Hotel Pullman, San Francisco Bay, USA, from July 1 to July 3, 2018. SEKE2018 will also be dedicated in memory of Professor Lofti Zadeh, a great scholar, pioneer and leader in fuzzy sets theory and soft computing. The conference aims at bringing together experts in software engineering and knowledge engineering to discuss on relevant results in either software engineering or knowledge engineering or both. Special emphasis will be put on the transference of methods between both domains. The theme this year is soft computing in software engineering & knowledge engineering. Submission of papers and demos are both welcome

Software Engineers' Information Seeking Behavior in Change Impact Analysis - An Interview Study

Software engineers working in large projects must navigate complex information landscapes. Change Impact Analysis (CIA) is a task that relies on engineers' successful information seeking in databases storing, e.g., source code, requirements, design descriptions, and test case specifications. Several previous approaches to support information seeking are task-specific, thus understanding engineers' seeking behavior in specific tasks is fundamental. We present an industrial case study on how engineers seek information in CIA, with a particular focus on traceability and development artifacts that are not source code. We show that engineers have different information seeking behavior, and that some do not consider traceability particularly useful when conducting CIA. Furthermore, we observe a tendency for engineers to prefer less rigid types of support rather than formal approaches, i.e., engineers value support that allows flexibility in how to practically conduct CIA. Finally, due to diverse information seeking behavior, we argue that future CIA support should embrace individual preferences to identify change impact by empowering several seeking alternatives, including searching, browsing, and tracing.Comment: Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehensio

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

A unified view of data-intensive flows in business intelligence systems : a survey

Data-intensive flows are central processes in today’s business intelligence (BI) systems, deploying different technologies to deliver data, from a multitude of data sources, in user-preferred and analysis-ready formats. To meet complex requirements of next generation BI systems, we often need an effective combination of the traditionally batched extract-transform-load (ETL) processes that populate a data warehouse (DW) from integrated data sources, and more real-time and operational data flows that integrate source data at runtime. Both academia and industry thus must have a clear understanding of the foundations of data-intensive flows and the challenges of moving towards next generation BI environments. In this paper we present a survey of today’s research on data-intensive flows and the related fundamental fields of database theory. The study is based on a proposed set of dimensions describing the important challenges of data-intensive flows in the next generation BI setting. As a result of this survey, we envision an architecture of a system for managing the lifecycle of data-intensive flows. The results further provide a comprehensive understanding of data-intensive flows, recognizing challenges that still are to be addressed, and how the current solutions can be applied for addressing these challenges.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Towards a methodology for the development of integrated IT infrastructures

In this paper, the authors propose and validate a methodology for the development of integrated Information Technology (IT) infrastructures. The motivation for putting forward a new methodology is grounded on the limitations of the various software engineering methodologies (traditional) that exist today. Despite that the traditional methodologies result in the development of Information Systems (IS) from scratch, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) builds integrated IT infrastructures using existing applications. This significant difference is associated with many issues needed to be realised and addressed like: (a) the changes that such an infrastructure brings to organisations, (b) the resistance to change and (c) the extension of IS lifecycle’s. The proposed methodology consist of eight stages and aims at supporting software engineers, organisations and researchers to build integrated IT infrastructures. As a result the methodology seeks to contribute to the body of knowledge

Enterprise Architecture Documentation: Current Practices and Future Directions

Over the past decade Enterprise Architecture (EA) management matured to a discipline commonly perceived as a strategic advantage. Among others, EA management helps to identify and realize cost saving potentials in organizations. EA initiatives commonly start by documenting the status-quo of the EA. The respective management discipline analyzes this so-called current state and derives intermediate planned states heading towards a desired target state of the architecture. Several EA frameworks describe this process in theory. However, during practical application, organizations struggle with documenting the EA and lack concrete guidance during the process. To underline our observations and confirm our hypotheses, we conducted a survey among 140 EA practitioners to analyze issues organizations face while documenting the EA and keeping the documentation up to date. In this paper we present results on current practices, challenges, and automation techniques for EA documentation in a descriptive manner

Maintenance of Enterprise Architecture Models

Enterprise architecture (EA) models are tools of analysis, communication, and support towards enterprise transformation. These models need a suitable maintenance process to support comprehensive knowledge of the enterprise’s structure and dynamics. This study aims to identify and discuss the existing approaches to EA model maintenance published in the scientific literature. A systematic literature review was employed as the research method. A keyword-based search in six databases identified a total of 4495 papers in which 31 primary studies were included. A total of nine categories of EA model maintenance approaches were identified from both information systems and enterprise engineering fields of research. The increasing amount of research in EA model maintenance suggests that the topic still presents opportunities for research contributions. This study also proposes future lines of research according to the results identified in the theoretical corpus

Decision Support Tools for Cloud Migration in the Enterprise

This paper describes two tools that aim to support decision making during the migration of IT systems to the cloud. The first is a modeling tool that produces cost estimates of using public IaaS clouds. The tool enables IT architects to model their applications, data and infrastructure requirements in addition to their computational resource usage patterns. The tool can be used to compare the cost of different cloud providers, deployment options and usage scenarios. The second tool is a spreadsheet that outlines the benefits and risks of using IaaS clouds from an enterprise perspective; this tool provides a starting point for risk assessment. Two case studies were used to evaluate the tools. The tools were useful as they informed decision makers about the costs, benefits and risks of using the cloud.Comment: To appear in IEEE CLOUD 201

Business Capability Mining - Opportunities and Challenges

Business capability models are widely used in enterprise architecture management to generate an abstract overview of an organization’s business activities to reach its business objectives. The creation and maintenance of these models are associated with a huge manual workload. Research provides insights into opportunities for automated modeling of enterprise architecture models. However, most models address the application and technology layer and leave the business layer largely unexplored. Particularly, no research has been conducted on the automated generation of business capability models. This research paper uses 19 semi-structured expert interviews to identify possible automated modeling opportunities of business capabilities and related challenges and to jointly develop a business capability mining approach. This research benefit both, practice and research, by describing a situation-based business capability mining approach and identifying appropriate implementation scenarios