Supporting Scientists' Everyday Work: Automating Scientific Workflows

An action research project involving scientists from the National Research Council Canada and the Institute for Ocean Technology analyzed difficulties in using software to collect data and manage processes. The project identified three requirements for increasing research productivity: ease of use for end users, managing scientific workflows, and facilitating software interoperability. On the basis of these requirements, the researchers developed Sweet, a software framework, to help automate scientific workflows.     

Marketplace issues in software planning and design

Software management and project decisions must consider many factors. The most recognized return-on-investment drivers include the value to users; the cost of development, maintenance, upgrades, and customer support; and the risks of project failure, budget overrun, and revenue shortfall. We focus on other ROI issues related to positioning software in the marketplace, which serves as an intermediary between a software supplier organization and its customers. Rather than discuss contracted software development for specific customers or open-source software efforts, we emphasize the uncertainties and strategic issues that suppliers encounter in selling or licensing software in the general marketplace. We categorize these issues by the standard ROI measures of revenue, cost, and risk.     

A cost-value approach for prioritizing requirements

Developing software systems that meet stakeholders' needs and expectations is the ultimate goal of any software provider seeking a competitive edge. To achieve this, you must effectively and accurately manage your stakeholders' system requirements: the features, functions, and attributes they need in their software system. Once you agree on these requirements, you can use them as a focal point for the development process and produce a software system that meets the expectations of both customers and users. However, in real world software development, there are usually more requirements than you can implement given stakeholders' time and resource constraints. Thus, project managers face a dilemma: how do you select a subset of the customers' requirements and still produce a system that meets their needs? The authors developed a cost-value approach for prioritizing requirements and applied it to two commercial projects     

Mass customization and personalization software development: a case study eco-design product service system

A large number of customers currently require manufacturers to develop more flexible products to satisfy their own personalization. Due to buyer’s market and short product lifecycles, many industries are beginning to shift from mass production to mass customization to satisfy their customer requirements. The purpose of this research is to provide a model for enhancing the software component design in order to improve quality and reusability, as well as to reduce costs based on the concept of mass customization and personalization (MC&P). First, quality function deployment (QFD) was used to find out what the customers think, and to determine the core functions and components of the software. The mass customization technology was then used to aggregate the software modules. Thirdly, the software costs for business strategies, purchasing and renting under the customization model were evaluated. Finally, a real case of Eco design software in PSS was illustrated based on the model.     

Construction of house of quality for new product planning: A 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic approach

A house of quality (HOQ) diagram is used to analyze the critical factors involved in the quality function deployment (QFD) processes for the new product planning (NPP). The principal tasks of the QFD acting process comprise describing and scoring customer requirements (CRs); determining design requirements (DRs), the relationship between CRs and DRs, the correlations among CRs, and the correlations among DRs. Finally, the DRs can be scored by these assessments in NPP. This study proposes various methods of scoring the requirements of current and potential customers to reflect the knowledge and preference differences among different customers regarding CRs. The CR scores provided by different customers can be assessed by using linguistic, numerical, and interval values, or can be assessed using linguistic label sets with different granularity. A 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic computational approach is adopted to aggregate the CR importance scores obtained from customers by using various methods. In addition, to accurately rate the DRs, a modified relationship between CRs and DRs is proposed. The proposed HOQ construction model is practical because it prevents the loss of information during the QFD process for NPP. An example is used to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model.     

Forming telecommunications software specifications from a service-driven model using enhanced software tools

Increasing diversity and sophistication among telecommunications customers has led to pressure on the telecommunications industry to give customer groups the capability to customize aspects of offered telecommunications services for their own particular needs. To offer such user-customizable services correctly, quickly, and cheaply, the telecommunications industry needs adequate techniques for transforming user requirements into software specifications and for realizing these software specifications with application code. In today's environment, several well-known software development life cycle processes exist for realizing software specifications; however, analogous techniques for transforming user requirements into explicit software specifications do not. This paper proposes a technique for transforming user requirements and then demonstrates its use on a sample telecommunications application. The technique creates a simulation environment that lets simulation users describe their application requirements and then determine the appropriate software specifications needed. The technique builds on aspects of a service-driven specification model and simulation software tools published earlier. Because the simulation environment derives from user requirements and produces software specifications, the proposed technique could represent the first phase of a service-driven software development life cycle process, eventually evolving from the nonservice-driven “requirements analysis” phase commonly used in practice today.     

