THE OTHER SIDE OF CASE IMPLEMENTATION Best Practices for Success

Implementation of a CASE tool is a complex process whose success depends on more than having the right tool with the desired features. Two studies encompassing more than 100 developers reveal nine practices that differentiate successful implementations of CASE tools from failed ones.     

Supporting search for reusable software objects

Prior research has shown that achieving high levels of software reuse in the presence of repository and object-based computer-aided software engineering (CASE) development methods presents interesting human, managerial and technical challenges. This article presents research that seeks to enhanced software development performance through reuse. We propose automated support for developers who search large repositories for the appropriate reusable software objects. We characterize search for repository objects in terms of a multistage model involving screening, identification, and the subsequent choice between new object construction or reusable object implementation. We propose automated support tools, including ORCA, a software Object Reuse Classification Analyzer, and AMHYRST, an Automated HYpertext-based Reuse Search Tool, that are based on this model. ORCA utilizes a faceted classification approach that can be implemented using hypertext. We also describe an aspect of AMHYRST's architecture which can automatically create hypertext networks that represent and link objects in terms of a number of distinguishing features. We illustrate our approach with an example drawn from a real world object repository     

Process integration in CASE environments

Research in CASE environments has focused on two kinds of integration: tool and object. A higher level of integration, process integration, which represents development activities explicitly in a software process model to guide and coordinate development and to integrate tools and objects, is proposed. Process integration uses software process models (SPMs) a process driver, a tool set, and interfaces for both developers and managers to form the backbone of a process-driven CASE environment. The developer's interface, a working environment that lets developers enact an SPM, and the manager's interface which gives managers and analysts the tools to define, monitor, and control the SPMs that developers are working on concurrently are discussed. The Softman environment experiment, an implementation of process-driven CASE environments with existing CASE environments, is reviewed     

Constructing component-based software engineering environments: issues and experiences

Developing software engineering tools is a difficult task, and the environments in which these tools are deployed continually evolve as software developers’ processes, tools and tool sets evolve. To more effectively develop such evolvable environments, we have been using component-based approaches to build and integrate a range of software development tools, including CASE and workflow tools, file servers and versioning systems, and a variety of reusable software agents. We describe the rationale for a component-based approach to developing such tools, the architecture and support tools we have used some resultant tools and tool facilities we have developed, and summarise the possible future research directions in this area.     

Record it without words: designing a CPR (computer-based patient record)

Two way-communication between users and developers is a must when creating a truly functional computer-based patient record. The solution for tackling this daunting task may be to use structured requirements analysis supported by CASE tools.     

Behavioural effects of attitudes toward constraint in CASE: the impact of development task and project phase

This paper examines the effects of systems development task and phase upon individuals’ attitudes and behaviour while using computer‐aided systems engineering (CASE) tools. A previous empirical study of developers in several countries is revisited. Findings indicate that the mediating effects of task and phase upon the relationship among constraints, attitudes and behaviour are weak. They thereby support earlier research, which claims significance between attitudes and behaviour, by eliminating the potentially mediating effects of task and phase. Findings also indicate that CASE tool users associate implementation, integration and maintenance in terms of tasks and constraints, suggesting a reassessment of traditional life cycle models.     

Point-counterpoint: what's the proper role for CASE tools

Proper use of CASE tools can and does significantly improve developer productivity and yield high-quality systems. Appropriate management, methods, techniques, and tools contribute to successes every day. When the input mix is right, quality software results, regardless of language, discipline, organization size or type, or the use of internal or external developers. Success stories in financial services and a government agency are considered     

Heuristic expansion of feature mappings in evolving program families

Establishing explicit mappings between features and their implementation elements in code is one of the critical factors to maintain and evolve software systems successfully. This is especially important when developers have to evolve program families, which have evolved from one single core system to similar but different systems to accommodate various requirements from customers. Many techniques and tools have emerged to assist developers in the feature mapping activity. However, existing techniques and tools for feature mapping are limited as they operate on a single program version individually. Additionally, existing approaches are limited to recover features on demand, that is, developers have to run the tools for each family member version individually. In this paper, we propose a cohesive suite of five mapping heuristics addressing those two limitations. These heuristics explore the evolution history of the family members in order to expand feature mappings in evolving program families. The expansion refers to the action of automatically generating the feature mappings for each family member version by systematically considering its previous change history. The mapping expansion starts from seed mappings and continually tracks the features of the program family, thus eliminating the need of on demand algorithms. Additionally, we present the MapHist tool that provides support to the application of the proposed heuristics. We evaluate the accuracy of our heuristics through two evolving program families from our industrial partners. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A hypertext based software-engineering environment

