Next Generation Middleware Technology for Mobile Computing

Current advances in portable devices, wireless technologies, and distributed systems have created a mobile computing environment that is characterized by a large scale of dynamism. Diversities in network connectivity, platform capability, and resource availability can significantly affect the application performance. Traditional middleware systems are not prepared to offer proper support for addressing the dynamic aspects of mobile systems. Modern distributed applications need a middleware that is capable of adapting to environment changes and that supports the required level of quality of service. This paper represents the experience of several research projects related to next generation middleware systems. We first indicate the major challenges in mobile computing systems and try to identify the main requirements for mobile middleware systems. The different categories of mobile middleware technologies are reviewed and their strength and weakness are analyzed

Software Technology Maturation and Software Security

Software technology maturation, also referred to as technology transfer, is as difficult as it is rare, mostly because of the time scale involved. Software maturation is defined as the process of taking a piece of technology from conception to popularization. Frequently, software engineers and developers tend to oversimplify the problems of technology transfer. They attribute problems to management pressures that complicate the use of software-engineering practices. However, a good understanding of the processes and problems is necessary to effectively tackle the technology-transfer problem. Without that understanding, the transfer of inappropriate technology to an organization without the maturity to understand and absorb it is likely to do harm, rather than to bring benefits. This research aims to answer two research questions regarding the technology maturation. Namely, is Redwine and Riddle's "Software Technology Maturation" study the accepted and gold standard within the software engineering discipline for assessing the maturation of software technology? Secondly, can the software technology maturation study be applied to other areas of software technology? The purpose of this research is to answer these questions of interest which will serve as the basis for the second implementation; applying the Redwine and Riddle criteria to the comparatively young discipline of software security. The primary goal for the second implementation is to explore and extend the second research question and demonstrate the maturity phases for the field of software security

Characterizing industry-academia collaborations in software engineering: evidence from 101 projects

Research collaboration between industry and academia supports improvement and innovation in industry and helps ensure the industrial relevance of academic research. However, many researchers and practitioners in the community believe that the level of joint industry-academia collaboration (IAC) projects in Software Engineering (SE) research is relatively low, creating a barrier between research and practice. The goal of the empirical study reported in this paper is to explore and characterize the state of IAC with respect to industrial needs, developed solutions, impacts of the projects and also a set of challenges, patterns and anti-patterns identified by a recent Systematic Literature Review (SLR) study. To address the above goal, we conducted an opinion survey among researchers and practitioners with respect to their experience in IAC. Our dataset includes 101 data points from IAC projects conducted in 21 different countries. Our findings include: (1) the most popular topics of the IAC projects, in the dataset, are: software testing, quality, process, and project managements; (2) over 90% of IAC projects result in at least one publication; (3) almost 50% of IACs are initiated by industry, busting the myth that industry tends to avoid IACs; and (4) 61% of the IAC projects report having a positive impact on their industrial context, while 31% report no noticeable impacts or were “not sure”. To improve this situation, we present evidence-based recommendations to increase the success of IAC projects, such as the importance of testing pilot solutions before using them in industry. This study aims to contribute to the body of evidence in the area of IAC, and benefit researchers and practitioners. Using the data and evidence presented in this paper, they can conduct more successful IAC projects in SE by being aware of the challenges and how to overcome them, by applying best practices (patterns), and by preventing anti-patterns.The authors would like to thank the researchers and practitioners who participated in this survey. João M. Fernandes was supported by FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia) within the Project Scope UID/CEC/00319/2013. Dietmar Pfahl was supported by the institutional research grant IUT20-55 of the Estonian Research Council. Andrea Arcuri was supported by the Research Council of Norway (grant agreement No 274385). Mika Mäntylä was partially supported by Academy of Finland grant and ITEA3 / TEKES grant

