Towards guidelines for building a business case and gathering evidence of software reference architectures in industry

Background: Software reference architectures are becoming widely adopted by organizations that need to support the design and maintenance of software applications of a shared domain. For organizations that plan to adopt this architecture-centric approach, it becomes fundamental to know the return on investment and to understand how software reference architectures are designed, maintained, and used. Unfortunately, there is little evidence-based support to help organizations with these challenges. Methods: We have conducted action research in an industry-academia collaboration between the GESSI research group and everis, a multinational IT consulting firm based in Spain. Results: The results from such collaboration are being packaged in order to create guidelines that could be used in similar contexts as the one of everis. The main result of this paper is the construction of empirically-grounded guidelines that support organizations to decide on the adoption of software reference architectures and to gather evidence to improve RA-related practices. Conclusions: The created guidelines could be used by other organizations outside of our industry-academia collaboration. With this goal in mind, we describe the guidelines in detail for their use.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A Process Framework for Semantics-aware Tourism Information Systems

The growing sophistication of user requirements in tourism due to the advent of new technologies such as the Semantic Web and mobile computing has imposed new possibilities for improved intelligence in Tourism Information Systems (TIS). Traditional software engineering and web engineering approaches cannot suffice, hence the need to find new product development approaches that would sufficiently enable the next generation of TIS. The next generation of TIS are expected among other things to: enable semantics-based information processing, exhibit natural language capabilities, facilitate inter-organization exchange of information in a seamless way, and evolve proactively in tandem with dynamic user requirements. In this paper, a product development approach called Product Line for Ontology-based Semantics-Aware Tourism Information Systems (PLOSATIS) which is a novel hybridization of software product line engineering, and Semantic Web engineering concepts is proposed. PLOSATIS is presented as potentially effective, predictable and amenable to software process improvement initiatives

A Brief Survey on Product Derivation Methods in Software Product Line

Product Derivation represents one of the main challenges that a Software Product Line (SPL) faces. Deriving individual products from shared software assets is a time-consuming and an expensive activity. Until now, only few works addressed, in a limited context, a partial evaluation of a reduced number of proposed derivation approaches. The main objective of such studies was the comparison of a proposed approach regarding two or three approaches. The purpose of the study reported in this paper is to set up a framework oriented to evaluate and compare existing SPL derivation approaches. The proposed framework uses a number of criteria which help understanding the capabilities and highlight the strength and the weakness of each SPL derivation approach

An Agile Process Model for Product Derivation in Software Product Line Engineering

Software Product Lines (SPL) and Agile practices have emerged as new paradigms for developing software. Both approaches share common goals; such as improving productivity, reducing time to market, decreasing development costs and increasing customer satisfaction. These common goals provide the motivation for this research. We believe that integrating Agile practices into SPL can bring a balance between agility and formalism. However, there has been little research on such integration. We have been researching the potential of integrating Agile approaches in one of the key SPL process areas, product derivation. In this paper we present an outline of our Agile process model for product derivation that was developed through industry based case study research

Software product line testing - a systematic mapping study

Context: Software product lines (SPL) are used in industry to achieve more efficient software development. However, the testing side of SPL is underdeveloped. Objective: This study aims at surveying existing research on SPL testing in order to identify useful approaches and needs for future research. Method: A systematic mapping study is launched to find as much literature as possible, and the 64 papers found are classified with respect to focus, research type and contribution type. Results: A majority of the papers are of proposal research types (64 %). System testing is the largest group with respect to research focus (40%), followed by management (23%). Method contributions are in majority. Conclusions: More validation and evaluation research is needed to provide a better foundation for SPL testing

Exploring Knowledge Engineering Strategies in Designing and Modelling a Road Traffic Accident Management Domain

Formulating knowledge for use in AI Planning engines is currently something of an ad-hoc process, where the skills of knowledge engineers and the tools they use may significantly influence the quality of the resulting planning application. There is little in the way of guidelines or standard procedures, however, for knowledge engineers to use when formulating knowledge into planning domain languages such as PDDL. This paper seeks to investigate this process using as a case study a road traffic accident management domain. Managing road accidents requires systematic, sound planning and coordination of resources to improve outcomes for accident victims. We have derived a set of requirements in consultation with stakeholders for the resource coordination part of managing accidents. We evaluate two separate knowledge engineering strategies for encoding the resulting planning domain from the set of requirements: (a) the traditional method of PDDL experts and text editor, and (b) a leading planning GUI with built in UML modelling tools. These strategies are evaluated using process and product metrics, where the domain model (the product) was tested extensively with a range of planning engines. The results give insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches, highlight lessons learned regarding knowledge encoding, and point to important lines of research for knowledge engineering for planning