A Goal Driven Approach to Modelling COTS Acquisition Impacts

International audienceIn this position paper we are concerned by modelling the impact of change due to the integration of COTS (commercial offthe- shelf) systems in an organisation. We advocate a position that suggests a model driven paradigm to reason about change in a goal driven manner. The suggested goal driven approach is sketched and exemplified with the integration of a COTS system in an electricity supply company

Requirements Engineering for COTS based Systems

International audienceIn spite of the increasing use of COTS products for system development, there is little consideration on how to acquire requirements for COTS products, how to select COTS components and how to assemble them to comply to these requirements. The paper addresses the issue of the requirements engineering process for COTS components acquisition and assembly. It proposes an approach based on the notion of requirements maps and assembly strategies and demonstrates the approach with the selection of a CASE tool

Beyond goal driven requirements engineering for purposeful system design

National audienceRequirements engineering has drawn our attention to the importance of understanding the 'whys' of the system tot be developed. While agreeing with this position, this paper argues that the fit between the 'whats' and the 'whys' is key to develop purposeful systems, i.e. to ensure the best match between organisation needs (whys) and system functionality (whats). The paper explores issues related to the whys-whats relationship referred to as the fitness relationship

Information Systems and Web Information Systems: A Methodological Perspective

International audienceThe Development of Information Systems (ISD) is a complex activity that requires methodological support. Current ISD methods are predominantly following an object driven paradigm that allows us to capture the static as well as the dynamic dimensions of real world objects into information objects. However, Web Information Systems have facets such as information presentation, user profile, navigation structure etc. which pose new challenges to ISD methods. The keynote talk will provide an overview of current ISD methods and discuss the new challenges raised by the development of Web Information Systems. This paper is a brief overview of the key points developed in the talk

Capturing System Intentionality with Maps

International audienceConceptual modelling has emerged as a means to capture the relevant aspects of the world on which it is necessary to provide information. Whereas conceptual models succeeded in telling us how to represent some excerpt of the world in informational terms, they failed to guide system analysts in conceptualising purposeful systems, i.e. systems that meet the expectations of their users. This chapter aims to investigate this issue of conceptualising purposeful systems and to discuss the role that goal driven approaches can play to resolve it. It considers the challenge of new systems having a multifaceted purpose and shows how intention/strategy maps help facing this challenge

L'E-Lyee, Coupling L'Ecritoire and LyeeALL

International audienceThe paper deals with the requirements engineering environment provided by L'Ecritoire to the L'E-Lyee project. The project aims to reduce the software development cycle to two explicit steps, requirements engineering and program generation, by coupling L'Ecritoire to the program generation features of LyeeALL. The basis of L'Ecritoire is a set of enactable rules to guide the requirements elicitation process through interleaved goal modelling and scenario authoring. The paper gives an overview of the enactment rules and illustrates their use through a L'Ecritoire session. Thereafter, the matching of the technical features of L'Ecritoire with those of LyeeALL is outlined and the resulting benefits are highlighted

Enhancing the Guidance of the Intentional Model "MAP": Graph Theory Application

The MAP model was introduced in information system engineering in order to model processes on a flexible way. The intentional level of this model helps an engineer to execute a process with a strong relationship to the situation of the project at hand. In the literature, attempts for having a practical use of maps are not numerous. Our aim is to enhance the guidance mechanisms of the process execution by reusing graph algorithms. After clarifying the existing relationship between graphs and maps, we improve the MAP model by adding qualitative criteria. We then offer a way to express maps with graphs and propose to use Graph theory algorithms to offer an automatic guidance of the map. We illustrate our proposal by an example and discuss its limitations.Comment: 9 page

A User Centric View of Lyee Requirements

National audienceThe paper deals with the modelling of Lyee user requirements and guidelines to support their capture. The Sorbonne contribution to the Lyee collaborative project aims to reduce the software development cycle to two explicit steps, requirements engineering and code generation by coupling the code generation features of LyeeALL with an interface to capture user requirements. The paper presents a 2-layer meta-model relating the set of concepts to capture user requirements to the set of concepts for the formulation of software requirements that are the input of the LyeeALL generation mechanism. It exemplifies the concepts with example and introduces the guidance support for capturing these user centric requirements

Aligning Business and System Functionality Through Model Matching

The dependence between organizations and IT leads to better understand the necessary alignment between business models (BM) and associated system functionality models (SFM). The baseline of this paper is that there is a conceptual mismatch between languages expressing BM and SFM that should be reduced. For this purpose, we propose to raise the level of SFM from a functional description to a goal-oriented one. We propose to represent goals together with the strategies to achieve them in a directed graph called map. The paper presents the concept of a map and illustrates it with the SAP-MM map. The BM/SFM relationship is then discussed and the alignment problem is highlighted in the case of an ERP system installation

Are Methods Really useful ?

International audienceThere are a large number of methods available for information systems development (ISD). These include structured approaches, prototyping approaches, systemic approaches, object-oriented, etc. Many of these methods have been comparatively analysed in books [OLLE88] and journals (e.g [HIRS92]). Despite a large body of work concerning details of systems development methods, there is still a poor understanding of how such methods are actually used in practice [WYNE93]. Thus, there is a felt need for empirical evaluation of the use of methods