PuLSE-I: Deriving instances from a product line infrastructure

Reusing assets during application engineering promises to improve the efficiency of systems development. However, in order to benefit from reusable assets, application engineering processes must incorporate when and how to use the reusable assets during single system development. However, when and how to use a reusable asset depends on what types of reusable assets have been created.Product line engineering approaches produce a reusable infrastructure for a set of products. In this paper, we present the application engineering process associated with the PuLSE product line software engineering method - PuLSE-I. PuLSE-I details how single systems can be built efficiently from the reusable product line infrastructure built during the other PuLSE activities

CP-nets: A Tool for Representing and Reasoning withConditional Ceteris Paribus Preference Statements

Information about user preferences plays a key role in automated decision making. In many domains it is desirable to assess such preferences in a qualitative rather than quantitative way. In this paper, we propose a qualitative graphical representation of preferences that reflects conditional dependence and independence of preference statements under a ceteris paribus (all else being equal) interpretation. Such a representation is often compact and arguably quite natural in many circumstances. We provide a formal semantics for this model, and describe how the structure of the network can be exploited in several inference tasks, such as determining whether one outcome dominates (is preferred to) another, ordering a set outcomes according to the preference relation, and constructing the best outcome subject to available evidence

Towards Method Component Contextualization

International audienceMethod Engineering (ME) is a discipline which aims to bring effective solutions to the construction, improvement and modification of the methods used to develop Information Systems (IS). Situational Method Engineering (SME) promotes the idea of retrieving, adapting and tailoring components, rather than complete methodologies, to the specific context. Existing SME approaches use the notion of context for characterizing situations of IS development projects and for guiding the method components selection from a repository. However, in the reviewed literature, there is no proposed approach to specify the specific context of method components. This paper provides a detailed vision of context and a process for contextualizing methods in the IS domain. This proposal is illustrated with three case studies: scenario conceptualization, project portfolio management, and decision-making

Strategy Patterns for Evaluating and Improving Usability

Patterns have had significant impact in many disciplines, particularly in software and web engineering, and we believe that they also provide a basis for selecting evaluation strategies via practical tips and tricks that can be easily adopted for evaluation and change projects. In this paper, we propose a holistic quality evaluation approach for usability and user experience (UX), which relies on quality views and strategy patterns. A quality view relates accordingly an entity super-category (e.g., product, system, system in use) with a quality focus (e.g., internal quality, external quality, quality in use). Usability and user experience are higher-level characteristics that should be linked to quality views appropriately. Also quality views support ‘influences’ and ‘depends on’ relationships between them. With a concrete evaluation or change project goal, our approach selects and instantiates a suitable strategy from a set of strategy patterns. Practical use of our approach is demonstrated through the specification and use of a strategy pattern in the evaluation of the Facebook mobile app.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Strategy Patterns for Evaluating and Improving Usability

Patterns have had significant impact in many disciplines, particularly in software and web engineering, and we believe that they also provide a basis for selecting evaluation strategies via practical tips and tricks that can be easily adopted for evaluation and change projects. In this paper, we propose a holistic quality evaluation approach for usability and user experience (UX), which relies on quality views and strategy patterns. A quality view relates accordingly an entity super-category (e.g., product, system, system in use) with a quality focus (e.g., internal quality, external quality, quality in use). Usability and user experience are higher-level characteristics that should be linked to quality views appropriately. Also quality views support ‘influences’ and ‘depends on’ relationships between them. With a concrete evaluation or change project goal, our approach selects and instantiates a suitable strategy from a set of strategy patterns. Practical use of our approach is demonstrated through the specification and use of a strategy pattern in the evaluation of the Facebook mobile app.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

A Dual-Engine for Early Analysis of Critical Systems

This paper presents a framework for modeling, simulating, and checking properties of critical systems based on the Alloy language -- a declarative, first-order, relational logic with a built-in transitive closure operator. The paper introduces a new dual-analysis engine that is capable of providing both counterexamples and proofs. Counterexamples are found fully automatically using an SMT solver, which provides a better support for numerical expressions than the existing Alloy Analyzer. Proofs, however, cannot always be found automatically since the Alloy language is undecidable. Our engine offers an economical approach by first trying to prove properties using a fully-automatic, SMT-based analysis, and switches to an interactive theorem prover only if the first attempt fails. This paper also reports on applying our framework to Microsoft's COM standard and the mark-and-sweep garbage collection algorithm.Comment: Workshop on Dependable Software for Critical Infrastructures (DSCI), Berlin 201

Combining configuration and recommendation to enable an interactive guidance of product line configuration

This paper is interested in e-commerce for complex configurable products/systems. E-commerce makes a wide use of recommendation techniques to help customers identify relevant products or services in large collections of offers. One particular way to achieve this is to offer customers a panel of options among which they can select their preferred ones. A trend in the industry is to go a step further, beyond the selection of pre-defined products from a catalogue by handling products customization. The systems engineering community has shown that, based on product line engineering methods, techniques and tools, it is possible to produce customized products efficiently and at low cost. The problem is that there are usually so many products in a PL that it is impossible to specify all of them explicitly, and therefore traditional recommendation techniques cannot be simply applied. This paper proposes an approach that combines two complementary forms of guidance: configuration and recommendation, to help customers define their own products out of a product line specification. The proposed approach, called interactive configuration supports the combination by organizing the configuration process in a series of partial configurations where decisions are made by the recommendation. This paper illustrates this process by applying it to an example with the content based method for recommendation and the a priori configuration approach