Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The use of requirements traceability for information systems development (ISD) projects is not very common in practice despite its often mentioned advantages in the literature. We conducted a case study in a large IT company to identify the factors that are relevant for the decision whether or not to adopt traceability in an ISD project. Five dominant factors emerged: development organization awareness, customer awareness, return on investment, stakeholder preferences, and process flow. It turned out that the majority of the software development project leaders we interviewed were not aware of the concept of traceability – with the obvious result that using traceability in software project is not even considered. This fact has possibly been underestimated in the present literature of requirements engineering.

This paper proposes an approach to support separation and modularization of crosscutting concerns in multi-agent systems (MAS). Crosscutting concerns are properties that do not align well with the decomposition criteria of the chosen approach and, therefore, cannot be modularized. Aspect-Oriented Software Development offers mechanisms to encapsulate such properties in separate modules, the . Aspects are used as abstractions to capture social patterns concerns that cut across functional modules in MAS. To achieve this, we propose a technique to describe social patterns in an aspect-oriented context and a systematic way for using them in MAS design.

Traditional process modeling approaches focus on the activities needed to achieve a business goal. However, these approaches often pose obstacles in consolidating processes across an organization because they fail to capture the informational structure pertinent to the business context or . In this paper, we discuss business artifact-centered operational modeling. Artifacts capture the contexture of a business and operational models describe how a business goal is achieved by acting upon the business artifact. Business artifacts, such as Purchase Order or Insurance Claim, provide business analysts an additional dimension to model their business. With operational models, they can describe how a business operates by processing business artifacts and adding business value to the artifacts. This approach has been successfully employed in a variety of customer engagements. We summarize our best practices by describing nine operational patterns. Furthermore, we develop a computational model for operational models based on Petri Nets to enable formal analysis and verification thereof.

The execution of business processes with BPEL relies on external Web services, which are not necessarily managed by the process owner. This implies the need to constantly verify the correctness of the interactions between the involved parties. This paper proposes a design process model for the definition of supervised processes, in which supervision rules are automatically generated starting from the policies that characterize the external services. These policies exploit WSCoL as a language for describing constraints on the messages exchanged with the business process. In addition, we also present a new version of Dynamo: a prototype of an aspect oriented execution environment that conjugates a BPEL engine and a supervision framework.

A semantic annotation framework has been proposed to tackle the semantic heterogeneity problem of distributed process models in our earlier work. The goal annotation as part of the framework is further developed, in which goal ontology is annotated to process models to indicate the objectives or the capability of models. In the paper, we introduce a way to represent goal ontology, build relationships between goals and process models, and develop a goal annotation approach to process models. As an illustration, a case study is deployed with the proposed annotation approach. The results of the goal annotation enrich the semantics of process knowledge from stakeholders’ perspective in a cooperative goal-oriented manner. The ontology and the annotation results also facilitate the ontology-based queries for the semantic discovery and the reuse of heterogenous process models.

Stakeholder identification together with its needs and expectations has been poorly realized in software projects. This is probably because the process is mistakenly viewed as a self-evident task in which direct users and the development team are the only stakeholders. It could also be due to the fact that the identification area can be substituted by opinions or knowledge from other more accessible sources of information. This paper provides a review of stakeholder identification literature and an overview of the state-of-the-art in methods for that purpose, which leads to a number of issues that are important in further research (e.g. developing a methodology). The paper findings are presented from two points of view: firstly, the impact of stakeholder identification on software requirements quality, and secondly, practices developed to carry out this task. Also, the present paper aims to describe the studies analyzed uniformly and show their contributions in this field.

This paper reports the findings of an experimental study of web-based negotiations among a group of distributed stakeholders involved in the design of a complex information system. Using a web-based communication system, the stakeholders had to reach agreement on a common set of software requirements taking into account their individual preferences as well as overall constraints of available time and budget. To support such complex negotiations, the objective of our study was to analyze the impact of providing structured task and explicit negotiation sequence support to the negotiating group with respect to their activity, conflict and satisfaction. Our results show that groups following a structured task are more active than groups lacking such structure. However, the absence of negotiation sequence and structured task support leads to greater satisfaction.

Web development teams include not only software engineers but also graphic designers. In this work, we extend the OOWS method in order to introduce graphic designers into its development process. To do this, we extend the automatic code generation strategy of the OOWS method to obtain code that provides users with the information and functionality captured in the requirements model but without considering any kind of aesthetic aspect. We also propose a strategy to define domain-independent presentation templates. These templates can be applied to any web application developed by the OOWS method. These extensions allow us to define a web development process where graphic designers work together with analysts with a high degree of independence from each other but always in a coordinated way.

Languages for business process definition generally suffer from myopic approaches to capturing communication between distributed processes. Effective communication between processes requires: support for conversations involving interrelated interactions spread over time; ability to select and group messages based on their content, regardless of format and transport technology; and resolving contention between processes or tasks for common sets of messages. This paper presents a set of communication abstractions that provide a “glue” between the process layer and the middleware. The paper also reports on an implementation of these abstractions and an experimental evaluation.

Reference models are a widely accepted means to facilitate reusable information system and organizational design. At present, besides domain knowledge, the configuration of a reference model requires a thorough understanding of the notation it is captured in. This hinders the involvement of domain experts without specialized modeling background, in the configuration of reference models. In this paper, we propose a questionnaire-driven approach to reference model configuration which abstracts away from the modeling language. For illustration, we show how this approach can be applied to reference process models captured in the Configurable EPC notation. To demonstrate its applicability, the proposal has been implemented as a toolset that guides users through the configuration process by means of a form-based interface.