Change Support in Process-Aware Information Systems - A Pattern-Based Analysis

In today's dynamic business world the economic success of an enterprise increasingly depends on its ability to react to changes in its environment in a quick and flexible way. Process-aware information systems (PAIS) offer promising perspectives in this respect and are increasingly employed for operationally supporting business processes. To provide effective business process support, flexible PAIS are needed which do not freeze existing business processes, but allow for loosely specified processes, which can be detailed during run-time. In addition, PAIS should enable authorized users to flexibly deviate from the predefined processes if required (e.g., by allowing them to dynamically add, delete, or move process activities) and to evolve business processes over time. At the same time PAIS must ensure consistency and robustness. The emergence of different process support paradigms and the lack of methods for comparing existing change approaches have made it difficult for PAIS engineers to choose the adequate technology. In this paper we suggest a set of changes patterns and change support features to foster the systematic comparison of existing process management technology with respect to process change support. Based on these change patterns and features, we provide a detailed analysis and evaluation of selected systems from both academia and industry. The identified change patterns and change support features facilitate the comparison of change support frameworks, and consequently will support PAIS engineers in selecting the right technology for realizing flexible PAIS. In addition, this work can be used as a reference for implementing more flexible PAIS

Semantics of trace relations in requirements models for consistency checking and inferencing

Requirements traceability is the ability to relate requirements back to stakeholders and forward to corresponding design artifacts, code, and test cases. Although considerable research has been devoted to relating requirements in both forward and backward directions, less attention has been paid to relating requirements with other requirements. Relations between requirements influence a number of activities during software development such as consistency checking and change management. In most approaches and tools, there is a lack of precise definition of requirements relations. In this respect, deficient results may be produced. In this paper, we aim at formal definitions of the relation types in order to enable reasoning about requirements relations. We give a requirements metamodel with commonly used relation types. The semantics of the relations is provided with a formalization in first-order logic. We use the formalization for consistency checking of relations and for inferring new relations. A tool has been built to support both reasoning activities. We illustrate our approach in an example which shows that the formal semantics of relation types enables new relations to be inferred and contradicting relations in requirements documents to be determined. The application of requirements reasoning based on formal semantics resolves many of the deficiencies observed in other approaches. Our tool supports better understanding of dependencies between requirements

A graph based approach to trace models composition

International audienceA model driven engineering process involves different and heterogeneous models that represent various perspectives of the system under development. The model composition operation allows combining those sub-models into an integrated view, but remains a tedious activity. For that, traceability information must be maintained to comprehend the composition effects and better manage the operation itself. Against this context, the current paper describes a framework for model composition traceability. We consider the traces generation concern as a crosscutting concern where the weaving mechanism is performed using graph transformations. A composition specification case study is presented to illustrate our contribution

Invest to Save: Report and Recommendations of the NSF-DELOS Working Group on Digital Archiving and Preservation

Digital archiving and preservation are important areas for research and development, but there is no agreed upon set of priorities or coherent plan for research in this area. Research projects in this area tend to be small and driven by particular institutional problems or concerns. As a consequence, proposed solutions from experimental projects and prototypes tend not to scale to millions of digital objects, nor do the results from disparate projects readily build on each other. It is also unclear whether it is worthwhile to seek general solutions or whether different strategies are needed for different types of digital objects and collections. The lack of coordination in both research and development means that there are some areas where researchers are reinventing the wheel while other areas are neglected. Digital archiving and preservation is an area that will benefit from an exercise in analysis, priority setting, and planning for future research. The WG aims to survey current research activities, identify gaps, and develop a white paper proposing future research directions in the area of digital preservation. Some of the potential areas for research include repository architectures and inter-operability among digital archives; automated tools for capture, ingest, and normalization of digital objects; and harmonization of preservation formats and metadata. There can also be opportunities for development of commercial products in the areas of mass storage systems, repositories and repository management systems, and data management software and tools.

Requirements for software engineering languages

This paper analyzes the concepts of software construction embodied in the Draco system. The analysis relates specific mechanisms in Draco to particular software engineering (SE) principles and suggests future research needed to extend the approach. The purpose of the analysis is to help researchers understand Draco better and thus be able to direct in productive directions future research on this type of software engineering tool

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Traceability support in software product lines

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática.Traceability is becoming a necessary quality of any modern software system. The complexity in modern systems is such that, if we cannot rely on good techniques and tools it becomes an unsustainable burden, where software artifacts can hardly be linked to their initial requirements. Modern software systems are composed by a many artifacts (models, code, etc.). Any change in one of them may have repercussions on many components. The assessment of this impact usually comes at a high cost and is highly error-prone. This complexity inherent to software development increases when it comes to Software Product Line Engineering. Traceability aims to respond to this challenge, by linking all the software artifacts that are used, in order to reason about how they influence each others. We propose to specify, design and implement an extensible Traceability Framework that will allow developers to provide traceability for a product line, or the possibility to extend it for other development scenarios. This MSc thesis work is to develop an extensible framework, using Model-Driven techniques and technologies, to provide traceability support for product lines. We also wish to provide basic and advanced traceability queries, and traceability views designed for the needs of each user

Interoperability and FAIRness through a novel combination of Web technologies

Data in the life sciences are extremely diverse and are stored in a broad spectrum of repositories ranging from those designed for particular data types (such as KEGG for pathway data or UniProt for protein data) to those that are general-purpose (such as FigShare, Zenodo, Dataverse or EUDAT). These data have widely different levels of sensitivity and security considerations. For example, clinical observations about genetic mutations in patients are highly sensitive, while observations of species diversity are generally not. The lack of uniformity in data models from one repository to another, and in the richness and availability of metadata descriptions, makes integration and analysis of these data a manual, time-consuming task with no scalability. Here we explore a set of resource-oriented Web design patterns for data discovery, accessibility, transformation, and integration that can be implemented by any general- or special-purpose repository as a means to assist users in finding and reusing their data holdings. We show that by using off-the-shelf technologies, interoperability can be achieved atthe level of an individual spreadsheet cell. We note that the behaviours of this architecture compare favourably to the desiderata defined by the FAIR Data Principles, and can therefore represent an exemplar implementation of those principles. The proposed interoperability design patterns may be used to improve discovery and integration of both new and legacy data, maximizing the utility of all scholarly outputs

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications