Designing a novel virtual collaborative environment to support collaboration in design review meetings

Project review meetings are part of the project management process and are organised to assess progress and resolve any design conflicts to avoid delays in construction. One of the key challenges during a project review meeting is to bring the stakeholders together and use this time effectively to address design issues as quickly as possible. At present, current technology solutions based on BIM or CAD are information-centric and do not allow project teams to collectively explore the design from a range of perspectives and brainstorm ideas when design conflicts are encountered. This paper presents a system architecture that can be used to support multi-functional team collaboration more effectively during such design review meetings. The proposed architecture illustrates how information-centric BIM or CAD systems can be made human- and team-centric to enhance team communication and problem solving. An implementation of the proposed system architecture has been tested for its utility, likability and usefulness during design review meetings. The evaluation results suggest that the collaboration platform has the potential to enhance collaboration among multi-functional teams

The Architecture Decentralised Autonomous Organisation: a stigmergic exploration in architectural collaboration.

We present "ArchiDAO", a decentralised Autonomous Organisation, i.e an architecture studio run on via smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. The objective of the paper is to offer a concise framework for the transformation of the way architectural work is conducted, via stigmergic principles, realised on smart contracts. The paper follows a systematic review of the Viable System Model, collective authorship in architectural design and previous DAO software stacks to extract a set of stigmergic principles. We conclude the paper with a discussion and a proposal for a basic set of smart contracts that can regulate the ArchiDAO operations

Change-Impact driven Agile Architecting.

Software architecture is a key factor to scale up Agile Software Development ASD in large softwareintensive systems. Currently, software architectures are more often approached through mechanisms that enable to incrementally design and evolve software architectures aka. agile architecting. Agile architecting should be a light-weight decision-making process, which could be achieved by providing knowledge to assist agile architects in reasoning about changes. This paper presents the novel solution of using change-impact knowledge as the main driver for agile architecting. The solution consists of a Change Impact Analysis technique and a set of models to assist agile architects in the change -decision-making- process by retrieving the change-impact architectural knowledge resulting from adding or changing features iteration after iteration. To validate our approach, we have put our solution into practice by running a project of a metering management system in electric power networks in an i-smart software factory

Software Product Line Engineering: Future Research Directions

The recent trend of switching from single software product development tolines of software products in the software industry has made the software product line concept viable and widely accepted methodology in the future. Some of the potential benefits of this approach include cost reduction, improvement in quality and a decrease in product development time. Many organizations that deal in wide areas of operation, from consumer electronics, telecommunications, and avionics to information technology, are using software product lines practice because it deals with effective utilization ofsoftware assets and provides numerous benefits. Software product line engineering is an inter-disciplinary concept. It spans over the dimensions of business, architecture, process and organization. The business dimension of software product lines deals with managing a strong coordination between product line engineering and the business aspects of product line. Software product line architecture is regarded as one of the crucial piece of entity in software product lines. All the resulting products share thiscommon architecture. The organizational theories, behavior and management play critical role in the process of institutionalization of software product line engineering in an organization. The objective of this chapter is to discuss the state of the art of software product line engineering from the perspectives of business, architecture, organizational management and software engineering process. This work also highlights and discusses the future research directions in this area thus providing an opportunity to researchers and practitioners to better understand the future trends and requirements

Supporting Software Development by an Integrated Documentation Model for Decisions

Decision-making is a vital activity during software development. Decisions made during requirements engineering, software design, and implementation guide the development process. In order to make decisions, developers may apply different strategies. For instance, they can search for alternatives and evaluate them according to given criteria, or they may rely on their personal experience and heuristics to make single solution claims. Thereby, knowledge emerges during the process of decision making, as the content, outcome, and context of decisions are explored by developers. For instance, different solution options may be considered to address a given decision problem. In particular, such knowledge is growing rapidly, when multiple developers are involved. Therefore, it should be documented to make decisions comprehensible in the future. However, this documentation is often not performed by developers in practice. First, developers need to find and use a documentation approach, which provides support for the decision making strategies applied for the decision to be documented. Thus, documentation approaches are required to support multiple strategies. Second, due to the collaborative nature of the decision making process during one or more development activities, decision knowledge needs to be captured and structured according to one integrated model, which can be applied during all these development activities. This thesis uncovers two important reasons, why the aforementioned requirements are currently not fulfilled sufficiently. First, it is investigated, which decision making strategies can be identified in the documentation of decisions within issue tickets from the Firefox project. Interestingly, most documented decision knowledge originates from naturalistic decision making, whereas most current documentation approaches structure the captured knowledge according to rational decision making strategies. Second, most decision documentation approaches focus on one development activity, so that for instance decision documentation during requirements engineering and implementation are not supported within the same documentation model. The main contribution of this thesis is a documentation model for decision knowledge, which addresses these two findings. In detail, the documentation model supports the documentation of decision knowledge resulting from both naturalistic and rational decision making strategies, and integrates this knowledge within flexible documentation structures. Also, it is suitable for capturing decision knowledge during the three development activities of requirements engineering, design, and implementation. Furthermore, a tool support is presented for the model, which allows developers to integrate decision capturing and documentation in their activities using the Eclipse IDE

