Decision Rule for Investment in Reusable Code

Reusable code helps to decrease code errors, code units and therefore development time. It serves to improve quality and productivity frameworks in software development. The question is not HOW to make the code reusable, but WHICH amount of software components would be most beneficial (i.e. costeffective in terms of reuse), and WHAT method should be used to decide whether to make a component reusable or not. If we had unlimited time and resources, we could write any code unit in a reusable way. In other words, its reusability would be 100%. However, in real life, resources and time are limited. Given these constraints, decisions regarding reusability are not always straightforward. The current chapter focuses on decision-making rules for investing in reusable code. It attempts to determine the parameters, which should be taken into account in decisions relating to degrees of reusability. Two new models are presented for decisions-making relating to reusability: (i) a restricted model, and (ii) a non-restricted model. Decisions made by using these models are then analyzed and discussed.

Web-Based Systems Development

This chapter encapsulates the main findings of an in-depth study of Web development practices in Ireland. The essential research objective was to build a richer understanding of the modern context of Web development and of how that context influences design practices. At the outset, a conceptual framework was derived through a synthesis of issues in the literature and an analysis of existing models of IS development. Data was then gathered through a dual-mode (Web and postal) quantitative survey which yielded 165 usable responses, and later through a series of 14 semi-structured qualitative interviews in a follow-up field study. Following an interpretive approach, elementary statistics and grounded theory were used to iteratively analyze the data until a reasonably comprehensive and stable explanation emerged. This is presented in the form of an elaborated conceptual framework of Web-based systems development as “situated action.”

SEACON

The extent methods largely ignore the importance of integrating security requirements with business requirements and providing built-in steps for dealing with these requirements seamlessly. To address this problem, a new approach to secure network analysis and design is presented. The proposed method, called the SEACON method, provides an integrated approach to use existing principles of information systems analysis and design with the unique requirements of distributed secure network systems. We introduce several concepts including security adequacy level, process-location-security matrix, datalocation- security matrix, and secure location model to provide built-in mechanisms to capture security needs and use them seamlessly throughout the steps of analyzing and designing secure networks. This method is illustrated and compared to other secure network design methods. The SEACON method is found to be a useful and effective method.

User Interface Generation from the Data Schema

Traditionally, the data model and the process model have been considered separately when modeling an application for construction purposes. The system analysis and design area has largely ignored the issue of the relationship between the user interface (UI) and the underlying data schema, leaving UI creation within the purview of the human computer interaction (HCI) literature. Traditional HCI methods however, underutilize the information in the data schema when designing user screens. Much of the work on automatic user interface (UI) generation has met with limited success because of the added load on the human designer to use specialized scripts for UI specification. In this research in progress, the authors propose a methodology applicable to database driven systems that a) automatically infers a draft interface directly from an extended entity relationship (EER) model schema and b) lists the interactions that need to take place between the designer and the tool in order to generate the final user schema.

Configurable Reference Modeling Languages

This chapter discusses reference modeling languages for business systems analysis and design. In particular, it reports on reference models in the context of the design-for/by-reuse paradigm, explains how traditional modeling techniques fail to provide adequate conceptual expressiveness to allow for easy model reuse by configuration or adaptation and elaborates on the need for reference modeling languages to be configurable. We discuss requirements for and the development of reference modeling languages that reflect the need for configurability. Exemplarily, we report on the development, definition and configuration of configurable event-driven process chains. We further outline how configurable reference modeling languages and the corresponding design principles can be used in future scenarios such as process mining and data modeling.

Formal Methods for Specifying and Analyzing Complex Software Systems

Software has been a major enabling technology for advancing modern society, and is now an indispensable part of daily life. Because of the increased complexity of these software systems, and their critical societal role, more effective software development and analysis technologies are needed. How to develop and ensure the dependability of these complex software systems is a grand challenge. It is well known that a highly dependable complex software system cannot be developed without a rigorous development process and a precise specification and design documentation. Formal methods are one of the most promising technologies for precisely specifying, modeling, and analyzing complex software systems. Although past research experience and practice in computer science have convincingly shown that it is not possible to formally verify program behavior and properties at the program source code level due to its extreme huge size and complexity, recently advances in applying formal methods during software specification and design, especially at software architecture level, have demonstrated significant benefits of using formal methods. In this chapter, we will review several well-known formal methods for software system specification and analysis. We will present recent advances of using these formal methods for specifying, modeling, and analyzing software architectural design.

