Business Rule Mining from Spreadsheets

Business rules represent the knowledge that guides the operations of a business organization. They are implemented in software applications used by organizations, and the activity of extracting them from software is known as business rule mining. It has various purposes amongst which migration and generating documentation are the most common. However, apart from conventional software, organizations also use spreadsheets for a large part of their operations and decision-making activities. Therefore we believe that spreadsheets are also rich in business rules. We thus propose to develop an automated system for extracting business rules from spreadsheets in a human comprehensible natural language format. This position paper describes our motivation, the problem description, related work, and challenges we foresee.Comment: In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Software Engineering Methods in Spreadsheets (http://spreadsheetlab.org/sems15/

A goal model for crowdsourced software engineering

Crowdsourced Software Engineering (CSE) is the act of undertaking any external software engineering tasks by an undefined, potentially large group of online workers in an open call format. Using an open call, CSE recruits global online labor to work on various types of software engineering tasks, such as requirements extraction, design, coding and testing. The field is rising rapidly and touches various aspects of software engineering. CSE has grown significance in both academy and industry. Despite of the enormous usage and significance of CSE, there are many open challenges reported by various researchers. In order to overcome the challenges and realizing the full potential of CSE, it is highly important to understand the concrete advantages and goals of CSE. In this paper, we present a goal model for CSE, to understand the real environment of CSE, and to explore the aspects that can somehow overcome the aforementioned challenges. The model is designed using RiSD, a method for building Strategic Dependency (SD) models in the i* notation, applied in this work using iStar2.0. This work can be considered useful for CSE stakeholders (Requesters, Workers, Platform owners and CSE organizations).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Challenges and Success Factors for Metrics in Large-Scale Agile Development

Contemporary organizations widely use agile software development to react to unpredictable changes in their business environment. Due to the success of agile methods in contexts similar to the agile sweet spot, organizations have been applying them on a larger scale. However, maintaining oversight in large-scale agile development remains a problem. Metrics can tackle this problem by increasing transparency, but organizations have struggled with their adoption. Furthermore, extant research on large-scale agile development lacks publications investigating metric challenges and success factors. Against this backdrop, we conducted an expert interview study with 23 experts from 13 organizations. The most mentioned challenges are data collection challenges, lack of metric usefulness, and metric calculation challenges. On the other hand, the most occurring success factors are context-dependent metric adoption, implementing an agile metric management process, and ensuring understanding of the metric purpose

Healthcare Data Analytics on the Cloud

Meaningful analysis of voluminous health information has always been a challenge in most healthcare organizations. Accurate and timely information required by the management to lead a healthcare organization through the challenges found in the industry can be obtained using business intelligence (BI) or business analytics tools. However, these require large capital investments to implement and support the large volumes of data that needs to be analyzed to identify trends. They also require enormous processing power which places pressure on the business resources in addition to the dynamic changes in the digital technology. This paper evaluates the various nuances of business analytics of healthcare hosted on the cloud computing environment. The paper explores BI being offered as Software as a Service (SaaS) solution towards offering meaningful use of information for improving functions in healthcare enterprise. It also attempts to identify the challenges that healthcare enterprises face when making use of a BI SaaS solution

Contemporary e-learning as panacea for large-scale software training

Large organizations renew their core business software with some regularity, resulting in serious challenges for in-company training officers. Especially when large numbers of employees need to be trained to use updated software on short notice, traditional face-to-face training methods fall short. Contemporary e-learning is regarded a solution for such short-term and large-scale training. This paper discusses the effect of a didactically sound e-learning solution on learning to use a new version of an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software package. This solution not only features generally recognized e-learning characteristics like any time, place, path, and pace, but also marks the element ‘just enough’ to emphasize that the e-learning content only covers knowledge (concepts and procedures) necessary to perform the daily professional tasks. Around 2000 healthcare workers of a mental healthcare institution were educated online to use a renewed version of an EMR software package within two months. Results (i.e., time on task, test results, and perceived effectiveness) indicate that contemporary online solutions can help large organizations to face short-term and large-scale training problems. (This paper was presented at CSEDU 2013 in Aachen, Germany; see http://www.csedu.org/?y=2013

An emergency communication system based on software-defined radio

Wireless telecommunications represent an important asset for Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) organizations as they improve the coordination and the distribution of information among first responders in the field. In large international disaster scenarios, many different PPDR organizations may participate to the response phase of disaster management. In this context, PPDR organizations may use different wireless communication technologies; such diversity may create interoperability barriers and degrade the coordination among first time responders. In this paper, we present the design, system integration and testing of a demonstration system based on Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology and Software Communication Architecture (SCA) to support PPDR operations with special focus on the provision of satellite communications. This paper describes the main components of the demonstration system, the integration activities as well as the testing scenarios, which were used to evaluate the technical feasibility. The paper also describes the main technical challenges in the implementation and integration of the demonstration system. Finally future developments for this technology and potential deployment challenges are presented.JRC.G.6-Digital Citizen Securit

