A framework for cots software evaluation and selection for COTS mismatches handling and non-functional requirements

The decision to purchase Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software needs systematic guidelines so that the appropriate COTS software can be selected in order to provide a viable and effective solution to the organizations. However, the existing COTS software evaluation and selection frameworks focus more on functional aspects and do not give adequate attention to accommodate the mismatch between user requirements and COTS software specification, and also integration with non functional requirements of COTS software. Studies have identified that these two criteria are important in COTS software evaluation and selection. Therefore, this study aims to develop a new framework of COTS software evaluation and selection that focuses on handling COTS software mismatches and integrating the nonfunctional requirements. The study is conducted using mixed-mode methodology which involves survey and interview. The study is conducted in four main phases: a survey and interview of 63 organizations to identify COTS software evaluation criteria, development of COTS software evaluation and selection framework using Evaluation Theory, development of a new decision making technique by integrating Analytical Hierarchy Process and Gap Analysis to handle COTS software mismatches, and validation of the practicality and reliability of the proposed COTS software Evaluation and Selection Framework (COTS-ESF) using experts’ review, case studies and yardstick validation. This study has developed the COTS-ESF which consists of five categories of evaluation criteria: Quality, Domain, Architecture, Operational Environment and Vendor Reputation. It also provides a decision making technique and a complete process for performing the evaluation and selection of COTS software. The result of this study shows that the evaluated aspects of the framework are feasible and demonstrate their potential and practicality to be applied in the real environment. The contribution of this study straddles both the research and practical perspectives of software evaluation by improving decision making and providing a systematic guidelines for handling issue in purchasing viable COTS software

Guidelines for developing agricultural information portals in the Southern African Development Community Region (SADC)

The Internet and the Web have become a source of agricultural information for many people, including researchers working in agricultural research organizations. According to Besemer, Addison and Ferguson (2003:2), the Web has changed the information landscape in the field of agriculture and natural resources. The relatively small investment required to set up a Web site enables a great many institutions to become instant information providers

System engineering and evolution decision support, Final Progress Report (05/01/1998 - 09-30-2001)

The objective of our effort is to develop a scientific basis for system engineering automation and decision support. This objective addresses the long term goals of increasing the quality of service provided complex systems while reducing development risks, costs, and time. Our work focused on decision support for designing operations of complex modular systems that can include embedded software. Emphasis areas included engineering automation capabilities in the areas of design modifications, design records, reuse, and automatic generation of design representations such as real-time schedules and software.U.S. Army Research OfficeFunding number(s): DSAM 90387, DWAM 80013, DWAM 90215

Model driven product line engineering : core asset and process implications

Reuse is at the heart of major improvements in productivity and quality in Software Engineering. Both Model Driven Engineering (MDE) and Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) are software development paradigms that promote reuse. Specifically, they promote systematic reuse and a departure from craftsmanship towards an industrialization of the software development process. MDE and SPLE have established their benefits separately. Their combination, here called Model Driven Product Line Engineering (MDPLE), gathers together the advantages of both. Nevertheless, this blending requires MDE to be recasted in SPLE terms. This has implications on both the core assets and the software development process. The challenges are twofold: (i) models become central core assets from which products are obtained and (ii) the software development process needs to cater for the changes that SPLE and MDE introduce. This dissertation proposes a solution to the first challenge following a feature oriented approach, with an emphasis on reuse and early detection of inconsistencies. The second part is dedicated to assembly processes, a clear example of the complexity MDPLE introduces in software development processes. This work advocates for a new discipline inside the general software development process, i.e., the Assembly Plan Management, which raises the abstraction level and increases reuse in such processes. Different case studies illustrate the presented ideas.This work was hosted by the University of the Basque Country (Faculty of Computer Sciences). The author enjoyed a doctoral grant from the Basque Goverment under the “Researchers Training Program” during the years 2005 to 2009. The work was was co-supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education, and the European Social Fund under contracts WAPO (TIN2005-05610) and MODELINE (TIN2008-06507-C02-01)

