Software project management education —experiences of training full-time professionals

The experiences gained from planning and implementing two evolutionary steps in a systematic training programme for young software project managers from a group of companies are presented, and the impacts of the programme on the growth of the participating companies in terms of turnover and number of staff are discussed. The basic ideas of planning were adopted from research carried out into curriculum design for systems analysts and continuing education for software engineers. In our experience the core topics of the courses should be taken from traditional software project management together with courses in leadership and the fundamentalsof software business and marketing. The course modules should be very short together with personal exercises that are closely tied to the day-to-day work of the participants. Commitment of the company to the training scheme can be ensured by using a careful analysis of its software process maturity when selecting the exercises.     

Storing and analysing voice of the market data in the corporate data warehouse

Web opinion feeds have become one of the most popular information sources users consult before buying products or contracting services. Negative opinions about a product can have a high impact in its sales figures. As a consequence, companies are more and more concerned about how to integrate opinion data in their business intelligence models so that they can predict sales figures or define new strategic goals. After analysing the requirements of this new application, this paper proposes a multidimensional data model to integrate sentiment data extracted from opinion posts in a traditional corporate data warehouse. Then, a new sentiment data extraction method that applies semantic annotation as a means to facilitate the integration of both types of data is presented. In this method, Wikipedia is used as the main knowledge resource, together with some well-known lexicons of opinion words and other corporate data and metadata stores describing the company products like, for example, technical specifications and user manuals. The resulting information system allows users to perform new analysis tasks by using the traditional OLAP-based data warehouse operators. We have developed a case study over a set of real opinions about digital devices which are offered by a wholesale dealer. Over this case study, the quality of the extracted sentiment data is evaluated, and some query examples that illustrate the potential uses of the integrated model are provided.     

Supporting management and maintenance of manufacturing knowledge in design automation systems

Many companies base their business strategy on customized products. To enable a high level of product adaptation in an engineer-to-order approach companies invest time and resources to develop design automation systems. Initially, when implementing a design automation system, the focus is on successfully developing a system that generates design variants based on different customer specifications (i.e. the execution of system embedded knowledge and system output). However, in the long run, two important aspects are the management and maintenance of the knowledge that governs the designs. Further, the increasing emphasis on deploying a holistic view of a product’s properties and functions implies an increasing number of life-cycle requirements. The knowledge to adapt the product to fulfil these requirements should also be used and consequently incorporated into the knowledge-base, allowing for correct decisions to be made. In a system for automated variant design, the implications on the product of these life-cycle requirements have to be expressed as algorithms, production rules and/or computational statements to be intertwined with the design calculations. The number of requirements can be significantly large, and the knowledge scattered over different application systems used for the realisation of the design automation system. This makes it difficult to manage and maintain the system as the product life-cycle environment changes and evolves.In this article, the focus is on the requirements related to manufacturing. For that, an approach for the modelling of manufacturing requirements, supporting both knowledge execution and information management, in systems for automated variant design is introduced. The approach has been applied and refined when developing a design automation system in cooperation with a company to demonstrate and verify the approach’s usability.     

CASS加密环境下的CAXA协同集成管理

为解决公司以往技术文件、资料管理中存在的安全问题和研发工作效率问题,公司先后引进了CAXA协同管理系统和CASS文档加密系统,同时对设计过程实施集成功能,对技术资料进行自动加密,经过与两家软件公司的共同努力,解决了相互之间的兼容问题和实施过程中遇到的其他各项问题,最终成功实现了CASS加密环境下的CAXA协同集成管理,保证了技术资料的安全。     

Specifying information systems for business process integration – A management perspective*

Supply chain management and customer relationship management are concepts for optimizing the provision of goods to customers. Information sharing and information estimation are key tools used to implement these two concepts. The reduction of delivery times and stock levels can be seen as the main managerial objectives of an integrative supply chain and customer relationship management. To achieve this objective, business processes need to be integrated along the entire supply chain including the end consumer. Information systems form the backbone of any business process integration. The relevant information system architectures are generally well-understood, but the conceptual specification of information systems for business process integration from a management perspective, remains an open methodological problem. To address this problem, we will show how customer relationship management and supply chain management information can be integrated at the conceptual level in order to provide supply chain managers with relevant information. We will further outline how the conceptual management perspective of business process integration can be supported by deriving specifications for enabling information system from business objectives. This work has been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung), record no. 01HW0196.     

