Model-driven approach to enterprise interoperability at the technical service level

Enterprise Interoperability is the ability of enterprises to interoperate in order to achieve their business goals. Although the purpose of enterprise interoperability is determined at the business level, the use of technical (IT) services to support business services implies that interoperability solutions at both the business and technical level should be aligned. This paper introduces and demonstrates the suitability of an approach based on model transformations to automate enterprise interoperability. We start by considering that a set of enterprises are willing to interoperate in the context of their individual goals. The interactions necessary for their cooperation are then properly captured in terms of a so-called choreography. Our approach allows a choreography to be mapped and transformed to an orchestration, which defines the operation of the actual technical services of the interoperating enterprises. The paper discusses the technical challenges of implementing the transformation, and illustrates our approach with two application scenarios.     

Integration by communication: knowledge exchange in global outsourcing of product software development

Global outsourcing is a growing trend among independent software vendors. In these projects like other distributed work, distances have negative effects on communication and coordination, directly impacting performance. We present a normative model designed to address this issue by improving communication and knowledge exchange. The model consists of six distinct practices and a tool blueprint, each coming with practical guidelines. It is based in part on two case studies of Dutch software vendors who have successfully outsourced part of their activities to an Eastern European outsourcing vendor, and validated by a panel of six experts from industry and the scientific community. It is concluded that knowledge exchange in global software outsourcing is a by‐product of efforts to enhance communication and coordination, rather than specific technical solutions. By committing to sharing knowledge, emphasizing transparency and integrating the outsourcing team into their organizations, customers from the product software business can realize the benefits of global outsourcing.     

The case for precision tungsten carbide gauge blocks

Many years ago, tungsten carbide protector blocks were introduced by some leading manufacturer of steel gauges to extend the life gauge block sets. It followed naturally that the introduction of complete sets of tungsten carbide gauge blocks should lead to even greater economies, through extended life with maintained accuracy, provided the initial outlay was not excessive. Engineers tend to be conservative and in the early days a number of reservations were expressed: some of these attitudes persist. This article considers the basis of these reservations against the use of tungsten carbide and indicates how they could be overcome.     

Improving the nutritional properties of rapessed

Canadian plant breeders have recently succeeded in producing rapeseed with <1% erucic acid in the oil and with a very low level of glucosinolates in the meal. One suchBrassica napus cultivar, ‘Tower,’ is now licensed. The meal from ‘Tower’ seed has been subjected to extensive chemical and biological testing and has proven to be a markedly superior product as compared with conventional rapeseed meals. This new cultivar is less goitrogenic and more palatable and gives satisfactory productive performance in animals at use levels well in excess of older varieties. The presence of high levels of erucic acid in older varieties made the oils undesirable, particularly because this compound is not well metabolized by cardiac and certain other tissues and results in pathological changes in a number of experimental animals. ‘Tower’ rapeseed oil is less cardiotoxic than high erucic oils and appears to be no more detrimental when used at the 20% level in animal diets than a number of other oils used in human foods.     

An integrated approach for requirement selection and scheduling in software release planning

It is essential for product software companies to decide which requirements should be included in the next release and to make an appropriate time plan of the development project. Compared to the extensive research done on requirement selection, very little research has been performed on time scheduling. In this paper, we introduce two integer linear programming models that integrate time scheduling into software release planning. Given the resource and precedence constraints, our first model provides a schedule for developing the requirements such that the project duration is minimized. Our second model combines requirement selection and scheduling, so that it not only maximizes revenues but also simultaneously calculates an on-time-delivery project schedule. Since requirement dependencies are essential for scheduling the development process, we present a more detailed analysis of these dependencies. Furthermore, we present two mechanisms that facilitate dynamic adaptation for over-estimation or under-estimation of revenues or processing time, one of which includes the Scrum methodology. Finally, several simulations based on real-life data are performed. The results of these simulations indicate that requirement dependency can significantly influence the requirement selection and the corresponding project plan. Moreover, the model for combined requirement selection and scheduling outperforms the sequential selection and scheduling approach in terms of efficiency and on-time delivery.     

Incremental method evolution in global software product management: A retrospective case study

Company growth in a global setting causes challenges in the adaptation and maintenance of an organization’s methods. In this paper, we will analyze incremental method evolution in software product management in a global environment. We validate a method increment approach, based on method engineering principles, by applying it to a retrospective case study conducted at a large ERP vendor. The results show that the method increment types cover all increments that were found in the case study. Also, we identified the following lessons learned for company growth in a global software product management context: method increment drivers, such as the change of business strategy, vary during evolution; a shared infrastructure is critical for rollout; small increments facilitate gradual process improvement; and global involvement is critical. We then claim that method increments enable software companies to accommodate evolutionary adaptations of development process in agreement with the overall company expansion.     

The accuracy of dependency analysis in static architecture compliance checking

Architecture compliance checking (ACC) is an approach to verify conformance of implemented program code to high‐level models of architectural design. Static ACC focuses on the modular software architecture and on the existence of rule violating dependencies between modules. Accurate tool support is essential for effective and efficient ACC. This paper presents a study on the accuracy of ACC tools regarding dependency analysis and violation reporting. Ten tools were tested and compared by means of a custom‐made benchmark. The Java code of the benchmark testware contains 34 different types of dependencies, which are based on an inventory of dependency types in object oriented program code. In a second test, the code of open source system FreeMind was used to compare the 10 tools on the number of reported rule violating dependencies and the exactness of the dependency and violation messages. On the average, 77% of the dependencies in our custom‐made test software were reported, while 72% of the dependencies within a module of FreeMind were reported. The results show that all tools in the test could improve the accuracy of the reported dependencies and violations, though large differences between the 10 tools were observed. We have identified 10 hard‐to‐detect types of dependencies and four challenges in dependency detection. The relevance of our findings is substantiated by means of a frequency analysis of the hard‐to‐detect types of dependencies in five open source systems. © 2016 The Authors. Software: Practice and Experience Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Model-driven development platform selection: four industry case studies

Software and Systems Modeling - Model-driven development platforms shift the focus of software development activity from coding to modeling for enterprises. A significant number of such platforms...     

Reviewing Enterprise Content Management: a functional framework

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) focuses on managing all types of content being used in organizations. It is a convergence of previous approaches that focus on managing only particular types of content, as for example documents or web pages. In this paper, we present an overview of previous research by categorizing the existing literature. We show that scientific literature on ECM is limited and there is no consensus on the definition of ECM. Therefore, the literature review surfaced several ECM definitions that we merge into a more consistent and comprehensive definition of ECM. The Functional ECM Framework (FEF) provides an overview of the potential functionalities of ECM systems (ECMSs). We apply the FEF in three case studies. The FEF can serve to communicate about ECMSs, to understand them and to direct future research. It can also be the basis for a more formal reference architecture and it can be used as an assessment tool by practitioners for comparing the functionalities provided by existing ECMSs.