Highly redundant and fault tolerant actuator system: control, condition monitoring and experimental validation

This thesis is concerned with developing a control and condition monitoring system for a class of fault tolerant actuators with high levels of redundancy. The High Redundancy Actuator (HRA) is a concept inspired by biomimetics that aims to provide fault tolerance using relatively large numbers of actuation elements which are assembled in parallel and series configurations to form a single actuator. Each actuation element provides a small contribution to the overall force and displacement of the system. Since the capability of each actuation element is small, the effect of faults within the individual element of the overall system is also small. Hence, the HRA will gracefully degrade instead of going from fully functional to total failure in the presence of faults. Previous research on HRA using electromechanical technology has focused on a relatively low number of actuation elements (i.e. 4 elements), which were controlled with multiple loop control methods. The objective of this thesis is to expand upon this, by considering an HRA with a larger number of actuation elements (i.e. 12 elements). First, a mathematical model of a general n-by-m HRA is derived from first principles. This method can be used to represent any size of electromechanical HRA with actuation elements arranged in a matrix form. Then, a mathematical model of a 4-by-3 HRA is obtained from the general n-by-m model and verified experimentally using the HRA test rig. This actuator model is then used as a foundation for the controller design and condition monitoring development. For control design, two classical and control method-based controllers are compared with an H_infinity approach. The objective for the control design is to make the HRA track a position demand signal in both health and faulty conditions. For the classical PI controller design, the first approach uses twelve local controllers (1 per actuator) and the second uses only a single global controller. For the H_infinity control design, a mixed sensitivity functions is used to obtain good tracking performance and robustness to modelling uncertainties. Both of these methods demonstrate good tracking performance, with a slower response in the presence of faults. As expected, the H_infinity control method's robustness to modelling uncertainties, results in a smaller performance degradation in the presence of faults, compared with the classical designs. Unlike previous work, the thesis also makes a novel contribution to the condition monitoring of HRA. The proposed algorithm does not require the use of multiple sensors. The condition monitoring scheme is based on least-squares parameter estimation and fuzzy logic inference. The least-squares parameter estimation estimates the physical parameters of the electromechanical actuator based on input-output data collected from real-time experiments, while the fuzzy logic inference determines the health condition of the actuator based on the estimated physical parameters. Hence, overall, a new approach to both control and monitoring of an HRA is proposed and demonstrated on a twelve elements HRA test rig

Model-Driven Development of Aspect-Oriented Software Architectures

The work presented in this thesis of master is an approach that takes advantage of the Model-Driven Development approach for developing aspect-oriented software architectures. A complete MDD support for the PRISMA approach is defined by providing code generation, verification and reusability properties.Pérez Benedí, J. (2007). Model-Driven Development of Aspect-Oriented Software Architectures. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/12451Archivo delegad