A form driven object-oriented reverse engineering methodology

Legacy applications are valuable assets that should be integrated into business systems in succeeding generations. In order to take advantage of these applications, progressive companies seek to improve current operations by reverse engineering. This paper proposes the form driven object-oriented reverse engineering (FORE) methodology by using forms to recover semantics of legacy applications. Forms are exceptionally easy to understand because of the user-oriented nature of the contents of business. This form driven object-oriented reverse engineering methodology consists of five different phases: form usage analysis, form object slicing, object structure modeling, scenario design, and model integration. Knowledge of the form structure and the user's interaction between legacy application is compiled to extract the design semantics. This application demonstrates the practical usability of the FORE methodology by transforming the resulting object models into well-known UML-based models.     

InRob: An approach for testing interoperability and robustness of real-time embedded software

Advances in digital technologies have contributed for significant reduction in accidents caused by hardware failures. However, the growing complexity of functions performed by embedded software has increased the number of accidents caused by software faults in critical systems. Moreover, due to the highly competitive market, software intensive subsystems are usually developed by different suppliers. Often these subsystems are required to interact with each other in order to provide a collaborative service. Testing approaches for subsystems integration support verification of the quality of service, focusing on the subsystems interfaces. The increasing complexity and tight coupling of real-time subsystems make integration testing unmanageable. The ad-hoc approach for testing is becoming less effective and more expensive. This article presents an integration testing approach denominated InRob, designed to verify the interoperability and robustness related to timing constraints of real-time embedded software. InRob guides the construction of services, based on formal models, aiming at the specifications of interoperability and robustness of test cases related to delays and time-outs of the messages exchanged in the interfaces of interconnected subsystems. The proposed formalism supports automatic test cases generation by verifying the relevant properties in the service behavioral model. As timing constraints are critical properties of aerospace systems, the feasibility of InRob is showed in the integration testing process of a telescope onboard in a satellite. The process is instantiated with existing testing tools and the case study is the software embedded in the telescope.     

Scenario-based and value-based specification mining: better together

Specification mining takes execution traces as input and extracts likely program invariants, which can be used for comprehension, verification, and evolution related tasks. In this work we integrate scenario-based specification mining, which uses a data-mining algorithm to suggest ordering constraints in the form of live sequence charts, an inter-object, visual, modal, scenario-based specification language, with mining of value-based invariants, which detects likely invariants holding at specific program points. The key to the integration is a technique we call scenario-based slicing, running on top of the mining algorithms to distinguish the scenario-specific invariants from the general ones. The resulting suggested specifications are rich, consisting of modal scenarios annotated with scenario-specific value-based invariants, referring to event parameters and participating object properties. We have implemented the mining algorithm and the visual presentation of the mined scenarios within a standard development environment. An evaluation of our work over a number of case studies shows promising results in extracting expressive specifications from real programs, which could not be extracted previously. The more expressive the mined specifications, the higher their potential to support program comprehension and testing.     

A framework for data-driven informatization of the construction company

With the advent of big data era, the construction industry has focused on processing large quantities of engineering data and extracting their value. However, inaccurate manual entries and delayed data collection have created difficulties in making full use of information. Meanwhile, difficulty sharing data and weak interoperability of data among business information systems also leaves company headquarters without the resource integration that can facilitate decision making. To overcome these challenges, we proposed a big data infrastructure called the enterprise integrated data platform (EIDP) for use by construction companies. We discuss a case study, and offer a framework for future business improvement that contributes to closed-loop construction supply chain management, cost management and control, knowledge discovery, and decision making. The proposed informatization solution provides a theoretical basis for realizing data sharing and interoperability between business management and project management. On this basis, it will help construction companies to improve the efficiency of both company operations and project delivery by optimizing the business process and supporting decision making.     

Modelling Off-the-Shelf Information Systems Requirements: An Ontological Approach

Requirements for choosing off-the-shelf information systems (OISR) differ from requirements for development of new information systems in that they do not necessarily provide complete specifications, thus allowing flexibility in matching an existing IS to the stated needs. We present a framework for OISR conceptual models that consists of four essential elements: business processes, business rules, information objects and required system services. We formalise the definitions of these concepts based on an ontological model. The ontology-based OISR model provides a framework to evaluate modelling languages on how appropriate they are for OISR requirements specifications. The evaluation framework is applied to the Object-Process Methodology, and its results are compared with a similar evaluation of ARIS. This comparison demonstrates the effectiveness of the ontological framework for evaluating modelling tools on how well they can guide selection, implementation and integration of purchased software packages.     

