Evaluating the quality of a set of modelling languages used in combination: A method and a tool

[EN] Modelling languages have proved to be an effective tool to specify and analyse various perspectives of enterprises and information systems. In addition to modelling language designs, works on model quality and modelling language quality evaluation have contributed to the maturity of the model-driven engineering (MDE) field. Although consolidated knowledge on quality evaluation is still relevant to this scenario, in previous works, we have identified misalignments between the topics that academia is addressing and the needs of industry in applying MDE, thus identifying some remaining challenges. In this paper, we focus on the need for a method to evaluate the quality of a set of modelling languages used in combination within a MDE environment. This paper presents MMQEF (Multiple Modelling language Quality Evaluation Framework), describing its foundations, presenting its method components and discussing its trade-offs. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.This work was supported by COLCIENCIAS (Colombia) (grant 512, 2010); the European Commision FP7 Project CaaS (611351).Giraldo-Velásquez, FD.; España Cubillo, S.; Giraldo, WJ.; Pastor López, O. (2018). Evaluating the quality of a set of modelling languages used in combination: A method and a tool. Information Systems. 77:48-70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2018.06.002S48707

An empirical comparative evaluation of gestUI to include gesture-based interaction in user interfaces

[EN] Currently there are tools that support the customisation of users' gestures. In general, the inclusion of new gestures implies writing new lines of code that strongly depend on the target platform where the system is run. In order to avoid this platform dependency, gestUI was proposed as a model-driven method that permits (i) the definition of custom touch-based gestures, and (ii) the inclusion of the gesture-based interaction in existing user interfaces on desktop computing platforms. The objective of this work is to compare gestUI (a MDD method to deal with gestures) versus a code-centric method to include gesture-based interaction in user interfaces. In order to perform the comparison, we analyse usability through effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. Satisfaction can be measured using the subjects' perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and intention to use. The experiment was carried out by 21 subjects, who are computer science M.Sc. and Ph.D. students. We use a crossover design, where each subject applied both methods to perform the experiment. Subjects performed tasks related to custom gesture definition and modification of the source code of the user interface to include gesture-based interaction. The data was collected using questionnaires and analysed using non-parametric statistical tests. The results show that gestUI is more efficient and effective. Moreover, results conclude that gestUI is perceived as easier to use than the code-centric method. According to these results, gestUI is a promising method to define custom gestures and to include gesture-based interaction in existing user interfaces of desktop-computing software systems. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work has been supported by Department of Computer Science of the Universidad de Cuenca and SENESCYT of Ecuador, and received financial support from the Generalitat Valenciana under "Project IDEO (PROMETEOII/2014/039)" and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the "DataMe Project (TIN2016-80811-P)".Parra-González, LO.; España Cubillo, S.; Panach Navarrete, JI.; Pastor López, O. (2019). An empirical comparative evaluation of gestUI to include gesture-based interaction in user interfaces. Science of Computer Programming. 172:232-263. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2018.12.001S23226317

GestUI: A Model-driven Method and Tool for Including Gesture-based Interaction in User Interfaces

[EN] Among the technological advances in touch-based devices, gesture-based interaction have become a prevalent feature in many application domains. Information systems are starting to explore this type of interaction. As a result, gesture specifications are now being hard-coded by developers at the source code level that hinders their reusability and portability. Similarly, defining new gestures that reflect user requirements is a complex process. This paper describes a model-driven approach to include gesture-based interaction in desktop information systems. It incorporates a tool prototype that captures user-sketched multi-stroke gestures and transforms them into a model by automatically generating the gesture catalogue for gesture-based interaction technologies and gesture-based user interface source codes. We demonstrated our approach in several applications ranging from case tools to form-based information systems.This work was supported by SENESCYT and Universidad de Cuenca from Ecuador, and received financial support from Generalitat Valenciana under Project IDEO (PROMETEOII/2014/039).Parra-González, LO.; España Cubillo, S.; Pastor López, O. (2016). GestUI: A Model-driven Method and Tool for Including Gesture-based Interaction in User Interfaces. Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly. 6:73-92. https://doi.org/10.7250/csimq.2016-6.05S7392

In Search of Evidence for Model-Driven Development Claims: An Experiment on Quality, Effort, Productivity and Satisfaction

