Differentiating Web Service Offerings

The advent of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm and increasing use of Web Services (WS) implies that the future will see a large number of services transferred between providers and consumers, using many applications or agents working on behalf of humans. Discovering and using the services is the easy part. Negotiating and selecting the best services from amongst the plethora of similar ones, depending on their cost and quality, is the challenging issue. However, existing WS-I standards neither cater to provision of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), nor their exchange between parties. These standards are confined merely to WS description (WSDL). Once WS are discovered and selected, SLAs are merely used to monitor service compliance. We propose a novel method that allows service-providers to dynamically generate the SLAs, and then transfer them to clients for selection amongst competitive service providers. The clients use Application to Application (A2A) communication to choose the best service provider at run time, and then bind to it to available services. Our method complies with all WS-I standards, and hence does not require any modifications to the UDDI or WSDL. Instead of using the SLA as just a contractual document for compliance monitoring of the service, we also use it as a means of service selection. We demonstrate and validate our method using a prototype developed in laboratory settings, which uses multiple ‘Weather Service Providers’ to obtain various indicators for weather forecasting

A Systematic, View-based Approach to Eliciting Process Models

. Building a high quality descriptive process model of a software process is recognized to be important for a number of reasons, such as certification, assessment, improvement and tool insertion. Experience has shown, time and again, that such models require process information to be elicited from multiple sources. However, a problem noted with multiple sources is that, amongst other things, process information can be inconsistent in various ways. In this position paper, we describe some mechanisms for resolving this problem. In particular, the mechanisms help in: (i) drawing out information pertaining to a specific role in the process, yielding a process view; (ii) ensuring consistency within a given view; (iii) merging various views; and (iv) ensuring global coherence of the elicited process model. These mechanisms are an integral part of V-elicit, a prototype system for eliciting process models. 1 Introduction In order to improve a software process, one should have visibility into t..

A Case for Establishing Evolutionary Policies and their Support Mechanisms, with Examples †

An important trait of a mature discipline is that, amongst other things, practitioners have specific criteria to judge the appropriateness of the different courses of action to take under a given circumstance, or whether a given task has been well-accomplished. These criteria may be in the form of templates, checklists, rules-of-thumb, constraints, policies and laws, which have resulted from many years of experience with repeated application of these in different situations. There is data to support that software evolution practices are far from mature. Thus, in this position statement, we make a case for establishing a (i) comprehensive set of evolutionary policies and (ii) their support mechanisms, to guide development 1 in the context of the instituted policies. A benefit of utilising established policies and their support mechanisms is that the sustainability of the evolving systems would likely be increased. 1

Human-Oriented Improvement in the Software Process

By doing any task repeatedly, individuals can usually improve continuously due to the experience gained (called autonomous first-order learning). In addition, they can improve due to the injection of software development technology by the organization (called second-order learning). Organizations have studied such learning curves to make decisions regarding cost estimation and budgeting, production and labor scheduling, product pricing, etc. Such progress behavior was studied in a laboratory setting in an experiment involving a sample of 12 student software developers, who completed one small-sized project every week for ten weeks. A within-subject, repeated-measure, time-series quasi-experimental design was used as the research method. This also included the Goal/Question/Metric (GQM) paradigm with some additional validation techniques from Social Sciences/MIS/Software Engineering. Statistical tests showed that on average, progress takes place at a rate of about 20%, with technology i..

The Role of a Software Process Generalizer in Managing a Line of Products

There is an urgent need for tools for understanding commonality and variability amongst a set of projects, for example, those dealing with a line of products

Personal `Progress Functions' in the Software Process

this paper, we are done with 5 of the 10 projects, and expect to finish collecting data for the remaining five within two months period

A Method for Instrumenting Software Evolution Processes and An Example Application

Introduction Typical difficulties faced by contemporary information systems organizations include: expending a majority of their resources on evolving legacy systems, having a large backlog of change requests to these legacy systems, and providing inadequate service to end-users and hence contributing to their dissatisfaction. Such a state of affairs reduces the ability of user organizations to take advantage of emerging business opportunities through Information Technology. Thus, there is an urgent need for information systems organizations to address these difficulties by improving their software evolution processes. A prerequisite to improving software evolution processes is the ability to instrument these processes. In this position statement we present a method for instrumenting software evolution processes within the context of improvement. The method builds on existing approaches in software engineering, namely the Quality Improvement Paradigm and the G/Q/M method [1]

A Field Study of Requirements Engineering Practices in Information Systems Development

To make recommendations for improving requirements engineering processes, it is critical to understand the problems faced in contemporary practice. In this paper, we describe a field study whose general objectives were to formulate recommendations to practitioners for improving requirements engineering processes, and to provide directions for future research on methods and tools. The results indicate that there are seven key issues of greatest concern in requirements engineering practice. These issues are discussed in terms of the problems they represent, how these problems are addressed successfully in practice, and impediments to the implementation of such good practices. 1 Introduction The requirements engineering process is arguably one of the most important processes in software development. Unfortunately, however, the record is poor. For example, it has been found in a number of previous studies that the requirements engineering phase is the source of the majority of detected so..