Un modelo de mediación para el desarrollo de software basado en componentes COTS

Aunque realmente es muy complicado predecir y cuantificar el impacto que podría tener en un futuro la utilización de las prácticas de desarrollo basadas en componentes COTS en las organizaciones, sí que puede cambiar la forma de pensar de los ingenieros a la hora de afrontar sus proyectos, ya que este planteamiento está haciendo que la ingeniería del software se enfrente a nuevos estilos de desarrollo de software, ascendentes y siguiendo algún modelo en espiral (como el de Nuseibeh, 2001), frente al desarrollo tradicional, descendente y en cascada. Una de las principales consecuencias de este estilo de desarrollo (ascendente y basado en componentes comerciales) es el acercamiento fehaciente de tres áreas importantes de la Ingeniería del software, como son las arquitecturas de software, los servicios de mediación y las especificaciones de componentes. Este acercamiento ha venido propiciado por la inherente naturaleza del estilo de desarrollo ascendente: la necesidad de contemplar sistemáticamente las características de implementación de los componentes en fases de diseño del sistema. Una de las principales motivaciones del presente trabajo ha sido la de tratar de acercar aún más estas tres áreas de la ingeniería del software con la intención de ofrecer una propuesta de solución al problema de la conexión diseño-implementación, anteriormente citado. Por tanto, el trabajo aquí presentado ofrece sus contribuciones dentro del paradigma del desarrollo de software basado en componentes, y en particular en los campos de (a) los componentes comerciales, (b) los modelos de mediación y (c) los modelos de documentación de componentes, en donde su principal aportación es la definición de un modelo de mediación de componentes COTS para la construcción de aplicaciones de software en entornos abiertos y distribuidos. Las principales aportaciones de este trabajo son las siguientes: Se ha realizado un estudio de la actual función de mediación de ODP y se han identificado una serie de limitaciones para trabajar con componentes comerciales. Este estudio ha sido clave para el diseño posterior de un modelo de mediación para componentes COTS. Se define un modelo de mediación de componentes diseñado para construir aplicaciones de software a partir de componentes comerciales. A partir de este modelo se ha desarrollado una implementación de un servicio de mediación, denominado COTStrader. También se define un modelo para la documentación de componentes COTS, y un lenguaje en la notación XMLSchemas (W3C) que lo sustenta. Este lenguaje permite definir especificaciones de componentes comerciales en plantillas XML, denominadas COTScomponent. También, se estudia y ofrece una solución a ciertos problemas que aparecen en la construcción de aplicaciones de software cuando se combinan especificaciones de componentes con múltiples interfaces: los problemas de las lagunas y solapamientos entre interfaces. También se extienden los tradicionales operadores de reemplazabilidad y compatibilidad de componentes para el caso de múltiples interfaces, y se define un algoritmo de configuración que utiliza estos operadores extendidos para calcular la lista de combinaciones de especificaciones de componente a partir de una colección de componentes candidatos dada. Se ha desarrollado una implementación del algoritmo de configuración, denominado COTSconfig. Para definir una arquitectura de software con información de componentes COTS, se realiza una propuesta que utiliza la notación UML-RT extendiendo las representaciones gráficas de las cápsulas mediante notas, estereotipos y valores etiquetados, para modelar la captura de los requisitos de los componentes del sistema. Se ha definido un método de desarrollo de software semi-automatizado para la construcción de aplicaciones con componentes comerciales, y que pone de manifiesto cómo se pueden integrar nuestras propuestas en algunos tipos de metodologías en espiral del DSBC. Se ha desarrollado un caso ejemplo completo de una aplicación de software con componentes comerciales, en el campo de los sistemas de información geográficos (SIG)

Enterprise modelling framework for dynamic and complex business environment: socio-technical systems perspective

The modern business environment is characterised by dynamism and ambiguity. The causes include global economic change, rapid change requirements, shortened development life cycles and the increasing complexity of information technology and information systems (IT/IS). However, enterprises have been seen as socio-technical systems. The dynamic complex business environment cannot be understood without intensive modelling and simulation. Nevertheless, there is no single description of reality, which has been seen as relative to its context and point of view. Human perception is considered an important determinant for the subjectivist view of reality. Many scholars working in the socio-technical systems and enterprise modelling domains have conceived the holistic sociotechnical systems analysis and design possible using a limited number of procedural and modelling approaches. For instance, the ETHICS and Human-centred design approaches of socio-technical analysis and design, goal-oriented and process-oriented modelling of enterprise modelling perspectives, and the Zachman and DoDAF enterprise architecture frameworks all have limitations that can be improved upon, which have been significantly explained in this thesis. [Continues.

Diagnosing runtime violations of security and dependability properties

Monitoring the preservation of security and dependability (S&D) properties of complex software systems is widely accepted as a necessity. Basic monitoring can detect violations but does not always provide sufficient information for deciding what the appropriate response to a violation is. Such decisions often require additional diagnostic information that explains why a violation has occurred and can, therefore, indicate what would be an appropriate response action to it. In this thesis, we describe a diagnostic procedure for generating explanations of violations of S&D properties developed as extension of a runtime monitoring framewoek, called EVEREST. The procedure is based on a combination of abductive and evidential reasoning about violations of S&D properties which are expressed in Event Calculus