Standards-based approaches to B2B workflow integration

E-business automates the overall activities of a company and allows distributed systems to communicate their information. Process automation and information sharing improve a company’s productivity and responsiveness, while Business-to-Business (B2B) workflow systems electronically aid the progress of business processes among trading partners, and also help companies to monitor and administrate their process execution. This study analyzes the technologies and standards for B2B workflow integration, and extracts a reference model for B2B workflow integration. Based on the reference model, three approaches to B2B workflow integration will be introduced here. In addition, we have developed a prototype system of one approach and have illustrated an example for B2B workflow integration. The result of our research can help business partners understand the workflow standards and the messaging technologies for B2B workflow integration, and also help them understand how to implement workflow integration systems that are appropriate to their e-business environments.     

Leveraging legacy system dollars for e-business

Although many firms have rapidly and enthusiastically adopted distributed architectures, many more are stuck with mainframe based mission-critical systems that continue to isolate them from their partner, supplier, and customer systems. Most companies want to transform their applications to meet new business demands, but because legacy systems tend to be unwieldy, monolithic, and inflexible, many firms regard modernization as somewhere between improbable and impossible. Reeling from the Y2K debacle and saddled with years of application backlog, the most these companies can hope for is to keep their legacy system alive. And keeping it alive is getting more expensive. It is also becoming harder to find qualified personnel to do the maintenance. All of this makes it difficult to add new functionality and keep up with business requirements. The ideal solution is to transform legacy systems to newer, more productive platforms so that companies can exploit faster and cheaper development technologies, like Java and XML (Extensible Markup Language). The focus then shifts to functionality, not the infrastructure, which means a company can respond more quickly to its changing business requirements and technology enhancements. RescueWare, legacy transformation software from Relativity Technologies, breaks business knowledge into stand-alone pieces, or e-components. The e-components are basically collections of objects that perform specific business services, have clearly defined application program interfaces (APIs), and are accessible through modern industry-standard protocols     

The analysis and management of non-canonical requirement specifications through a belief integration game

Non-canonical requirement specifications refer to a set of software requirements that is either inconsistent, vague or incomplete. In this paper, we provide a correspondence between requirement specifications and annotated propositional belief bases. Through this analogy, we are able to analyze the contents of a given set of requirement collections known as viewpoints and specify whether they are incomplete, incoherent, or inconsistent under a closed-world reasoning assumption. Based on the requirement collections’ properties introduced in this paper, we define a viewpoint integration game through which the inconsistencies of non-canonical requirement specifications are resolved. The game consists of several rounds of negotiation and is performed by two main functions, namely choice and enhancement functions. The outcome of this game is a set of inconsistency-free requirement collections that can be integrated to form a unique fair representative of the given requirement collections.     

Integration of information systems: assessing its quality

Due to organizational and technological changes the need for integrating information systems within healthcare institutions, has increased enormously. Although the technical means for systems integration have definitely matured, integration methodologies are still in their infancy. Two important questions regarding systems integration are hardly ever addressed in a systematic way: how to derive integration requirements, and how to check whether the requirements are met in a given integrated system. These two questions must be answered if we want to assess or improve the quality of integration of a given set of systems. In this article we present a nine-step method for deriving integration requirements from a business process model, and we assess the quality of integration of a given integrated system against these requirements. The method is demonstrated by elaborating two case studies from the health care domain.     

New computational paradigms in solving fault detection and isolation problems

A representative set of fault detection and isolation problems are formulated for linear time-invariant systems with additive faults. For all problems general existence conditions of their solutions are given. An overview of recently developed computational methods for the synthesis of fault detection filters is presented for all formulated problems. Two remarkable computational paradigms emerged in these developments, which are instrumental in developing generally applicable, numerically reliable and computationally efficient synthesis methods. The first paradigm is the use of integrated synthesis algorithms, where the resulting fault detection filters are determined by successive updating of partial syntheses addressing specific requirements. The second paradigm is the use of the nullspace method as a first synthesis step to reduce all synthesis problems to a simple standard form which allows to easily check solvability conditions and address least order synthesis problems.     