SSP: a simple software process for small- size software development projects

A large number of software development projects in Latin- American countries are small-size, poorly defined and time pressured. These projects usually involve under qualified people. Provided that well-known software development models have shown limited applicability in such scenario, developers usually carry out ad-hoc software processes. Therefore, the obtained results are unpredictable. This article presents a Simple Software Process (SSP) for small-size software projects involving under qualified people. The proposal is motivated by current practice in Chile. SSP proposes a step-by-step process which structures the development activities and it improves the process visibility for clients and team members. Furthermore, SSP formally includes “the user/client” as an active role to be played during the project. This process has been used in 22 software projects and the results are encouraging.1st International Workshop on Advanced Software Engineering: Expanding the Frontiers of Software Technology - Session 3: Software Development ProcessRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Integration of Information Technologies in Enterprise Application Development

Healthcare enterprises are disconnected. In the era of integrated information systems and Internet explosion, the necessity of information systems integration reside from business process evolution, on the one hand, and from information technology tendencies, on the other hand. In order to become more efficient and adaptive to change, healthcare organizations are tremendously preoccupied of business process automation, flexibility and complexity. The need of information systems integration arise from these goals, explaining, at the same time, the special interest in EAI. Extensible software integration architectures and business orientation of process modeling and information systems functionalities, the same as open-connectivity, accessibility and virtualization lead to most suitable integration solutions: SOA and BPM architectural styles in a cloud computing environment

Let’s augment the future together!:Augmented reality troubleshooting support for IT/OT rolling stock failures

The railway industry is moving to a socio-technological system that relies on computer-controlled and human-machine interfaces. Opportunities arise for creating new services and commercial business cases by using technological innovations and traffic management systems. The convergence of Information Technology (IT) with Operational Technology (OT) is critical for cost-effective and reliable railway operations. However, this convergence introduces complexities, leading to more intricate rolling stock system failures. Hence, operators necessitate assistance in their troubleshooting and maintenance strategy to simplify the decision-making and action-taking processes. Augmented Reality (AR) emerges as a pivotal tool for troubleshooting within this context. AR enhances the operator’s ability to visualize, contextualize, and understand complex data by overlaying real-time and virtual information onto physical objects. AR supports the identification of IT/OT rolling stock system failures, offers troubleshooting directions, and streamlines maintenance procedures, ultimately enhancing decision-making and action-taking processes. This thesis investigates how AR can support operators in navigating troubleshooting and maintenance challenges posed by IT/OT rolling stock system failures in the railway industry

Entrepreneurial adaptation: Insights from existing literature and possibilities for new research.

Recent research shows that new ventures have great difficulties in defining a viable business model from the outset and that minor or major adaptations to this initial business model are needed as the venture evolves. Entrepreneurial adaptation or the entrepreneur's willingness and ability to make appropriate adjustments to the business concept become critical. If adaptation is so important for entrepreneurial companies, we need to ask ourselves a number of questions. (1) What causes this need for adaptation? (2a) What is the precise effect of adaptation on a start-up's performance or survival and (2b) is this effect similar for all start-ups? Also, (3) what do we know about the process of adaptation? And (4) what are factors enabling this adaptation process? Finally, we also need to determine (5) how the concept of adaptation in entrepreneurial companies is related to existing concepts of change and adaptation. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of different literature streams that are specifically relevant to entrepreneurial adaptation and the questions listed above, and to point out gaps in the existing literature requiring further investigation. We look at whether and how the existing literature can provide insight into each of those five questions. In a final section, we point out directions for further research.Innovation; Research; Model; Companies; Performance; Startups; Processes; Factors;