Incremental Integration of Microservices in Cloud Applications

Microservices have recently appeared as a new architectural style that is native to the cloud. The high availability and agility of the cloud demands organizations to migrate or design microservices, promoting the building of applications as a suite of small and cohesive services (microservices) that are independently developed, deployed and scaled. Current cloud development approaches do not support the incremental integration needed for microservice platforms, and the agility of getting new functionalities out to customers is consequently affected by the lack of support for the integration design and automation of the development and deployment tasks. This paper presents an approach for the incremental integration of microservices that will allow developers to specify and design microservice integration, and provide mechanisms with which to automatically obtain the implementation code for business logic and interoperation among microservices along with deployment and architectural reconfiguration scripts specific to the cloud environment in which the microservice will be deployed

A Value-Based Approach for Reasoning with Goal Models

Goal models are used to represent stakeholders’ intentions regarding the system to be developed and the alternative means to achieve those intentions. Goal-oriented analysis techniques have been proposed to help analysts reason when employing goal models. These techniques can be used to identify conflicts among goals, to choose between alternatives or to check the satisfiability of the model. Unfortunately, most of these techniques consider that stakeholders their intentions are equally important. This paper presents a value-based approach that and allows stakeholders to assign a relative importance to the elements in a goal model. It then propagates that importance by means of their relationships (dependencies, contributions and decompositions) in order to determine which elements are more valuable. Fisher’s weighted distribution and multi-criteria decision analysis techniques are used to deal with the propagation of the importance among the goals. The contribution is the alignment of information system with stakeholders and organizational goals

Specifying Value in GRL for Guiding BPMN Activities Prioritization

In a value-based requirements engineering approach, the stakeholders’ value propositions must be considered ahead in order to prioritize which requirements will be developed first to drive the software development activities. Early requirements approaches like the Goal- Oriented Requirements Language (GRL) focuses on modeling goals, tasks, contributions, and dependencies in order to satisfy the stakeholders’ needs, but do not provide a mechanism to specify value according to stakeholders’ value propositions. Moreover, in software development, after specifying value propositions, there is a need to align goal elements into business process elements in order to prioritize which business process activity is going to be developed next. Thus, we propose a new approach (value@GRL) to improve GRL and prioritize Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) activities. Value@GRL provides guidelines for specifying value in GRL models according to the stakeholders’ needs and prioritization mechanisms to define BPMN activities\u27 order in an incremental software development

Assessing the effectiveness of goal-oriented modeling languages: A family of experiments

[EN] Context Several goal-oriented languages focus on modeling stakeholders' objectives, interests or wishes. However, these languages can be used for various purposes (e.g., exploring system solutions or evaluating alternatives), and there are few guidelines on how to use these models downstream to the software requirements and design artifacts. Moreover, little attention has been paid to the empirical evaluation of this kind of languages. In a previous work, we proposed value@GRL as a specialization of the Goal Requirements Language (GRL) to specify stakeholders' goals when dealing with early requirements in the context of incremental software development. Objective: This paper compares the value@GRL language with the i* language, with respect to the quality of goal models, the participants' modeling time and productivity when creating the models, and their perceptions regarding ease of use and usefulness. Method: A family of experiments was carried out with 184 students and practitioners in which the participants were asked to specify a goal model using each of the languages. The participants also filled in a questionnaire that allowed us to assess their perceptions. Results: The results of the individual experiments and the meta-analysis indicate that the quality of goal models obtained with value@GRL is higher than that of i*, but that the participants required less time to create the goal models when using i*. The results also show that the participants perceived value@GRL to be easier to use and more useful than i* in at least two experiments of the family. Conclusions: value@GRL makes it possible to obtain goal models with good quality when compared to i*, which is one of the most frequently used goal-oriented modeling languages. It can, therefore, be considered as a promising emerging approach in this area. Several insights emerged from the study and opportunities for improving both languages are outlined.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Adapt@Cloud project, grant number TIN2017-84550-R) and the Programa de Ayudas de Investigación y Desarrollo (PAID-01-17) from the Universitat Politècnica de València.Abrahao Gonzales, SM.; Insfran, E.; González-Ladrón-De-Guevara, F.; Fernández-Diego, M.; Cano-Genoves, C.; Pereira De Oliveira, R. (2019). Assessing the effectiveness of goal-oriented modeling languages: A family of experiments. Information and Software Technology. 116:1-24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2019.08.003S12411