Context: Model-Driven Development (MDD) is a paradigm that prescribes building conceptual models that abstractly represent the system and generating code from these models through transformation rules. The literature is rife with claims about the benefits of MDD, but they are hardly supported by evidences. Objective: This experimental investigation aims to verify some of the most cited benefits of MDD. Method: We run an experiment on a small set of classes using student subjects to compare the quality, effort, productivity and satisfaction of traditional development and MDD. The experiment participants built two web applications from scratch, one where the developers implement the code by hand and another using an industrial MDD tool that automatically generates the code from a conceptual model. Results: Outcomes show that there are no significant differences between both methods with regard to effort, productivity and satisfaction, although quality in MDD is more robust to small variations in problem complexity. We discuss possible explanations for these results. Conclusions: For small systems and less programming-experienced subjects, MDD does not always yield better results than a traditional method, even regarding effort and productivity. This contradicts some previous statements about MDD advantages. The benefits of developing a system with MDD appear to depend on certain characteristics of the development context. 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work was developed with the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation project SMART ADAPT (TIN2013-42981-P), TIN2011-23216 and was co-financed by ERDF. It also has the support of Generalitat Valenciana-funded IDEO project (PROMETEOII/2014/039) and UV (UV-INV-PRECOMP13-115032).Panach Navarrete, JI.; España Cubillo, S.; Dieste, O.; Pastor López, O.; Juristo Juzgado, N. (2015). In Search of Evidence for Model-Driven Development Claims: An Experiment on Quality, Effort, Productivity and Satisfaction. Information and Software Technology. 62:164-186. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2015.02.012S1641866

On more realistic environment distributions for defining, evaluating and developing intelligence

One insightful view of the notion of intelligence is the ability to perform well in a diverse set of tasks, problems or environments. One of the key issues is therefore the choice of this set, which can be formalised as a `distribution¿. Formalising and properly defining this distribution is an important challenge to understand what intelligence is and to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI). In this paper, we agree with previous criticisms that a universal distribution using a reference universal Turing machine (UTM) over tasks, environments, etc., is perhaps amuch too general distribution, since, e.g., the probability of other agents appearing on the scene or having some social interaction is almost 0 for many reference UTMs. Instead, we propose the notion of Darwin-Wallace distribution for environments, which is inspired by biological evolution, artificial life and evolutionary computation. However, although enlightening about where and how intelligence should excel, this distribution has so many options and is uncomputable in so many ways that we certainly need a more practical alternative. We propose the use of intelligence tests over multi-agent systems, in such a way that agents with a certified level of intelligence at a certain degree are used to construct the tests for the next degree. This constructive methodology can then be used as a more realistic intelligence test and also as a testbed for developing and evaluating AGI systems.We thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We also thank the funding from the Spanish MEC and MICINN for projects TIN2009-06078-E/TIN, Consolider-Ingenio CSD2007-00022 and TIN2010-21062- C02, for MEC FPU grant AP2006-02323, and Generalitat Valenciana for Prometeo/2008/051Hernández Orallo, J.; Dowe, DL.; España Cubillo, S.; Hernández-Lloreda, MV.; Insa Cabrera, J. (2011). On more realistic environment distributions for defining, evaluating and developing intelligence. En Artificial General Intelligence. Springer Verlag (Germany). 6830:82-91. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22887-2_9S82916830Dowe, D.L.: Foreword re C. S. Wallace. Computer Journal 51(5), 523–560 (2008); Christopher Stewart WALLACE (1933-2004) memorial special issueDowe, D.L.: Minimum Message Length and statistically consistent invariant (objective?) Bayesian probabilistic inference - from (medical) “evidence”. Social Epistemology 22(4), 433–460 (2008)Dowe, D.L.: MML, hybrid Bayesian network graphical models, statistical consistency, invariance and uniqueness. In: Bandyopadhyay, P.S., Forster, M.R. (eds.) Handbook of the Philosophy of Science. Philosophy of Statistics, vol. 7, pp. 901–982. Elsevier, Amsterdam (2011)Dowe, D.L., Hajek, A.R.: A computational extension to the Turing Test. 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(eds.) Artificial General Intelligence, pp. 182–183 (2010)Hernández-Orallo, J., Dowe, D.L.: Measuring universal intelligence: Towards an anytime intelligence test. Artificial Intelligence 174(18), 1508–1539 (2010)Hernández-Orallo, J., Minaya-Collado, N.: A formal definition of intelligence based on an intensional variant of Kolmogorov complexity. In: Proc. Intl Symposium of Engineering of Intelligent Systems (EIS 1998), pp. 146–163. ICSC Press (1998)Herrmann, E., Call, J., Hernández-Lloreda, M.V., Hare, B., Tomasello, M.: Humans have evolved specialized skills of social cognition: The cultural intelligence hypothesis. Science 317(5843), 1360–1366 (2007)Hibbard, B.: Bias and No Free Lunch in Formal Measures of Intelligence. Journal of Artificial General Intelligence 1(1), 54–61 (2009)Krebs, J.R., Dawkins, R.: Animal signals: mind-reading and manipulation. Behavioural Ecology: an evolutionary approach 2, 380–402 (1984)Langton, C.G.: Artificial life: An overview. The MIT Press, Cambridge (1997)Legg, S., Hutter, M.: A collection of definitions of intelligence. In: Proc. of the 2007 Conf. on Artificial General Intelligence, pp. 17–24. IOS Press, Amsterdam (2007)Legg, S., Hutter, M.: Universal intelligence: A definition of machine intelligence. Minds and Machines 17(4), 391–444 (2007)Levin, L.A.: Universal sequential search problems. Problems of Information Transmission 9(3), 265–266 (1973)Sanghi, P., Dowe, D.L.: A computer program capable of passing IQ tests. In: Proc. 4th ICCS International Conference on Cognitive Science (ICCS 2003), Sydney, Australia, pp. 570–575 (2003)Schmidhuber, J.: A computer scientist’s view of life, the universe, and everything. In: Foundations of Computer Science, p. 201. Springer, Heidelberg (1997)Schmidhuber, J.: The Speed Prior: a new simplicity measure yielding near-optimal computable predictions. In: Kivinen, J., Sloan, R.H. (eds.) COLT 2002. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2375, pp. 123–127. 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Metamodeling the enhanced entity-relationship model