HyperCASE, an architectural framework for integrating CASE tools under an extended hypertext system, is described. HyperCASE's objective is to provide a powerful, user-friendly, integrated development platform that can significantly raise productivity. Its specific goal is to support software developers in project management, system analysis, design, and coding. HyperCASE integrates tools by combining a hypertext-based user interface with a common knowledge-based document repository. It includes extensive natural-language capabilities tailored to the CASE domain. These are used in the interface to the software repository, providing an alternative to hypertext information management and interdocument navigation. English input can be analyzed during informal system-requirements specification, allowing a significant degree of automation for design and concept reuse at the earliest development stages. HyperCASE's three subsystems, HyperEdit, the graphical user interface, HyperBase, the knowledge base, and HyperDict, the data dictionary, are discussed     

Experiences and expectations with CASE technology — An example from Slovenia

Adoption and current use, perceived benefits, problems, and expectations in the application of information system development methods and tools, specifically CASE technologies, are presented in the settings of Slovenia. Current practices and trends in the use of CASE technology were surveyed; major differences in the IS development approaches in organizations that currently use or do not use CASE were identified. The findings are believed to be indicative of some other new Central and Eastern European democracies that are at a comparable stage in developing their IS technology markets. Although most IS managers in Slovenia are aware of CASE technology or have considered its use, organizations with a comparatively high level of IS maturity - ones with some corporate IS development standards in place - actually use it. More than limited funding for investments in advanced information technology, the lack of related methodological and management knowledge and skills seems to be the major reason why system developers do not adopt it or, with limited use, slowly adopt CASE.     

An empirical investigation on factors affecting the acceptance of CASE by systems developers

This paper presents the findings of an empirical study of factors affecting the acceptance of CASE by systems developers. Based on two research models (technology acceptance and personal computer utilization) recently published in IS literature, an integrated model which consists of six variables and incorporates key elements of both models was developed to examine determinants of CASE acceptance. The findings indicate that ease of use has the largest influence on CASE acceptance, followed by long-term consequences. Both transitional support and near-term usefulness do not have a significant direct effect on the acceptance but exhibit their indirect influence through ease of use and/or long-term consequences. The implementation gap was found to have a relatively small and negative effect on CASE acceptance through its influence on ease of use, near-term usefulness, and long-term consequences. Implications of the findings, from both a research and a managerial perspective are discussed in this paper.     

What are mobile developers asking about? A large scale study using stack overflow

The popularity of mobile devices has been steadily growing in recent years. These devices heavily depend on software from the underlying operating systems to the applications they run. Prior research showed that mobile software is different than traditional, large software systems. However, to date most of our research has been conducted on traditional software systems. Very little work has focused on the issues that mobile developers face. Therefore, in this paper, we use data from the popular online Q&A site, Stack Overflow, and analyze 13,232,821 posts to examine what mobile developers ask about. We employ Latent Dirichlet allocation-based topic models to help us summarize the mobile-related questions. Our findings show that developers are asking about app distribution, mobile APIs, data management, sensors and context, mobile tools, and user interface development. We also determine what popular mobile-related issues are the most difficult, explore platform specific issues, and investigate the types (e.g., what, how, or why) of questions mobile developers ask. Our findings help highlight the challenges facing mobile developers that require more attention from the software engineering research and development communities in the future and establish a novel approach for analyzing questions asked on Q&A forums.     

