Your browser does not support JavaScript!
http://iet.metastore.ingenta.com
1887
banner image
image of Volume 4, Issue 6
Online ISSN 1751-8814 Print ISSN 1751-8806

IET Software

Volume 4, Issue 6, December 2010

Volumes & issues:

Volume 4, Issue 6

December 2010

Show / Hide details

  • Social semantic web support for software development

    • Editorial: Social semantic web support for software development
      Exploitation of social semantic technology for software development team configuration
      • Author(s): R. Valencia-Garcı́a ; F. Garcı́a-Sánchez ; D. Castellanos-Nieves ; J.T. Fernández-Breis ; A. Toval
      • Source: IET Software, Volume 4, Issue 6, p. 373 –385
      • DOI:  10.1049/iet-sen.2010.0043
      • Type: Article
      • + Show details - Hide details
      • p. 373 –385 (13)
        Social networks are having a huge impact on how people socialise, gather information, stay informed and solve problems. As could be expected, this trend is influencing the area of software engineering at different levels. In software development, the amount of data available is becoming prohibitively overwhelming for analysis purposes with traditional techniques. As semantic technologies mature, they provide a consistent and reliable basis to handle large amounts of data. Besides, they enable added value, reasoning-based functionality to access such data in an automatic fashion. The authors present a system for supporting the design of teams for software development projects, which combines the benefits of semantics and social networks. The authors also propose a full-fledged solution backed with a proof-of-concept implementation that has been tested in the scope of small and medium enterprises (SME).
        Add to favourites
        Export citations
      Semantic wiki for quality management in software development projects
      • Author(s): R. García ; R. Gil ; J.M. Gimeno ; T. Granollers ; J.M. López ; M. Oliva ; A. Pascual
      • Source: IET Software, Volume 4, Issue 6, p. 386 –395
      • DOI:  10.1049/iet-sen.2010.0044
      • Type: Article
      • + Show details - Hide details
      • p. 386 –395 (10)
        Quality management has become a strategic issue for organisations and is very valuable to produce quality software. However, quality management systems (QMS) are not easy to implement and maintain. The authors' experience shows the benefits of developing a QMS by first formalising it using semantic web ontologies and then putting them into practice through a semantic wiki. The QMS ontology that has been developed captures the core concepts of a traditional QMS and combines them with concepts coming from the MPIu+a development process model, which is geared towards obtaining usable and accessible software products. Then, the ontology semantics is directly put into play by a semantics-aware tool, the Semantic MediaWiki. The developed QMS tool is being used for 2 years by the GRIHO research group, where it has manages almost 50 software development projects taking into account the quality management issues. It has also been externally audited by a quality certification organisation. Its users are very satisfied with their daily work with the tool, which manages all the documents created during project development and also allows them to collaborate, thanks to the wiki features.
        Add to favourites
        Export citations
      Using the semantic web to define a language for modelling controlled flexibility in software processes
      • Author(s): R. Martinho ; J. Varajão ; D. Domingos
      • Source: IET Software, Volume 4, Issue 6, p. 396 –406
      • DOI:  10.1049/iet-sen.2010.0045
      • Type: Article
      • + Show details - Hide details
      • p. 396 –406 (11)
        Software processes and corresponding models are dynamic entities that must evolve to cope with changes occurred in the enacting process, the software development organisation, the market and the methodologies used to produce software. However, in the everyday practice, software team members do not want total flexibility. They rather prefer to learn about and follow previously defined controlled flexibility, that is, advices on which, where, how and by whom process models and related instances can change/adapt. Process engineers can express these advices within a process model with a domain-specific language (DSL), which complements the core process modelling language with additional controlled flexibility information. Then, software team members can browse and learn on this information in process models and instances, and be guided when performing changes. In this study, the authors propose the use of the semantic web and associated ontology-based technologies to develop and evolve their controlled flexibility DSL for software processes. They use an ontology-based format to define the controlled flexibility-related concepts, descriptions and axioms that specify the formal semantics of their DSL. In addition, the authors provide concrete mappings between these ontology concepts and a unified modelling language class-based DSL metamodel and describe how it supports changes made in the ontology.
        Add to favourites
        Export citations
      Usage of social and semantic web technologies to design a searching architecture for software requirement artefacts
      • Author(s): J. Chicaiza ; J. López ; N. Piedra ; O. Martínez ; E. Tovar
      • Source: IET Software, Volume 4, Issue 6, p. 407 –417