需求工程的探讨

软件工程被分为需求、设计、实现、测试等几个阶段,其中需求阶段是一个项目的开端,也是项目成功的基石。在软件工程中,需求分析指的是在建立一个新的或改变一个现存的电脑系统时描写新系统的目的、范围、定义和功能时所要做的所有的工作。需求分析是软件工程中的一个关键过程。在这个过程中,系统分析员和软件工程师确定顾客的需要。只有在确定了这些需要后他们才能够分析和寻求新系统的解决方法。在软件工程的历史中,很长时间里人们一直认为需求分析是整个软件工程中最简单的一个步骤,但在过去十年中越来越多的人认识到它是整个过程中最关键的一个过程。假如在需求分析时分析者们未能正确地认识到顾客的需要的话,那么最后的软件实际上不可能达到顾客的需要,或者软件无法在规定的时间里完工。     

Case study: factors for early prediction of software development success

Project managers can make more effective and efficient project adjustments if they detect project high-risk elements early. We analyzed 42 software development projects in order to investigate some early risk factors and their effect on software project success. Developers in our organization found the most important factors for project success to be: (1) the presence of a committed sponsor and (2) the level of confidence that the customers and users have in the project manager and development team. However, several other software project factors, which are generally recognized as important, were not considered important by our respondents.     

Multi-faceted quality and defect measurement for web software and source contents

In this paper, we examine external failures and internal faults traceable to web software and source contents. We develop related defect and quality measurements based on different perspectives of customers, users, information or service hosts, maintainers, developers, integrators, and managers. These measurements can help web information and service providers with their quality assessment and improvement activities to meet the quality expectations of their customers and users. The different usages of our measurement framework by different stakeholders of web sites and web applications are also outlined and discussed. The data sources include existing web server logs and statistics reports, defect repositories from web application development and maintenance activities, and source files. We applied our approach to four diverse websites: one educational website, one open source software project website, one online catalog showroom for a small company, and one e-Commerce website for a large company. The results demonstrated the viability and effectiveness of our approach.     

A linear goal programming approach to determining the relative importance weights of customer requirements in quality function deployment

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a planning tool used in new product development and quality management. It aims at achieving maximum customer satisfaction by listening to the voice of customers. To implement QFD, customer requirements (CRs) should be identified and assessed first. The current paper proposes a linear goal programming (LGP) approach to assess the relative importance weights of CRs. The LGP approach enables customers to express their preferences on the relative importance weights of CRs in their preferred or familiar formats, which may differ from one customer to another but have no need to be transformed into the same format, thus avoiding information loss or distortion. A numerical example is tested with the LGP approach to demonstrate its validity, effectiveness and potential applications in QFD practice.     

The role of distances in requirements communication: a case study

Requirements communication plays a vital role in development projects in coordinating the customers, the business roles and the software engineers. Communication gaps represent a significant source of project failures and overruns. For example, misunderstood or uncommunicated requirements can lead to software that does not meet the customers’ requirements, and subsequent low number of sales or additional cost required to redo the implementation. We propose that requirements engineering (RE) distance measures are useful for locating gaps in requirements communication and for improving on development practice. In this paper, we present a case study of one software development project to evaluate this proposition. Thirteen RE distances were measured including geographical and cognitive distances between project members, and semantic distances between requirements and testing artefacts. The findings confirm that RE distances impact requirements communication and project coordination. Furthermore, the concept of distances was found to enable constructive group reflection on communication gaps and improvements to development practices. The insights reported in this paper can provide practitioners with an increased awareness of distances and their impact. Furthermore, the results provide a stepping stone for further research into RE distances and methods for improving on software development processes and practices.

     

Business-oriented software process improvement based on CMMI using QFD

Software Process Improvement (SPI) has become the key to the survival of many software development organizations. As a follow-up of a previous paper on SPI for the CMM using Quality Function Deployment (QFD), a new SPI framework integrating QFD with the CMMI is developed. Similar to the earlier SPI framework for the CMM, the proposed SPI framework based on the CMMI using QFD aims to achieve three objectives: (1) to map process requirements, including business requirements, to the CMMI with the help of QFD; (2) to develop a method based on QFD for the integration and prioritization of requirements from multiple perspectives (groups); and (3) to be able to prioritize software process improvement actions based on process requirements.Process requirements from multiples groups of stakeholders (perspectives), including business goals, are integrated and prioritized. SPI actions are linked to these process requirements using QFD. Thus, the priorities of actions reflect the priorities of process requirements. By executing the actions with the highest priorities, the highest satisfaction level of process requirements can be achieved. One unique feature of the framework for the CMMI Continuous representation is that the priority values of these actions can be compared across PAs, even when the PAs attempt to reach different capability levels.     