[EN] A metamodel provides an abstract syntax to distinguish between valid and invalid models. That is, a metamodel is as useful for a modeling language as a grammar is for a programming language. In this context, although the Enhanced Entity-Relationship (EER) Model is the de facto standard modeling language for database conceptual design, to the best of our knowledge, there are only two proposals of EER metamodels, which do not provide a full support to Chen s notation. Furthermore, neither a discussion about the engineering used for specifying these metamodels is presented nor a comparative analysis among them is made. With the aim at overcoming these drawbacks, we show a detailed and practical view of how to formalize the EER Model by means of a metamodel that (i) covers all elements of the Chen s notation, (ii) defines well-formedness rules needed for creating syntactically correct EER schemas, and (iii) can be used as a starting point to create Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools for EER modeling, interchange metadata among these tools, perform automatic SQL/DDL code generation, and/or extend (or reuse part of) the EER Model. In order to show the feasibility, expressiveness, and usefulness of our metamodel (named EERMM), we have developed a CASE tool (named EERCASE), which has been tested with a practical example that covers all EER constructors, confirming that our metamodel is feasible, useful, more expressive than related ones and correctly defined. Moreover, we analyze our work against the related ones and present our final remarks.Fidalgo, RN.; Alves, E.; España Cubillo, S.; Castro, J.; Pastor López, O. (2013). Metamodeling the enhanced entity-relationship model. Journal of Information and Data Management. 4(3):406-420. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/47949S4064204

Propuestas para la Captura de Requisitos y el Modelado de la Interacción en el marco de MDA

[ES] El desarrollo de software dirigido por modelos (DSDM) se ha posicionado como una técnica relevante para garantizar la calidad del soft-ware producido industrialmente. Propuestas como MDA (Model-Driven Ar-chitecture) son indicadores de dicha aceptación. En este artículo se presen-tan unas propuestas de extensión para un método MDA de desarrollo de sistemas informáticos de gestión llamado OO-Method, el cual tiene su im-plementación industrial en la herramienta OLIVANOVA. Las propuestas de extensión se proponen para afrontar distintos retos a la hora de aplicar OO-Method en las distintas etapas del proceso de DSDM. Más concretamente, este artículo se centra en cómo afrontar la captura de requisitos y el desarro-llo de interfaces de usuario avanzadas que garanticen la usabilidad. Para ca-da uno de estos retos, se discute cómo abordarlos desde la perspectiva MDA.España Cubillo, S.; Panach Navarrete, JI.; Aquino, N.; Valverde Giromé, F.; Pastor López, O. (2009). Propuestas para la Captura de Requisitos y el Modelado de la Interacción en el marco de MDA. Novática. (202):61-67. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/77406S616720

