Predicting OSS Development Success

Open Source Software (OSS) has reached new levels of sophistication and acceptance by users and commercial software vendors. This research creates tests and validates a model for predicting successful development of OSS projects. Widely available archival data was used for OSS projects from Sourceforge.net. The data is analyzed with multiple Data Mining techniques. Initially three competing models are created using Logistic Regression, Decision Trees and Neural Networks. These models are compared for precision and are refined in several phases. Text Mining is used to create new variables that improve the predictive power of the models. The final model is chosen based on best fit to separate training and validation data sets and the ability to explain the relationship among variables. Model robustness is determined by testing it on a new dataset extracted from the SF repository. The results indicate that end-user involvement, project age, functionality, usage, project management techniques, project type and team communication methods have a significant impact on the development of OSS projects.

A Method for Eliciting Goals for Business Process Models based on Non-Functional Requirements Catalogues

While traditional approaches in business process modeling tend to focus on “how” the business processes are performed (adopting a behavioral description in which business processes are described in terms of procedural aspects), in goal-oriented business process modeling, the proposals strive to extend traditional business process methodologies by providing a dimension of intentionality to business processes. One of the key difficulties in enabling one to model goal-oriented processes concerns the identification or elicitation of goals. This paper reports on a case study conducted in a Brazilian hospital, which obtained several goal models represented in i*/Tropos, each of which correspond to a business process also modeled in the scope of the study. NFR catalogues were helpful in goal elicitation, uncovering goals that did not come up during previous interviews prior to these catalogues’ use.

CbSSDF

Web services as a new distributed system technology have been widely adopted by industries in the areas, such as enterprise application integration (EAI), business process management (BPM), and virtual organization (VO). However, lack of semantics in the current Web service standards has become a major barrier in service discovery and composition. To tackle the semantic issues of Web services, this paper proposes a comprehensive semantic service description framework – CbSSDF and a two-step service discovery mechanism based on CbSSDF—to help service users to easily locate their required services. The authors give a detailed explanation of CbSSDF, and then evaluate the framework by comparing it with OWL-S to examine how the proposed framework can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of service discovery and composition. The evaluation is carried out by analysing the different proposed solutions based on these two frameworks for achieving a series of tasks in a scenario.

Towards Method Component Contextualization

Method Engineering (ME) is a discipline which aims to bring effective solutions to the construction, improvement and modification of the methods used to develop Information Systems (IS). Situational Method Engineering (SME) promotes the idea of retrieving, adapting and tailoring components, rather than complete methodologies, to the specific context. Existing SME approaches use the notion of context for characterizing situations of IS development projects and for guiding the method components selection from a repository. However, in the reviewed literature, there is no proposed approach to specify the specific context of method components. This paper provides a detailed vision of context and a process for contextualizing methods in the IS domain. This proposal is illustrated with three case studies: scenario conceptualization, project portfolio management, and decision-making.

The Impact of Regulatory Compliance on Agile Software Processes with a Focus on the FDA Guidelines for Medical Device Software

The difficulty of complying with different regulations has become more evident as a large number of regulated businesses are mandated to follow an ever-increasing set of regulations. These regulations often drive significant changes in the way organizations operate to deliver value to their customers. This paper focuses on the impact of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations on agile software development processes, which in many ways can be considered as just another type of organizational processes. Particular focus is placed on the ability for Extreme Programming (XP) to support FDA requirements. Findings show that XP fails to meet many of the FDA guidelines for medical device software, which increases the risks of non-compliance for organizations that have adopted XP as their main software process. The results of this study can lead the work towards designing an extension to XP for FDA regulations.