A survey of approaches for the visual model-driven development of next generation software-intensive systems

Software-intensive systems of the future are expected to be highly distributed and to exhibit adaptive and anticipatory behavior when operating in highly dynamic environments and interfacing with the physical world. Therefore, visual modeling techniques to address these software-intensive systems require a mix of models from a multitude of disciplines such as software engineering, control engineering, and business process engineering. As in this concert of techniques software provides the most flexible element, the integration of these different views can be expected to happen in the software. The software thus includes complex information processing capabilities as well as hard real-time coordination between distributed technical systems and computers.In this article, we identify a number of general requirements for the visual model-driven specification of next generation software-intensive systems. As business process engineering and software engineering are well integrated areas and in order to keep this survey focused, we restrict our attention here to approaches for the visual model-driven development of adaptable software-intensive systems where the integration of software engineering with control engineering concepts and safety issues are important. In this survey, we identify requirements and use them to classify and characterize a number of approaches that can be employed for the development of the considered class of software-intensive systems.     

An integrated mathematical programming model for offset planning

The ability of a company to compete successfully in a global environment often extends beyond the ability to sell a product at a given price or service level. International “deals” are often based upon the company's ability to provide access to international markets (economic benefits), be perceived as socially responsible and meet political requirements. These requirements come in the form of offset, industrial participation or countertrade. Unfortunately, these factors cannot be measured in quantitative terms, but rather qualitative objectives. This paper presents the development of a quantitative model using multicriteria mathematical programming methods.This paper deals with the development of an integrated quantitative model for offset (countertrade) planning. The model includes multiple conflicting goals with inconsistent units requiring prioritization. As common in today's business environment, a single methodology for solving problems is insufficient. This paper discusses a case in which business decision-makers can take existing models from analytic hierarchy process (AHP) in socio-economic literature and apply it to the well-established goal programming model for an empirical example, based on the data obtained from the U.S. aerospace companies. The model is solved by a Micro Management Science computer software and its result is analyzed. The model validation is performed by sensitivity and factor analyses.     

Supporting the entire life-cycle of the extended manufacturing enterprise

This paper presents a framework to support the full life-cycle of extended manufacturing enterprises, from creation to operation and dissolution phases. The deployment and operation of such enterprises can be compared with the concept of ‘plug-and-play’, as the internal processes and legacy systems of the companies involved are smoothly integrated within an overall business process designed, validated and executed according to a specific business opportunity. During the plug phase, the specific business requirements are elicited and integrated with the design of the extended business processes. On the other hand, in the play phase, those predefined processes are executed in order to run the extended enterprise successfully. The paper describes an application case regarding an engineer-to-order and one-of-a-kind engineering product. This scenario is common to a large number of technology-driven SMEs, and illustrates the value of the framework to exploit business opportunities that require a combination of skills and resources that do not exist in-house. The case shows how the platform addresses the two main challenges in the deployment of an extended enterprise. The first challenge is finding the right set of partners to address a new business opportunity and the design of the underlying collaborative processes. The second challenge is mostly technical, and focuses on the integration of the legacy systems of the partners participating in the network so that cooperation can take place quickly and seamlessly.     

XML-based requirements engineering for an electronic clearinghouse

We present methods and tools to support XML-based requirements engineering for an electronic clearinghouse that connects trading partners in the telecommunications area. The original semi-structured requirements, locally known as business rules, were written as message specifications in a non-standardized and error-prone format using MS Word. To remedy the resulting software failures and faults, we first formalized the requirements by designing an W3C XML Schema for the precise definition of the requirements structure. The schema allows a highly structured representation of the essential information in eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Second, to offer the requirements engineers the ability to edit the XML documents in a friendly way while preserving their information structure, we developed a custom editor called XLEdit. Third, by developing a converter from MS Word to the target XML format, we helped the requirements engineers to migrate the existing business rules. Fourth, we developed translators from the structured requirements to schema languages, which enabled automated generation of message-validation code. The increase in customer satisfaction and clearinghouse-service efficiency are primary gains from the investment in the technology for structured requirements editing and validation.     

An integration framework for product lifecycle management

The need for integrating business and technical information systems, allowing partners to collaborate effectively in creating innovative products, has motivated the design and deployment of a novel integration framework for product lifecycle management. The time is ripe for such an integration framework because of the convergence of three important developments, almost in a perfect storm: (1) maturity of standardized product data and meta-data models, and standardized engineering and business processes; (2) emergence of service-oriented architecture for information sharing; and (3) availability of robust middleware to implement them. These developments allow engineering and business objects and processes to be built or composed as modular pieces of software in the form of services that can communicate with each other and be used across different parts of a business. These modular software pieces can be reused and reconfigured in new ways as business conditions change, thereby saving time and money for companies. This paper describes the business and technical aspects of an integration framework for product lifecycle management using open standards and service-oriented architecture.