196,546 research outputs found

    Collaborative Requirements Engineering Notation for Planning Globally Distributed Projects

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    Requirements engineering represents a critical phase of the software development lifecycle in which requirements describing the functional and non-functional behaviors of a system are elicited, modeled, analyzed, negotiated, agreed, and specified. In traditional software systems these tasks are typically performed in face-to-face meetings between requirements engineers and the project level stakeholders. However, in todayā€™s global software development environment, it is becoming increasingly commonplace for stakeholders to be dispersed across multiple geographical locations and time zones. Under these circumstances, face-to-face meetings become expensive, and often impossible to facilitate, and as a result the success of the requirements process relies, at least partially, on tools and processes that support distributed communication and collaboration. To investigate the challenges and effective practices for performing requirements activities in distributed environments, we conducted a series of in-depth interviews with project managers and business analysts who have worked with non-co-located stakeholders. Since many project managers fail to plan and deploy the necessary infrastructures to support quality communication, and in practice requirements are often elicited and managed via email exchanges; we introduced a visual modeling notation to help project managers proactively plan the collaboration infrastructures needed to support requirements-related activities in globally distributed projects. An underlying meta-model defines the elements of the modeling language, including locations, stakeholder roles, communication flows, critical documents, and supporting tools and repositories. The interview findings were further analyzed to identify practices that led to success or created significant challenges for the projects; resulting in a set of patterns for globally distributed requirements engineering

    FESTivE: an information system method to improve product designers and environmental experts information exchanges

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    Effective collaboration between product designers and environmental experts is an important driver for the ecodesign practice in industry. This paper investigates the principal functions required for such an e ective collaboration and aims at facilitating them. Product designers should be able to integrate the environmental parameters into their activities, and to exchange information dynamically with the environmental expert whenever needed during the design process. Therefore, the IT system should be in itself dynamic and exible to the integration of new concepts (knowledge, software). Recent developments in Model Driven Engineering (MDE) are showing some interesting results to gain exibility and dynamism in the IT system. Combining software interoperability using model federation based on MDE with the speci city of ecodesign practice in industry this paper proposes the FESTivE method for Federate EcodeSign Tool modEls. Experimented in two different industrial contexts the practical feasibility of FESTivE has been validated with practitioners. Results on the e ects of using FESTivE in industry shows that product designers and environmental experts are more equipped to anticipate and to respond to each other's needs at each stage of the design process of product or service

    Support for collaborative component-based software engineering

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    Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described. This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject. In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice. Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects. Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools). Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying, assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing. Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation, empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further advances

    Construction informatics in Turkey: strategic role of ICT and future research directions

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    Construction Informatics deals with subjects ranging from strategic management of ICTs to interoperability and information integration in the construction industry. Studies on defining research directions for Construction Informatics have a history over 20 years. The recent studies in the area highlight the priority themes for Construction Informatics research as interoperability, collaboration support, intelligent sites and knowledge sharing. In parallel, today it is widely accepted in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction (AEC) industry that ICT is becoming a strategic asset for any organisation to deliver business improvement and achieve sustainable competitive advantage. However, traditionally the AEC industry has approached investing in ICT with a lack of strategic focus and low level of priority to the business. This paper presents a recent study from Turkey that is focused on two themes. The first theme investigates the strategic role of ICT implementations from an industrial perspective, and explores if organisations within the AEC industry view ICT as a strategic resource for their business practice. The second theme investigates the ā€˜perspective of academiaā€™ in terms of future research directions of Construction Informatics. The results of the industrial study indicates that ICT is seen as a value-adding resource, but a shift towards the recognition of the importance of ICT in terms of value adding in winning work and achieving strategic competitive advantage is observed. On the other hand, ICT Training is found to be the theme of highest priority from the academia point of view

    A design recording framework to facilitate knowledge sharing in collaborative software engineering

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    This paper describes an environment that allows a development team to share knowledge about software artefacts by recording decisions and rationales as well as supporting the team in formulating and maintaining design constraints. It explores the use of multi-dimensional design spaces for capturing various issues arising during development and presenting this meta-information using a network of views. It describes a framework to underlie the collaborative environment and shows the supporting architecture and its implementation. It addresses how the artefacts and their meta-information are captured in a non-invasive way and shows how an artefact repository is embedded to store and manage the artefacts

    New Hampshire University Research and Industry Plan: A Roadmap for Collaboration and Innovation

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    This University Research and Industry plan for New Hampshire is focused on accelerating innovation-led development in the state by partnering academiaā€™s strengths with the stateā€™s substantial base of existing and emerging advanced industries. These advanced industries are defined by their deep investment and connections to research and development and the high-quality jobs they generate across production, new product development and administrative positions involving skills in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)
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