Survey of Cardinality Constraints in Snapshot and Temporal Semantic Data Models

Cardinality captures necessary semantics in conceptual data modeling and determines how constructs are translated into relations. Business policies in a variety of domains like healthcare, education, supply chain management and geographic systems are often expressible in terms of cardinality. The knowledge about cardinality constraints is also useful during schema integration, in query transformation for more efficient search strategies, and in database testing. Practically every conceptual modeling grammar provides support for this kind of constraint, and in an effort to resolve the variations in semantics past research has studied the different types of cardinality constraints. None have been so far comprehensive, and further there has been very little coverage of the concept in temporal domain even though it provides some interesting extensions to the concept. This study considers existing work in snapshot and temporal cardinality and suggests some areas for future work.

The UML 2 Academic Teaching Challenge

UML 2.x version has become even more complicated and diverse set of graphical techniques than its predecessors. Therefore, system developers propose preparation of its reduced, limited or minimal version called Light UML. This problem has become also the serious challenge for the UML academic teachers. The goal of this chapter is the study of specifying the UML 2.x Light version content on the basis of the questionnaire survey registering opinions of 180 university students of the University of Gdansk, Poland. After the introduction, the methodological prerequisites of the survey are clarified. Then, the research results are presented and discussed according to seven essential UML diagrams assessment criteria, included in a questionnaire. The final UML 2.x version, resulting from the accomplished survey is exposed in the last section of the chapter.

Solutions to Challenges of Teaching "Systems Analysis and Design" for Undergraduate Software Engineers

This study is an enhancement of previous research presented at the 2nd AIS SIGSAND European Symposium on Systems Analysis and Design and its improved version presented at the 3rd National Software Engineering Symposium (UYMS) 2007. The AIS-SIGSAND 2007 study, the first phase, was part of ongoing research by which systems analysis and design-teaching experiences related to course evaluation items were enlightened. This study summarizes previous studies and introduces new findings suggested by those studies that relate to teaching challenges on systems analysis and design in software engineering. The first challenge studied is to decide a suitable evaluation item set in undergraduate level system analysis and design courses for software engineers. The second challenge relates to implicit assumptions made by software engineers during the analysis phase. Based on pre-interview, test, and post-interview data, the study presents a snapshot of an analysis in software engineering regarding implicit assumptions made by analysts. Related to these challenges, the study concludes with proposals on systems analysis and design education.

UML 2.0 in the Modelling of the Complex Business Processes of Reporting and Control of Financial Information System

The General Inspectorate of Financial Information is instituted under the Ministry of Finance. Its duty is to counteract bringing into financial circulation pecuniary assets derived from illegal sources and to intercept any possible signs of money laundering. The procedure requires institutions such as banks and insurance companies to forward information of “over-the-limit” transactions in which the amounts involved exceeds the value specified by the Ministry. The efficiency of collecting information about these transactions is actually working, and is determined to a large extent by the speed and efficiency of the information systems in particular institutions responsible for those issues. The chapter discusses and analyses problems associated with the sending information about such transactions by the institution under such obligation. It lays out the range of possibilities opened up by the Unified Modeling Language (UML), which constitutes a universal tool for exchanging information within IT groups and specifying complex business processes. The potential of the language lies in its numerous extensibility mechanisms, which allow the application of various stereotypes, depending on the area given. The chapter also emphasizes significance of the CASE tool, which makes it possible to control and create UML diagrams. Programs of the CASE type are also able to generate a skeleton code used subsequently by programmers during implementation.This chapter includes an analysis and design of a system with a task of improving the efficiency of the information forwarding process by the institutions under obligation so that the criteria laid down by law are met. The description of the system has been created in accordance with the specifications of UML 2.0 and - based on many diagram types and the architecture - the business processes that it extends to and the database structure required to collect information about transactions are set forth. Thanks to the application of use cases the main functionality of the system is defined: searching for and bringing together particular transactions followed by transformation and the dispatching of reports. Complex business processes are presented by corresponding activity and interaction diagrams. The architecture and the placement of the system within the structure of the organization, however, are depicted with the help of structure diagrams such as class, component and deployment diagrams. The use made of the extensibility mechanisms of UML merits attention here. The database stereotype presented in the work made it possible for the database to be designed at the level of implementation, and the functionality of the CASE tool enabled the complete software script to be compiled on this basis.