      • DOI:  10.1049/iet-sen.2010.0046
      • Type: Article
      • + Show details - Hide details
      • p. 407 –417 (11)
        At present, the research community recognises a complementary relationship between the semantic and the social web. The merging of these web instances could play an essential role in different knowledge domains. In this study, the authors promote a social–semantic web paradigm using software engineering as the knowledge domain specifically. The authors address a major problem – the difficulty for end-users in finding documentation related to software requirements proposed by them; this fact reduces their participation at the time of specifying the software requirements. Architecture is proposed for enhanced resources search, combining the strengths of the social (social annotations) and semantic (semantic metadata) technologies, which has been designed considering the search style of the information seekers. Such architecture is applied in a use-scenario, where the expert users who are not technicians have some restrictions and limitations to retrieve the documents they need. The preliminary results demonstrate that it is possible to take advantage of the defined infrastructure of the ontology to organise and integrate the metadata of resources which are in databases or existent files; this approach opens several possibilities as creation and validation of software requirements collaboratively among different expert-users.
        Add to favourites
        Export citations
      AQUA: hybrid architecture for question answering services
      • Author(s): M. Vargas-Vera  and  M.D. Lytras
      • Source: IET Software, Volume 4, Issue 6, p. 418 –433
      • DOI:  10.1049/iet-sen.2010.0053
      • Type: Article
      • + Show details - Hide details
      • p. 418 –433 (16)
        This study describes AQUA software architecture for question answering services. AQUA has been designed as a hybrid system which can be used as closed-domain and open-domain question answering system. The software platform offers flexibility as incrementally software components can be added. AQUA makes intensive use of ontologies in several parts of the question answering system. An important component of AQUA is the similarity algorithm which is used to find similarities between relations and concepts in a query and classes and properties in ontologies. Furthermore, the authors have modified the similarity algorithms so that they can deal with several opinions of software agents and then combine the evidences found by each of the agent. In addition, uncertainty has been considered as uncertainty is always present when similarity is assessed. Finally, a case of study and an evaluation using academic and bibliographic ontologies from the ontology alignment evaluation initiative is presented.
        Add to favourites
        Export citations
      Knowledge repository to improve agile development processes learning
      • Author(s): A. Amescua ; L. Bermón ; J. García ; M.-I. Sánchez-Segura
      • Source: IET Software, Volume 4, Issue 6, p. 434 –444
      • DOI:  10.1049/iet-sen.2010.0067
      • Type: Article
      • + Show details - Hide details
      • p. 434 –444 (11)
        Software process learning depends significantly on technologies to store, search and share knowledge that can be used in software projects. The aim of this work is to provide a set of guidelines to develop a knowledge-based process asset libraries (PALs), using a Wiki (as a Web 2.0 technology), to store software engineering best practices. Fieldwork was carried out in a two-year training course of agile development process. This was validated in two phases (with and without PAL), each of which consisted of two stages: training and project. The study demonstrates that on the one hand, the learning process can be improved using a PAL–Wiki to transfer and share the software process knowledge, and on the other hand, junior software engineers developed software products with a greater degree of independence.
        Add to favourites
        Export citations
      Shaping human capital in software development teams: the case of mentoring enabled by semantics
      • Author(s): P. Soto-Acosta ; C. Casado-Lumbreras ; F. Cabezas-Isla
      • Source: IET Software, Volume 4, Issue 6, p. 445 –452
      • DOI:  10.1049/iet-sen.2010.0087
      • Type: Article
      • + Show details - Hide details
      • p. 445 –452 (8)
        In current organisations, the importance of knowledge and competence is unquestionable. In a scenario in which knowledge workers perform their duties in knowledge-intensive organisations, mentoring has emerged as an efficient practice for the development of these personnel. On the other hand, the convergence of information technology (IT) and communication technologies and the rapid evolution of the internet has been one of the most influential factors in human resources management, and the advent of semantic technologies presents novel opportunities for the improvement of personnel development, including semantics. This study presents a solution based on semantic technologies which utilises different personal and professional data to carry out pair matching of mentors and protégés.
        Add to favourites
        Export citations

Most viewed content for this Journal

Article
content/journals/iet-sen
Journal
5
Loading

Most cited content for this Journal

Print this page
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address