Large-Scale Agile Transformation: A Case Study of Transforming Business, Development and Operations

Today, product development organizations are adopting agile methods in units outside the software development unit, such as in sales, market, legal, operations working with the customer. This broader adoption of agile methods has been labeled large-scale agile transformation and is considered a particular type of organizational change, originating in the software development units. So far, there is little research-based advice on conducting such transformations. Aiming to contribute towards providing relevant research advice on large-scale agile transformation, we apply a research-based framework for evaluating organizational agility on a product development program in a maritime service provider organization. We found that doing a large-scale agile transformation involves many significant challenges, such as having a shared understanding of the problem, getting access to users, and getting commitment to change that needs to be done. In order to overcome such challenges, we discuss the need for a holistic and integrated approach to agile transformation involving all the units linked to software development.publishedVersio

The state of adoption and the challenges of systematic variability management in industry

Handling large-scale software variability is still a challenge for many organizations. After decades of research on variability management concepts, many industrial organizations have introduced techniques known from research, but still lament that pure textbook approaches are not applicable or efficient. For instance, software product line engineering—an approach to systematically develop portfolios of products—is difficult to adopt given the high upfront investments; and even when adopted, organizations are challenged by evolving their complex product lines. Consequently, the research community now mainly focuses on re-engineering and evolution techniques for product lines; yet, understanding the current state of adoption and the industrial challenges for organizations is necessary to conceive effective techniques. In this multiple-case study, we analyze the current adoption of variability management techniques in twelve medium- to large-scale industrial cases in domains such as automotive, aerospace or railway systems. We identify the current state of variability management, emphasizing the techniques and concepts they adopted. We elicit the needs and challenges expressed for these cases, triangulated with results from a literature review. We believe our results help to understand the current state of adoption and shed light on gaps to address in industrial practice.This work is supported by Vinnova Sweden, Fond Unique Interminist´eriel (FUI) France, and the Swedish Research Council. Open access funding provided by University of Gothenbur

Challenges and Success Factors of Scaled Agile Adoption – A South African Perspective

Agile methods and Agile scaling frameworks have become a solution for software-developing organizations striving to improve the success of software projects. Agile methods were developed for small projects, but due to their benefits, even large software-developing organizations have adopted them to scale their software projects. This quantitative study was undertaken to deepen the researchers’ understanding of the critical success factors and challenges of Scaled Agile from the South African perspective. A simple random sampling method was used. Data was collected with the use of an online structured questionnaire and the response rate was 70%. The results reveal that customer satisfaction remains at the epicenter of adopting Scaled Agile methods. Lack of top management support remains the major challenge in adopting Scaled Agile. The results reveal some notable changes when it comes to the most adopted Agile scaling framework

Designing an Innovation Engine Model and a Software Tool to Meet Large Organizations Challenges with SMEs Capabilities, a Pilot Study

Innovation models and innovation software tools are mechanisms designed to support innovation and collaboration activities. However, innovation models tend to be limited to close innovation or their implementation is not cost-effective for SMEs, while innovation software tools lack features for the collaboration of multiple organizations. Improved models and appropriate, well designed, software tools could address large organizations' challenges with SMEs capabilities, better foster innovation activities and encourage economic growth and jobs creation. This study piloted two 1.5-hour-workshops with 12 Enterprise Systems MSc students to design an innovation model and a software tool with PICTIVE participatory design technique. In the first workshop participants received a talk about innovation and were separated into three groups of four people. Each group was provided with one of three scenarios: the design of a robot exploring Mars, the design of an adrenaline auto-injector for severe allergies or the design of a new ambulance. Groups brainstormed ideas and created a diagram of the components that an innovation model should include to provide an effective collaboration between organizations. In the second workshop, groups implemented their model in an innovation software tool using participatory design. Two researchers observed the workshops and took notes of the group presentations. Three main components comprised their innovation models: Large organizations, SMEs and other institutions, and components for the management of the collaboration. Groups suggested to implement their model in a web site portal with features that support the definition of the challenge, the involvement of different stakeholders, sections to capture large organizations' needs and SMEs' capabilities, features to support the identification of the best partners, the best collaboration agreement and the management of intellectual property. Results were very insightf