A systematic literature review on the semi-automatic configuration of extended product lines

Product line engineering has become essential in mass customisation given its ability to reduce production costs and time to market, and to improve product quality and customer satisfaction. In product line literature, mass customisation is known as product configuration. Currently, there are multiple heterogeneous contributions in the product line configuration domain. However, a secondary study that shows an overview of the progress, trends, and gaps faced by researchers in this domain is still missing. In this context, we provide a comprehensive systematic literature review to discover which approaches exist to support the configuration process of extended product lines and how these approaches perform in practice. Extend product lines consider non-functional properties in the product line modelling. We compare and classify a total of 66 primary studies from 2000 to 2016. Mainly, we give an in-depth view of techniques used by each work, how these techniques are evaluated and their main shortcomings. As main results, our review identified (i) the need to improve the quality of the evaluation of existing approaches, (ii) a lack of hybrid solutions to support multiple configuration constraints, and (iii) a need to improve scalability and performance conditions

A Systematic Classification and Analysis of NFRs

The main agenda of Requirements Engineering (RE) is the development of tools, techniques and languages for the elicitation, specification, negotiation, and validation of software requirements. However, this development has traditionally been focused on functional requirements (FRs), rather than non-functional requirements (NFRs). Consequently, NFR approaches developed over the years have been fragmental and there is a lack of clear understanding of the positions of these approaches in the RE process. This paper provides a systematic classification and analysis of 89 NFR approaches

An Exploratory-Descriptive Review of Main Big Data Analytics Reference Architectures – an IT Service Management Approach

Big Data Analytics (BDA) aims to create decision-making business value by applying multiple analytical procedures from the Statistics, Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence disciplines to huge internal and external business datasets. However, BDA requires high investments in IT resources – computing, storage, network, software, data, and environment -, and consequently the selection of the right-sized implementation is a hard business managerial decision. Parallelly, IT Service Management (ITSM) frameworks have provided best processes-practices to deliver value to end-users through the concept of IT services, and the provision of BDA as Service (BDAaaS) has now emerged. Consequently, from a dual BDA-ITSM perspective, delivering BDAaaS demands the design and implementation of a concrete BDAaaS architecture. Practitioner and academic literature on BDAaaS architectures is abundant but fragmented, disperse and uses a non-standard terminology. ITSM managers and academics involved on the problematic to deliver BDAaaS, thus, face the lack of mature practical guidelines and theoretical frameworks on BDAaaS architectures. In this research, consequently, with an exploratory-descriptive purpose, we contributed with an updated review of three main non-proprietary BDAaaS reference architectures to ITSM managers, and with a hybrid functional-deployment architectural view to the BDAaaS literature. However, given its exploratory status, further conceptual and empirical research is encouraged

System Security Assurance: A Systematic Literature Review

System security assurance provides the confidence that security features, practices, procedures, and architecture of software systems mediate and enforce the security policy and are resilient against security failure and attacks. Alongside the significant benefits of security assurance, the evolution of new information and communication technology (ICT) introduces new challenges regarding information protection. Security assurance methods based on the traditional tools, techniques, and procedures may fail to account new challenges due to poor requirement specifications, static nature, and poor development processes. The common criteria (CC) commonly used for security evaluation and certification process also comes with many limitations and challenges. In this paper, extensive efforts have been made to study the state-of-the-art, limitations and future research directions for security assurance of the ICT and cyber-physical systems (CPS) in a wide range of domains. We conducted a systematic review of requirements, processes, and activities involved in system security assurance including security requirements, security metrics, system and environments and assurance methods. We highlighted the challenges and gaps that have been identified by the existing literature related to system security assurance and corresponding solutions. Finally, we discussed the limitations of the present methods and future research directions

Enhancing the Process Specification for Systematic Literature Reviews

SLR (Systematic Literature Review) is a research methodology intended to obtain evidence from scientific articles stored in digital repositories. It must be systematic, repeatable and auditable to formulate research questions about a thematic area or phenomenon of interest and to search, select, analyze and communicate all basic or applied research relevant findings in order to answer those questions. SLR can be carried out on primary or secondary studies. In both cases, well-established processes and methods are required. Although there are guides to the SLR process in Software Engineering, which indicate the steps to be followed in the three phases of the process proposed by Kitchenham, we considered that would be a contribution for the research community the strengthening of its current process specification. For this goal, we document the SLR process specification using mainly the SPEM (Software & Systems Process Engineering Metamodel) language and process modeling perspectives. As long as we develop the present work, we exemplify process aspects using a pilot SLR on software testing ontologies already performed.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ

Analysis of limitations and metrology weaknesses of enterprise architecture (EA) measurement solutions & proposal of a COSMIC-based approach to EA measurement

The literature on enterprise architecture (EA) posits that EA is of considerable value for organizations. However, while the EA literature documents a number of proposals for EA measurement solutions, there is little evidence-based research supporting their achievements and limitations. This thesis aims at helping the EA community to understand the existing trends in EA measurement research and to recognize the existing gaps, limitations, and weaknesses in EA measurement solutions. Furthermore, this thesis aims to assist the EA community to design EA measurement solutions based on measurement and metrology best practices. The research goal of this thesis is to contribute to the EA body of knowledge by shaping new perspectives for future research avenues in EA measurement research. To achieve the research goal, the following research objectives are defined: 1. To classify the EA measurement solutions into specific categories in order to identify research themes and explain the structure of the research area. 2. To evaluate the EA measurement solutions from a measurement and metrology perspective. 3. To identify the measurement and metrology issues in EA measurement solutions. 4. To propose a novel EA measurement approach based on measurement and metrology guidelines and best practices. To achieve the first objective, this thesis conducts a systematic mapping study (SMS to help understand the state-of-the-art of EA measurement research and classify the research area in order to acquire a general understanding about the existing research trends. To achieve the second and third objectives, this thesis conducts a systematic literature review (SLR) to evaluate the EA measurement solutions from a measurement and metrology perspective, and hence, to reveal the weaknesses of EA measurement solutions and propose relevant solutions to these weaknesses. To perform this evaluation, we develop an evaluation process based on combining both the components of the evolution theory and the concepts of measurement and metrology best practices, such as ISO 15939. To achieve the fourth objective, we propose a mapping between two international standards: • COSMIC - ISO/IEC 19761: a method for measuring the functional size of software. • ArchiMate: a modelling language for EA. This mapping results in proposing a novel EA measurement approach that overcomes the weaknesses and limitations found in the existing EA measurement solutions. The research results demonstrate that: 1. The current publications on EA measurement are trending toward an increased focus on the “enterprise IT architecting” school of thought, lacks the rigorous terminology found in science and engineering and shows limited adoption of knowledge from other disciplines in the proposals of EA measurement solutions. 2. There is a lack of attention to attaining appropriate metrology properties in EA measurement proposals: all EA measurement proposals are characterized with insufficient metrology coverage scoring, theoretical and empirical definitions. 3. The proposed novel EA measurement approach demonstrates that it is handy for EA practitioners, and easy to adopt by organizations