What Practitioners Think of Inter-Organizational ERP Requirements Engineering Practices

Empirical studies on requirements engineering for inter-organizational enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have demonstrated that the ERP vendor-provided prescriptive models for ERP roll-outs make tacit assumptions about the ERP adopter’s context. This, in turn, leads to the implementation of suboptimal solutions. Specifically, these models assume that ERP implementations happen within a single company, and so they pay only scant attention to the stakeholders’ requirements for inter-organizational coordination. Given this backdrop, the first author proposed 13 practices for engineering the ERP coordination requirements in previous publications. This paper reports a confirmatory study evaluating those practices. Using an online focus group, the authors collected and analyzed practitioners’ feedback and their experiences to understand the extent to which the proposed practices are indeed observable. The study indicated very low variability in practitioners’ perceptions regarding 12 of the 13 practices, and considerable variability in their perceptions regarding the role of modeling inter-organizational coordination requirements. The contribution of the study is twofold: (1) it adds to the body of knowledge in the sub-area of RE for ERP; and (2) it adds to the practice of using qualitative research methods in empirical RE.

An Approach for E-Service Design Using Enterprise Models

Organisations demand new business models for value creation and innovation that require collaboration with customers and vendors in agile and flexible networks. To realise such networks, organisations are embracing service oriented models and architectures using e-services for business communication. A major issue for a service oriented organisation is to design and offer e-services that are adapted to the needs, wants, and requirements of customers and vendors. This is a challenging task as different customer groups and vendors will have different requirements, which may vary over time, resulting in a large number of e-services. In this paper, the authors suggest enterprise models as being adequate instruments for design and maintenance of e-services. More specifically; an approach for designing e-services based on value and goal models, which will ensure that the constructed e-services will satisfy the needs and wants of customers. A project from the Swedish health care sector is used to demonstrate and evaluate the proposed approach.

Modeling Approach for Integration and Evolution of Information System Conceptualizations

Most information systems development methodologies are based on conceptual modeling of static and dynamic views, which are represented by totally different types of diagrams. Understanding of the interplay among interactive, behavioral and structural aspects of specifications is necessary for identification of semantic integrity problems between business process and business data. Typically, semantic inconsistencies and discontinuities between collections of conceptual representations are not easy to detect and to comprehend for information system designers due to static and dynamic aspects of models being visualized in isolation. The goal of this paper is to present a modeling approach for semantic integration and evolution of static and dynamic aspects of conceptual models. Visualization of interplay among structural, interactive and behavioral aspects of computation-neutral representations helps to understand crosscutting concerns and integrity problems of information system conceptualizations. The main advantage of the presented conceptual modeling approach is stability and flexibility of diagrams in dealing with the evolutionary changes of requirements. Therefore, the developed modeling foundation is targeted to both business managers and information system designers for the purpose of computation-neutral integration and evolution of information systems specifications.

Ontology Alignment Quality

Recently semantic web technologies, such as ontologies, have been proposed as key enablers for integrating heterogeneous data schemas in business and governmental systems. Algorithms designed to align different but related ontologies have become necessary as differing ontologies proliferate. The process of ontology alignment seeks to find corresponding entities in a second ontology with the same or the closest meaning for each entity in a single ontology. This research is motivated by the need to provide tools and techniques to support the task of validating ontology alignment statements, since it cannot be guaranteed that the results from automated tools are accurate. The authors present a framework for understanding ontology alignment quality and describe how AlViz, a tool for visual ontology alignment, may be used to improve the quality of alignment results. An experiment was undertaken to test the claim that AlViz supports the task of validating ontology alignments. A promising result found that the tool has potential for identifying missing alignments and for rejecting false alignments.

Ontological Description and Similarity-Based Discovery of Business Process Models

Project repositories are a central asset in software development, as they preserve the knowledge gathered in past development activities. Locating relevant information in a vast project repository is problematic, because it requires manually tagging projects with accurate metadata, an activity which is time consuming and prone to errors and omissions. Just like any other artifact or web service, business processes can be stored in repositories to be shared and used by third parties, e.g., as building blocks for constructing new business processes. The success of such a paradigm depends partly on the availability of effective search tools to locate business processes that are relevant to the user purposes. A handful of researchers have investigated the problem of business process discovery using as input syntactical and structural information that describes business processes. This work explores an additional source of information encoded in the form of annotations that semantically describe business processes. Business processes can be semantically described using the so called abstract business processes. These are designated by concepts from an ontology which additionally captures their relationships. This ontology can be built in an automatic fashion from a collection of (concrete) business processes, and this work illustrates how it can be refined by domain experts and used in the discovery of business processes, with the purpose of reuse and increase in design productivity.