Pattern Reification as the Basis for Description-Driven Systems

One of the main factors driving object-oriented software development for information systems is the requirement for systems to be tolerant to change. To address this issue in designing systems, this paper proposes a pattern-based, object-oriented, description-driven system (DDS) architecture as an extension to the standard UML four-layer meta-model. A DDS architecture is proposed in which aspects of both static and dynamic systems behavior can be captured via descriptive models and meta-models. The proposed architecture embodies four main elements - firstly, the adoption of a multi-layered meta-modeling architecture and reflective meta-level architecture, secondly the identification of four data modeling relationships that can be made explicit such that they can be modified dynamically, thirdly the identification of five design patterns which have emerged from practice and have proved essential in providing reusable building blocks for data management, and fourthly the encoding of the structural properties of the five design patterns by means of one fundamental pattern, the Graph pattern. A practical example of this philosophy, the CRISTAL project, is used to demonstrate the use of description-driven data objects to handle system evolution.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figure

Active artefact management for distributed software engineering

We describe a software artefact repository that provides its contents with some awareness of their own creation. "Active" artefacts are distinguished from their passive counterparts by their enriched meta-data model which reflects the work-flow process that created them, the actors responsible, the actions taken to change the artefact, and various other pieces of organisational knowledge. This enriched view of an artefact is intended to support re-use of both software and the expertise gained when creating the software. Unlike other organisational knowledge systems, the meta-data is intrinsically part of the artefact and may be populated automatically from sources including existing data-format specific information, user supplied data and records of communication. Such a system is of increased importance in the world of "virtual teams" where transmission of vital organisational knowledge, at best difficult, is further constrained by the lack of direct contact between engineers and differing development cultures

Support for collaborative component-based software engineering

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

Open semantic service networks

Online service marketplaces will soon be part of the economy to scale the provision of specialized multi-party services through automation and standardization. Current research, such as the *-USDL service description language family, is already defining the basic building blocks to model the next generation of business services. Nonetheless, the developments being made do not target to interconnect services via service relationships. Without the concept of relationship, marketplaces will be seen as mere functional silos containing service descriptions. Yet, in real economies, all services are related and connected. Therefore, to address this gap we introduce the concept of open semantic service network (OSSN), concerned with the establishment of rich relationships between services. These networks will provide valuable knowledge on the global service economy, which can be exploited for many socio-economic and scientific purposes such as service network analysis, management, and control

A survey of agent-oriented methodologies

This article introduces the current agent-oriented methodologies. It discusses what approaches have been followed (mainly extending existing object oriented and knowledge engineering methodologies), the suitability of these approaches for agent modelling, and some conclusions drawn from the survey

Die Organisation gemeinsamer Wissensproduktion im Internet

Die kooperative Entwicklung und Produktion freier/offener Computersoftware im Internet ist ein noch recht junges, aber von der Öffentlichkeit zunehmend beachtetes Phänomen sozialer Wissensproduktion. Unter dem Label „Free Software“ und „Open Source“ schließen sich global verteilte Akteure in einer Vielzahl von Projekten zusammen und widmen sich auf unbezahlter, freiwilliger Basis der gemeinsamen Herstellung von Software. Ihre Zusammenarbeit, meist ausschließlich über schriftliche Kommunikation koordiniert, folgt dabei den Maximen des unbeschränkten Austausches von Informationen und der Einbindung jedes Interessierten. Die vorliegende explorative Fallanalyse untersucht vor diesem Hintergrund die organisationalen Strukturen und Prozesse eines Projekts der freien/offenen Softwareentwicklung, um diese unter dem Aspekt sozialer Ordnungsleistung einem grundlegenden Verständnis zugänglich zu machen. In Rückgriff auf die bestehende Forschung wird zunächst das gesellschaftliche Feld freier/offener Softwareentwicklung als kontextualer Rahmen des kooperativen Zusammenschlusses erarbeitet und dargestellt. Darauf aufbauend folgt die Analyse der sozialen Organisationsformen eines ausgewählten Projektes anhand der exemplarischen Artefaktanalyse eines virtuellen Kommunikationstools und der Beziehungsstrukturen des Kommunikationsnetzwerkes des Projektes auf der Internetplattform sourceforge.net. Die Ergebnisse werden aus einer systemtheoretischen Perspektive schrittweise zusammengefasst und interpretiert. Die Fallanalyse zeigt eine grundlegende soziale Abgrenzung von Entwicklern und Anwendern (Leistungs- und Publikumsrolle), die sich in einem ausgeprägten Zentrum-Peripherie-Verhältnis organisieren. Ihre Kooperation realisiert sich in Form einer stark sachlich strukturierten Systemdifferenzierung, vor deren Hintergrund sich als emergentes Ordnungsprinzip eine abstrahierende Zwecksetzung bzw. ―programmierung freier/offener Softwareentwicklung rekonstruieren und zu einem funktionalen Verständnis der System- und Relationsausprägungen heranziehen lässt. Die Ergebnisse ermöglichen wesentliche Einsichten in die organisationalen Strategien gemeinsamer Wissensproduktion im Internet.The cooperative development and production of free/open computer software on the internet is a relatively recent, but public acclaimed phenomenon of social production of knowledge. Under the label of “free software” and “open source” global distributed actors are involved in projects and devote themselves to the production of software on an unpaid, voluntary basis. Their cooperation coordinates (mostly) exclusively through written communication and follows the maxims of open access to and unlimited exchange of information as well as the integration of each person interested. This case analysis examines the organizational structures and processes of a free/open software project to allow a fundamentally understanding under the aspect of social order. With recourse to existing research, at first the social field of free/open software development will be elaborated and presented as a contextual framework of the cooperative mergers. Based on this, the social organization of a project on the internet platform sourceforge.net will be analyzed by means of virtual communication tools and the structure of relationship of the communication network. The results are gradually summarized and interpreted from a social systems theory perspective. The case study shows a basic social distinction between developers and users (performance and audience role), organized in a pronounced centre-periphery relationship. Their cooperation is realized in form of a strongly factual structured system differentiation. Against this background an abstractive purpose-driven setting or programming of free/open software development can be reconstructed as an emergent principle of order and can be adducted for a functional understanding of system relation characteristics. These results provide important insights into the organizational strategies of joint production of knowledge on the Internet

Distributed software development in a financial services organisation

The outsourcing of IS functionality to offshore development firms has been a growth industry that has blossomed over the last 10 years. This is as a result of organisations, seeking to optimise costs, mitigate risks, and achieve greater return on shareholder value by delegating the delivery of business information systems and applications to third party vendors. At the same time, distributed approaches to software development has arisen, there has been a growing interest in the applicability of lightweight or Agile development methodologies. As such, this paper this paper discusses experiences of a European Financial Services firm in outsourcing, and subsequently offshoring, two of its IT projects to vendor firms in India, where Agile approaches were used. The authors provide a model of the financial firm’s critical success factors presented as a frame of reference for others interested and involved in this topical area

Research Agenda for Studying Open Source II: View Through the Lens of Referent Discipline Theories

In a companion paper [Niederman et al., 2006] we presented a multi-level research agenda for studying information systems using open source software. This paper examines open source in terms of MIS and referent discipline theories that are the base needed for rigorous study of the research agenda