UNA VISIÓN DEL DESARROLLO DE SOFTWARE UTILIZANDO MODELOS

RESUMEN ANALÍTICOLa construcción de software está lejos de ser una tarea sencilla, sobre todo si su complejidad es alta. Esta tarea exige un alto compromiso del equipo de desarrollo, recursos costosos, especialistas altamente cualificados y procesos y métodos cada vez más formales. Con el propósito de agilizar este proceso, surgió un movimiento centrado en el uso de modelos en diferentes niveles de abstracción. Las principales propuestas en este sentido son la Arquitectura Dirigida por Modelos y el Desarrollo de Software Dirigido por Modelos (MDA y MDSD, por sus siglas en ingles). En este artículo se hace una revisión de la literatura a cerca de estas dos propuestas. Describe sus principios fundamentales, el trabajo orientado a conformar la fundamentación teórica de las dos propuestas y las principales herramientas que implementan el desarrollo conducido por modelos. Este trabajo se realiza en el marco del proyecto de investigación “Construcción de un proceso de desarrollo de software con base en MDA y MDSD”, concretamente contribuye a establecer el trabajo de investigación realizado por la comunidad internacional y los fundamentos teóricos y conceptuales que subyacen a las dos propuestas.PALABRAS CLAVES: Arquitectura Guiada por Modelos, Desarrollo de Software Guiado por Modelos, Modelo Independiente de Plataforma, Modelo Independiente de la Computación, Transformaciones entre modelos, Herramientas MDSDA VIEW OF SOFTWARE DEVELOMENT USING MODELSANALYTICAL SUMMARYBuilding software is not an easy task, especially if its complexity is high. This task requires a high commitment to the development team, expensive resources, highly qualified specialists and increasingly formal methods and processes. In order to expedite this process, a movement focused on the use of models in different abstraction levels has emerged. The main proposals in this regard are Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Model Driven Software Development (MDSD). This paper is a review of the literature about those two proposals. It describes its fundamental principles, work oriented to form its theoretical basis and the main tools that implement the model-driven development. This work is performed under the research project “Construction of a software development process based on MDA and MDSD”, specifically contributes to establishing the research work done by the international community and the theoretical and conceptual underpinning the two proposals.KEYWORDS: Model Driven Architecture MDA, Model Driven Software Development MDSD, Platform Independent Model PIM, Computation Independent Model CIM, Transformations between Models MDSD tool

UNA VISIÓN DEL DESARROLLO DE SOFTWARE UTILIZANDO MODELOS

RESUMEN ANALÍTICOLa construcción de software está lejos de ser una tarea sencilla, sobre todo si su complejidad es alta. Esta tarea exige un alto compromiso del equipo de desarrollo, recursos costosos, especialistas altamente cualificados y procesos y métodos cada vez más formales. Con el propósito de agilizar este proceso, surgió un movimiento centrado en el uso de modelos en diferentes niveles de abstracción. Las principales propuestas en este sentido son la Arquitectura Dirigida por Modelos y el Desarrollo de Software Dirigido por Modelos (MDA y MDSD, por sus siglas en ingles). En este artículo se hace una revisión de la literatura a cerca de estas dos propuestas. Describe sus principios fundamentales, el trabajo orientado a conformar la fundamentación teórica de las dos propuestas y las principales herramientas que implementan el desarrollo conducido por modelos. Este trabajo se realiza en el marco del proyecto de investigación “Construcción de un proceso de desarrollo de software con base en MDA y MDSD”, concretamente contribuye a establecer el trabajo de investigación realizado por la comunidad internacional y los fundamentos teóricos y conceptuales que subyacen a las dos propuestas.PALABRAS CLAVES: Arquitectura Guiada por Modelos, Desarrollo de Software Guiado por Modelos, Modelo Independiente de Plataforma, Modelo Independiente de la Computación, Transformaciones entre modelos, Herramientas MDSDA VIEW OF SOFTWARE DEVELOMENT USING MODELSANALYTICAL SUMMARYBuilding software is not an easy task, especially if its complexity is high. This task requires a high commitment to the development team, expensive resources, highly qualified specialists and increasingly formal methods and processes. In order to expedite this process, a movement focused on the use of models in different abstraction levels has emerged. The main proposals in this regard are Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Model Driven Software Development (MDSD). This paper is a review of the literature about those two proposals. It describes its fundamental principles, work oriented to form its theoretical basis and the main tools that implement the model-driven development. This work is performed under the research project “Construction of a software development process based on MDA and MDSD”, specifically contributes to establishing the research work done by the international community and the theoretical and conceptual underpinning the two proposals.KEYWORDS: Model Driven Architecture MDA, Model Driven Software Development MDSD, Platform Independent Model PIM, Computation Independent Model CIM, Transformations between Models MDSD tool

