EXTREME PROGRAMMING AND RATIONAL UNIFIED PROCESS – CONTRASTS OR SYNONYMS?

The agile movement has received much attention in software engineering recently. Established methodologies try to surf on the wave and present their methodologies a being agile, among those Rational Unified Process (RUP). In order to evaluate the statements we evaluate the RUP against eXtreme Programming (XP) to find out to what extent they are similar end where they are different. We use a qualitative approach, utilizing a framework for comparison. RUP is a top-down solution and XP is a bottom-up approach. Which of the two is really best in different situations has to be investigated in new empirical studies.extreme programming

Environments to support collaborative software engineering

With increasing globalisation of software production, widespread use of software components, and the need to maintain software systems over long periods of time, there has been a recognition that better support for collaborative working is needed by software engineers. In this paper, two approaches to developing improved system support for collaborative software engineering are described: GENESIS and OPHELIA. As both projects are moving towards industrial trials and eventual publicreleases of their systems, this exercise of comparing and contrasting our approaches has provided the basis for future collaboration between our projects particularly in carrying out comparative studies of our approaches in practical use

Managing Evolutionary Method Engineering by Method Rationale

This paper explores how to integrate formal meta-models with an informal method rationale to support evolutionary (continuous) method development. While the former provides an exact and computer-executable specification of a method, the latter enables concurrent learning, expansion, and refinement of method use (instances of meta-models) and meta-models (evolution of method specifications). We explain the need for method rationale by observing the criticality of evolving method knowledge in helping software organizations to learn, as well as by the recurrent failure to introduce rigid and stable methods. Like a design rationale, a method rationale establishes a systematic and organized trace of method evolution. Method rationale is located at two levels of type-instance hierarchy depending on its type of use and the scope of the changes traced. A method construction rationale garners a history of method knowledge evolution as part of the method engineering process, which designs and adapts the method to a given organizational context. A method use rationale maintains knowledge of concrete use contexts and their history and justifies further method deployment in alternative contexts, reveals limitations in its past use, and enables sharing of method use experience. The paper suggests how a method rationale helps share knowledge of methods between method users and engineers, explores how method engineers coordinate the evolution of the existing method base through it, and suggests ways to improve learning through method rationale

E-MDAV: A Framework for Developing Data-Intensive Web Applications

The ever-increasing adoption of innovative technologies, such as big data and cloud computing, provides significant opportunities for organizations operating in the IT domain, but also introduces considerable challenges. Such innovations call for development processes that better align with stakeholders needs and expectations. In this respect, this paper introduces a development framework based on the OMG's Model Driven Architecture (MDA) that aims to support the development lifecycle of data-intensive web applications. The proposed framework, named E-MDAV (Extended MDA-VIEW), defines a methodology that exploits a chain of model transformations to effectively cope with both forward- and reverse-engineering aspects. In addition, E-MDAV includes the specification of a reference architecture for driving the implementation of a tool that supports the various professional roles involved in the development and maintenance of data-intensive web applications. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed E-MDAV framework, a tool prototype has been developed. E-MDAV has then been applied to two different application scenarios and the obtained results have been compared with historical data related to the implementation of similar development projects, in order to measure and discuss the benefits of the proposed approach