CMM中的需求管理

需求管理是SW-CMM(2)中软件开发的一个关键过程域(KPA),是在客户和解决客户需求的软件项目之间建立对客户需求的共同理解,是计划和管理软件的基础。文中探讨了需求管理的本质、所要涉及的任务,以及如何实施的方法,为软件组织进行有效的需求管理,保证项目的成功提供有益的指导。     

A hybrid methodology of fuzzy grey relation for determining multi attribute customer preferences of edible oil

The main idea behind this study is to introduce a fuzzy grey relational methodology (FGRM) to determine the importance of customer attributes’ (CAs) for edible oil, particularly for defining the opportunity of competitiveness which has recently become one of an important concern of manufacturing companies. It was also aimed to seek high quality level of product and process characteristics for meeting the desirability of attributes and for health care. A fuzzy grey inference system was employed with the support of fuzzy quality function (QFD) deployment to interpret the qualitative and imprecise customer attributes. Fuzzy QFD is relatively a recent methodology offering a more in-depth analysis and investigation into the handling of customer requirements and engineering characteristics. The attributes then were defuzzified into quantitative values by amalgamating the knowledge of the customers and the product designers.Customer needs (CNs) are the voice of customers and tend to be linguistic naturally. In this study, fuzzy inference system (FIS) along with fuzzy QFD was employed to determine the desirability of edible oil by consumers. Fuzzy QFD is a powerful tool for improving product design and quality, and procuring a customer-driven quality system. The integrated framework based on FIS, fuzzy QFD and FGRM determined the CAs relations, and desirability level of edible oil by consumers. The findings are not only meaningful for customers, but also important for market position of product. The methodology significantly reduces the complexity of decision making and increase the production efficiency and overall competitiveness.     

CMM中的需求管理

需求管理是SW-CMM(2)中软件开发的一个关键过程域(KPA)，是在客户和解决客户需求的软件项目之间，建立对客户需求的共同理解，是计划和管理软件的基础。探讨了需求管理的本质、所要涉及的任务以及如何实施的方法，为软件组织进行有效的需求管理和保证项目的成功提供有益的指导。     

Managing requirements inconsistency with development goal monitors

Managing the development of software requirements can be a complex and difficult task. The environment is often chaotic. As analysts and customers leave the project, they are replaced by others who drive development in new directions. As a result, inconsistencies arise. Newer requirements introduce inconsistencies with older requirements. The introduction of such requirements inconsistencies may violate stated goals of development. In this article, techniques are presented that manage requirements document inconsistency by managing inconsistencies that arise between requirement development goals and requirements development enactment. A specialized development model, called a requirements dialog meta-model, is presented. This meta-model defines a conceptual framework for dialog goal definition, monitoring, and in the case of goal failure, dialog goal reestablishment. The requirements dialog meta-model is supported in an automated multiuser World Wide Web environment, called DEALSCRIBE. An exploratory case study of its use is reported. This research supports the conclusions that: an automated tool that supports the dialog meta-model can automate the monitoring and reestablishment of formal development goals; development goal monitoring can be used to determine statements of a development dialog that fail to satisfy development goals; and development goal monitoring can be used to manage inconsistencies in a developing requirements document. The application of DEALSCRIBE demonstrates that a dialog meta-model can enable a powerful environment for managing development and document inconsistencies     

Identifying quality-requirement conflicts

Without a well-defined set of quality-attribute requirements, software projects are vulnerable to failure. The authors have developed QARCC, a knowledge-based tool that helps users, developers, and customers analyze requirements and identify conflicts among them     

Designing a sustainable supply chain using an integrated analytic network process and goal programming approach in quality function deployment

Sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) provides economic, social end environmental requirements in material and service flows occurring between suppliers, manufacturers and customers. SSCM structure is considered as a prerequisite for a sustainable success. Thus designing an effective SCM structure provides competitive advantages for the companies. In order to achieve an effective design of this structure, it is possible to apply quality function deployment (QFD) approach which is successfully applied as an effective product and system development tool. This study presents a decision framework where analytic network process (ANP) integrated QFD and zero-one goal programming (ZOGP) models are used in order to determine the design requirements which are more effective in achieving a sustainable supply chain (SSC). The first phase of the QFD is the house of quality (HOQ) which transforms customer requirements into product design requirements. In this study, after determining the sustainability requirements named customer requirements (CRs) and design requirements (DRs) of a SSC, ANP is employed to determine the importance levels in the HOQ considering the interrelationships among the DRs and CRs. Furthermore ZOGP approach is used to take into account different objectives of the problem. The proposed method is applied through a case study and obtained results are discussed.     

CMM中的需求管理分析

需求管理,简单地说,就是记录并管理需求、跟踪需求变更,其目的是在客户和解决客户需求的软件项目之间建立对客户需求的共同理解,并形成评估、计划、实施和跟踪整个软件生命周期中软件项目活动的基础。文中详细阐述了CMM中需求管理的重要性,基本思想、所要涉及的任务,以及如何实施的方法,为软件组织进行有效的需求管理提供有益的指导。     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Global Software Development: How Far Have We Come?

Global software development efforts have increased in recent years, and such development seems to have become a business necessity for various reasons, including cost, availability of resources, and the need to locate development closer to customers. However, there's still much to learn about global software development before the discipline becomes mature. This special issue aims to assess the gap between the state of the art and the state of the practice. It presents five articles that cover various aspects of global software development, including knowledge management strategies, distributed software development, requirements engineering, distributed requirements, and managing offshore collaboration. A Point/Counterpoint department discusses whether global software development is indeed a business necessity.This article is part of a special issue on Global Software Development.