Integrating technical debt into MDE

The main goal of this work is to evaluate the feasibility to calculate the technical debt (a traditional software quality approach) in a model-driven context through the same tools used by software deve- lopers at work. The SonarQube tool was used, so that the quality check was performed directly on projects created with Eclipse Modeling Frame- work (EMF) instead of traditionals source code projects. In this work, XML was used as the model speci cation language to verify in Sonar- Qube due to the creation of EMF metamodels in XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) and that SonarQube o ers a plugin to assess the XML lan- guage. After this, our work focused on the de nition of model rules as an XSD schema (XML Schema De nition) and the integration between EMF-SonarQube in order that these metrics were directly validated by SonarQube; and subsequently, this tool determined the technical debt that the analyzed EMF models could containF. G, thanks to Colciencias (Colombia) for funding this work through the Colciencias Grant call 512-2010. This work has been supported by the Spanish MICINN PROS-Req (TIN2010-19130-C02-02), the Generalitat Valenciana Project ORCA (PROMETEO/2009/015), the European Commission FP7 Project CaaS (611351), and ERDF structural funds.Giraldo Velásquez, FD.; España Cubillo, S.; Pineda, MA.; Giraldo, WJ.; Pastor López, O. (2014). Integrating technical debt into MDE. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/68278

METHODOLOGICAL INTEGRATION OF COMMUNICATION ANALYSIS INTO A MODEL-DRIVEN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK

It is widely recognised that information and communication technologies development is a risky activity. Despite the advances in software engineering, many software development projects fail to satisfy the clients' needs, to deliver on time or to stay within budget. Among the various factors that are considered to cause failure, an inadequate requirements practice stands out. Model-driven development is a relatively recent paradigm with the potential to solve some of the dragging problems of software development. Models play a paramount role in model-driven development: several modelling layers allow defining views of the system under construction at different abstraction levels, and model transformations facilitate the transition from one layer to the other. However, how to effectively integrate requirements engineering within model-driven development is still an open research challenge. This thesis integrates Communication Analysis, a communication-oriented business process modelling and requirements engineering method for information systems development, and the OO Method, an object-oriented model-driven software development method provides automatic software generation from conceptual models. We first provide a detailed specification of Communication Analysis intended to facilitate the integration; among other improvements to the method, we build an ontology-based set of concept definitions in which to ground the method, we provide precise methodological guidelines, we create a metamodel for the modelling languages included in the method, and we provide tools to support the creation of Communication Analysis requirements models. Then we perform the integration by providing a technique to systematically derive OO-Method conceptual models from Communication Analysis requirements models. The derivation technique is offered in two flavours: a set of rules to be manually applied by a human analyst, and an ATL model transformation that automates this task.España Cubillo, S. (2011). METHODOLOGICAL INTEGRATION OF COMMUNICATION ANALYSIS INTO A MODEL-DRIVEN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/14572Palanci

Evaluación de la calidad de lenguajes de modelado a través de análisis taxonómico: una propuesta preliminar

El paradigma de la ingeniería dirigida por modelos (MDE por sus siglas en inglés) promueve el uso de modelos conceptuales en procesos de ingeniería e investigación sobre sistemas de información. Como productos de ingeniería los modelos conceptuales deben tener calidad, la cual aplica tanto a los modelos conceptuales como los lenguajes de modelado empleados para construir dichos modelos. Debido a los múltiples retos, divergencias y tendencias para evaluación y aseguramiento de la calidad en contextos MDE, una forma para ejecutar un proceso de evaluación de la calidad es usar una técnica donde la aplicabilidad y metas de los artefactos de modelado puedan ser contrastadas con los principios esenciales del desarrollo de sistemas de información. Este trabajo formula un conjunto de requisitos conceptuales y metodológicos para un marco de evaluación de la calidad de lenguajes de modelado con el potencial de abordar algunos de los retos abiertos de calidad en MDE. Para este propósito, se propone usar principios del popular marco de trabajo Zachman para sistemas de información, como una herramienta taxonómica aplicada sobre artefactos de modelado usados en un desarrollo de un sistema de información, en aras de ejecutar procedimientos analíticos sobre modelos alineados con una arquitectura de referencia para sistemas de información, y con razonamientos ontológicos. En este trabajo se expone cómo el marco Zachman soporta análisis sobre modelos para propósitos de calidad por su administración nativa de la semántica.The Model-Driven Engineering (mde) paradigm promotes the usage of conceptual models in information systems (is) engineering and research. As engineering products, conceptual models must have quality, which applies on both conceptual models and modeling language employed to build them. This paper presents a modeling language quality evaluation framework. This framework uses the principles from the popular Zachman framework for information systems as a taxonomic tool applied over modeling rtifacts used in an information system development. The purpose of this taxonomic tool is to perform analytic procedures that are aligned with an is reference architecture and ontological reasoning. Throughout this work, we describe how the Zachman framework supports analytics over modeling languages for quality purposes by its native management of semantics