CASE工具国外使用问题及我们应采取的相应对策

本文针对国外在使用计算机辅助软件工程(CASE)工具时存在的CASE无用现象原因的分析,结合我国的具体情况,提出了一些相应的对策以将CASE工具在我国软件行业应用时的问题减少到最小。     

Inconsistency management for multiple-view software developmentenvironments

Developers need tool support to help manage the wide range of inconsistencies that occur during software development. Such tools need to provide developers with ways to define, detect, record, present, interact with, monitor and resolve complex inconsistencies between different views of software artifacts, different developers and different phases of software development. This paper describes our experience with building complex multiple-view software development tools that support diverse inconsistency management facilities. We describe software architectures that we have developed and user interface techniques that are used in our multiple-view development tools, and we discuss the effectiveness of our approaches compared to other architectural and HCI techniques     

Learning from IPSE's mistakes

The authors argue that current work on integrated project support environments (IPSEs) is based on an inappropriate view of integration, and that IPSE developers should create semantically rich infrastructures or produce well-integrated tool sets rather than open repositories or infrastructures. The requirements of IPSEs are outlined. The meaning of integration is examined, and tool integration in IPSEs, the only form of integration most IPSEs have, is discussed. CASE tools are perceived to be more effective and are much more widely used than IPSEs     

JOINT: Java ontology integrated toolkit

In the past few years, the use of ontologies for creating more intelligent and effective application has increased considerably. This growth is due to the fact that ontologies attempt to provide semantics to the data consumed by machines so that they can reason about this data. However, developing complex ontology-based applications is still difficult and time-consuming because the existing tools do not provide a simple and unified environment for developers. Most of these tools only provide data manipulation using RDF triples, complicating the development of applications that need to work with the object orientation paradigm. Furthermore, tools that provide instances manipulation via object orientation do not support features such as manipulating ontologies, reasoning over rules or querying data with SPARQL. In this context, this work proposes a framework and a tool for supporting the efficient development of ontology-based applications through the integration of existing technologies. Furthermore, we also define a methodology to use this tool efficiently. In order to evaluate the benefits of our work, a controlled experiment with eight developers (unfamiliar with ontologies) was performed to compare the proposed tool, JOINT, with another one, Jastor/Jena, frequently used by the community. The results suggest that our tool helps novice developers to create ontology-based applications faster and with few errors in the code. In addition, a real educational application with 10 ontologies, more than 200 ontology concepts (classes) and more than a million triples is already using the proposed tool successfully.     

一个改善软件结构设计质量的知识系统

本文讨论我们在研制”ＭＩＳ软件工程环境“中为优化软件结构而采用的知识技术。尽管技术工程学对软件设计提出了优化软件结构的任务并给出了一些指导性原则,但由于设计者的经验和理解程度不同,因而软件结构设计质量往往因人而异。本研究旨在探索一种方法提供一种工具,以改善软件结构的质量,提高软件工程环境的智能水平。     

Grammar engineering for multiple front-ends for Python

In this paper, we describe our experience in grammar engineering to construct multiple parsers and front ends for the Python language. We present a metrics-based study of the evolution of the Python grammars through the multiple versions of the language in an effort to distinguish and measure grammar evolution and to provide a basis of comparison with related research in grammar engineering. To conduct this research, we have built a toolkit, pygrat , which builds on tools developed in other research. We use pygrat to build a system that automates much of the process needed to translate the Python grammars from EBNF to a formalism acceptable to the bison parser generator. We exploit the suite of Python test cases, used by the Python developers, to validate our parser generation. Finally, we describe our use of the menhir parser generator to facilitate the parser and front-end construction, eliminating some of the transformations and providing practical support for grammar modularisation.     

“Modeling with tools is easier, believe me”—The effects of tool functionality on modeling grammar usage beliefs

Increasingly, studies are reported that examine how conceptual modeling is conducted in practice. Yet, typically the studies to date have examined in isolation how modeling grammars can be, or are, used to develop models of information systems or organizational processes, without considering that such modeling is typically done by means of a modeling tool that extends the modeling functionality offered by a grammar through complementary features. This paper extends the literature by examining how the use of seven different features of modeling tools affects usage beliefs users develop when using modeling grammars for process modeling. We show that five distinct tool features positively affect usefulness, ease of use and satisfaction beliefs of users. We offer a number of interpretations about the findings. We also describe how the results inform decisions of relevance to developers of modeling tools as well as managers in charge for making modeling-related investment decisions.