The relationship between information technology flexibility, capability and strategic alignment

The quest for information technology (IT) and business strategic alignment has become more complex due to the fact that organisations are finding it hard to align their IT with business strategies in today’s ever changing business environment. Upon reviewing previous literatures, it is found that IT flexibility and IT capability are two most important factors to sustain strategic alignment. Studies investigating the effect of IT flexibility dimensions (i.e., connectivity, compatibility, and modularity) and IT capability dimensions (i.e., IT infrastructure, IT architecture, IT relationship resource, and IT human resource) on strategic alignment are very limited and there is an opportunity to study these relationships. Furthermore, the effect of IT flexibility dimensions on IT capability is another key issue of the research and has not been studied in previous studies. 125 IT managers of top medium-to-large Iranian firms were the target subjects in this study and statistical software of SPSS and PLS were used to analyze the data. The results revealed that one dimension of IT flexibility (i.e., connectivity) and three dimensions of IT capability (i.e., IT human resource, IT relationship resource and IT infrastructure) significantly affect strategic alignment. Furthermore, the relationships of two dimensions of IT flexibility (i.e., compatibility and modularity) were significant with IT capability. The findings also indicated that the dimensions of IT flexibility and IT capability explain 67% of the variance in strategic alignment and IT flexibility explains 39% of the variance of IT capability. Unexpectedly, the effects of compatibility, modularity and IT architecture on strategic alignment and the relationship between connectivity and IT capability have not been supported in the present study

EXPRESS: Resource-oriented and RESTful Semantic Web services

This thesis investigates an approach that simplifies the development of Semantic Web services (SWS) by removing the need for additional semantic descriptions.The most actively researched approaches to Semantic Web services introduce explicit semantic descriptions of services that are in addition to the existing semantic descriptions of the service domains. This increases their complexity and design overhead. The need for semantically describing the services in such approaches stems from their foundations in service-oriented computing, i.e. the extension of already existing service descriptions. This thesis demonstrates that adopting a resource-oriented approach based on REST will, in contrast to service-oriented approaches, eliminate the need for explicit semantic service descriptions and service vocabularies. This reduces the development efforts while retaining the significant functional capabilities.The approach proposed in this thesis, called EXPRESS (Expressing RESTful Semantic Services), utilises the similarities between REST and the Semantic Web, such as resource realisation, self-describing representations, and uniform interfaces. The semantics of a service is elicited from a resource’s semantic description in the domain ontology and the semantics of the uniform interface, hence eliminating the need for additional semantic descriptions. Moreover, stub-generation is a by-product of the mapping between entities in the domain ontology and resources.EXPRESS was developed to test the feasibility of eliminating explicit service descriptions and service vocabularies or ontologies, to explore the restrictions placed on domain ontologies as a result, to investigate the impact on the semantic quality of the description, and explore the benefits and costs to developers. To achieve this, an online demonstrator that allows users to generate stubs has been developed. In addition, a matchmaking experiment was conducted to show that the descriptions of the services are comparable to OWL-S in terms of their ability to be discovered, while improving the efficiency of discovery. Finally, an expert review was undertaken which provided evidence of EXPRESS’s simplicity and practicality when developing SWS from scratch