Cargo Cults in Information Systems Development: a Definition and an Analytical Framework

Organizations today adopt agile information systems development methods (ISDM), but many do not succeed with the adoption process and in achieving desired results. Systems developers sometimes fail in efficient use of ISDM, often due to a lack of understanding the fundamental intentions of the chosen method. In many cases organizations simply imitate the behavior of others without really understanding why. This conceptual paper defines this phenomenon as an ISDM cargo cult behavior and proposes an analytical framework to identify such situations. The concept of cargo cults originally comes from the field of social anthropology and has been used to explain irrational, ritualistic imitation of certain behavior. By defining and introducing the concept in the field of information systems development we provide a diagnostic tool to better understand one of the reasons why ISDM adoption sometimes fail

Requirements Engineering for Enterprise Systems: What We Know and What We Don't Know?

This chapter presents research progress in Requirements Engineering (RE) for enterprise systems (ES) with a view to formulating current challenges and a promising research agenda for the future. In the field of ES, many RE approaches have been launched and tried out in the past decade, however most of them are over-expensive and their effectiveness is unpredictable. Our goal in this chapter is to make an inventory of the approaches discussed in literature, to evaluate the quality of evidence available regarding whether these approaches actually worked, and to identify promising directions for future RE research efforts. Our results indicate (i) that while there are significant achievements, the primary goal of RE for ES is only partly achieved and (ii) that the field is likely to remain very challenging due to the increasingly more pronounced cross-organizational aspects of RE in ES projects (e.g. cross-organizational coordination, trust). At the same time, the need for practical, efficient and effective RE approaches will grow as the importance of ES in today’s extended enterprises is growing

Using value models for business risk analysis in e-service networks

Commercially provided electronic services commonly operate on top of a complex, highly-interconnected infrastructure, which provides a multitude of entry points for attackers. Providers of e-services also operate in dynamic, highly competitive markets, which provides fertile ground for fraud. Before a business idea to provide commercial e-services is implemented in practice, it should therefore be analysed on its fraud potential. This analysis is a risk assessment process, in which risks are ordered on severity and the unacceptable ones are mitigated. Mitigations may consist of changes in the e-service network to reduce the attractiveness of fraud for the fraudster, or changes in coordination process steps or IT architecture elements to make fraud harder or better detectable. We propose to use e3value business value models for the identification and quantification of risks associated with e-service packages. This allows for impact estimation as well as understanding the attacker’s business cases. We show how the e3value ontology — with minimal extensions – can be used to analyse known telecommunication fraud scenarios. We also show how the approach can be used to quantify infrastructure risks. Based on the results, as well as feedback from practitioners, we discuss the scope and limits of generalizability of our approach

Agile quality requirements management best practices portfolio:a situational method engineering approach

Abstract Management of Quality Requirements (QRs) is determinant for the success of software projects. However, this management is currently under-considered in software projects and in particular, in agile methods. Although agile processes are focused on the functional aspects of the software, some agile practices can be beneficial for the management of QRs. For example, the collaboration and interaction of people can help in the QR elicitation by reducing vagueness of requirements through communication. In this paper, we present the initial findings of our research investigating what industrial practices, from the agile methods, can be used for better management of QRs in agile software development. We use Situational Method Engineering to identify, complement and classify a portfolio of best practices for QR management in agile environments. In this regard, we present the methodological approach that we are applying for the definition of these guidelines and the requirements that will lead us to compile a portfolio of agile QR management best practices. The proposed requirements correspond to the whole software life cycle starting in the elicitation and finalizing in the deployment phases

State Model Inference Through the GUI Using Run-Time Test Generation

Software testing is an important part of engineering trustworthy information systems. End-to-end testing through Graphical User Interface (GUI) can be done manually, but it is a very time consuming and costly process. There are tools to capture or manually define scripts for automating regression testing through a GUI, but the main challenge is the high maintenance cost of the scripts when the GUI changes. In addition, GUIs tend to have a large state space, so creating scripts to cover all the possible paths and defining test oracles to check all the elements of all the states would be an enormous effort. This paper presents an approach to automatically explore a GUI while inferring state models that are used for action selection in run-time GUI test generation, implemented as an extension to the open source TESTAR tool. As an initial validation, we experiment on the impact of using various state abstraction mechanisms on the model inference and the performance of the implemented action selection algorithm based on the inferred model. Later, we analyse the challenges and provide future research directions on model inference and scriptless GUI testing