Facilitating Requirements Negotiating: Modeling Alternatives and Arguments

Co-development aims to ensure the alignment of business processes and support technical systems. During co-development stakeholders need an early understanding of the potential impact of different requirement choices on the enterprise. An early impact analysis understanding is more likely to actively engage stakeholders, highlight strategic options and deliver useful and sustainable systems. However, when multiple stakeholders are involved with differing backgrounds, experiences and frequently competing goals it is inevitable that conflicts occur during the early phases when requirements tend to be opaque. This paper puts forward a conceptual framework for co-development to support collaborative reasoning and decision-making through the modelling of requirements alternatives and arguments, promoting critical reflection, negotiation and discussion

Visualisation for validation

Animation is a multiple graphical view of a process in action. Animation has been successfully employed in programming for designing, developing and debugging programs or monitoring their performance. This paper advocates that many benefits can be accrued from the use of visualisation techniques for the purpose of validating conceptual specifications during Requirements Engineering. To this end, the paper describes a visualisation system which makes use of three interrelated conceptual models and their metamodel represented uniformly in a repository and an animation algorithm which generates graphical views corresponding to the behaviour of an application domain as specified by the conceptual models

Selected Topics on Business Informatics: Editorial Introduction to Issue 13 of CSIMQ

[EN] The objective of this thematic issue is to bring attention to actual research on Business Informatics, as being publicized on the 19th IEEE Conference on Business Informatics (CBI 2017), July 24-27, 2017, in Thessaloniki, Greece. The conference created a productive forum for researchers and practitioners from the fields that contribute to the construction, use and maintenance of information systems and the organisational context in which they are embedded. 10 papers were selected by the Program Chairs Prof. Peri Loucopoulos, Prof. Oscar Pastor and Prof. Jelena Zdravkovic to submit extended versions for a possible publication in Issue 13 of CSIMQ, as well as few external candidate submissions were considered.Zdravkovic, J.; Pastor López, O.; Loucopoulos, P. (2017). Selected Topics on Business Informatics: Editorial Introduction to Issue 13 of CSIMQ. Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly. 13:I-II. doi:10.7250/csimq.2017-13.00SIII1

A Systematic Classification and Analysis of NFRs

The main agenda of Requirements Engineering (RE) is the development of tools, techniques and languages for the elicitation, specification, negotiation, and validation of software requirements. However, this development has traditionally been focused on functional requirements (FRs), rather than non-functional requirements (NFRs). Consequently, NFR approaches developed over the years have been fragmental and there is a lack of clear understanding of the positions of these approaches in the RE process. This paper provides a systematic classification and analysis of 89 NFR approaches

Towards a Unified Meta-Model for Goal Oriented Modelling

Goal oriented modelling (GOM) is one of the most prominent and widely accepted techniques in information systems research. Since the early 1990’s, a large number of GOM approaches have been proposed aiming to a better alignment between business strategy and the behaviour of supporting systems. Different GOM approaches focus on different activities in the early stages of system development and propose a variety of strategies for reasoning about goals. A number of researchers have stressed the advantages of integrating different GOM techniques, especially in the context of modern global business environments. This is evidenced in the increasing number of publications in this area. However as each GOM language (even versions of the same language) comes with its own syntactic and semantic singularities, such integration requires a number of complicated transformations which is a major obstacle to model and tool interoperability, and prevent wider adoption by practitioners. In order to provide a unified view of GOM, one needs a common understanding of GOM concepts, their semantics and deployment. To this end, this paper proposes a language independent meta-model based on the analysis of eight GOM languages. Generic concepts were identified and a robust semantic definition among these concepts was built in a unified meta-model. We claim that the unified GOM meta-model could help in a) analysing existing goal models in order to provide insights regarding different goal modelling perspectives b) identify semantic similarities / overlaps between existing GOM techniques c) provide the basis for a reference model for GOM

Developping patterns as a mechanism for assisting the management of knowledge in the context of conducting organisational change

International audienceIn a business environment that is constantly evolving the management of knowledge is becoming increasingly important. In particular the shareability and repeatability of experience gained in change situations can prove an invaluable tool for the evolving enterprise. We advocate the use of the pattern paradigm as a means to capture and disseminate this type of knowledge. The patterns that we propose are organisational design proposals, where particular emphasis is placed on representing two complementary aspects of change: the ways in which an enterprise can conduct change (the process of change), and the possible states to which this change leads the enterprise (the product of change). Our approach to pattern development is based (a) on the existence of a pattern template and (b) on a cooperative and discussant way of working, so as to ensure that a maximum of knowledge relevant to the domain of interest is captured. The approach is illustrated with examples from a study of change management in the electricity sector, where it is currently being applied

Explainability Design Patterns in Clinical Decision Support Systems

This paper reports on the ongoing PhD project in the field of explaining the clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) recommendations to medical practitioners. Recently, the explainability research in the medical domain has witnessed a surge of advances with a focus on two main methods: The first focuses on developing models that are explainable and transparent in its nature (e.g. rule-based algorithms). The second investigates the interpretability of the black-box models without looking at the mechanism behind it (e.g. LIME) as a post-hoc explanation. However, overlooking the human-factors and the usability aspect of the explanation introduced new risks following the system recommendations, e.g. over-trust and under-trust. Due to such limitation, there is a growing demand for usable explanations for CDSSs to enable the integration of trust calibration and informed decision-making in these systems by identifying when the recommendation is correct to follow. This research aims to develop explainability design patterns with the aim of calibrating medical practitioners trust in the CDSSs. This paper concludes the PhD methodology and literature around the research problem is also discussed

Capability Driven Development: An Approach to Designing Digital Enterprises

The need for organizations to operate in changing environments is addressed by proposing an approach that integrates organizational development with information system (IS) development taking into account changes in the application context of the solution. This is referred to as Capability Driven Development (CDD). A meta-model representing business and IS designs consisting of goals, key performance indicators, capabilities, context and capability delivery patterns, is being proposed. The use of the meta-model is validated in three industrial case studies as part of an ongoing collaboration project, whereas one case is presented in the paper. Issues related to the use of the CDD approach, namely, CDD methodology and tool support are also discussed