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Online ISSN 1751-8814 Print ISSN 1751-8806

IET Software

Volume 6, Issue 2, April 2012

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Volume 6, Issue 2

April 2012

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  • Web and requirements engineering

    • Editorial: Web and requirements engineering
      Towards conceptual foundations for service-oriented requirements engineering: bridging requirements and services ontologies
      • Author(s): B. Verlaine ; Y. Dubois ; I.J. Jureta ; S. Faulkner
      • Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 2, p. 85 –102
      • DOI:  10.1049/iet-sen.2011.0027
      • Type: Article
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      • p. 85 –102 (18)
        The engineering of a service-oriented system requires the specification of functions that Web services (WSs) should provide, before WSs are built or selected. Written in a service description language, the service specification instantiates concepts different than those used for requirement engineering (RE): the former speaks in terms of operations, metrics and bindings, whereas the latter manipulates, goals, evaluations and domain assumptions. It is, however, clear that functions expected of WSs to select or build will be relevant to the stakeholders if they satisfy the stakeholders’ requirements. As a result, there is a gap between the two specifications which must be bridged in order to ensure that the WS system is adequate w.r.t. requirements. This study proposes mappings between the concepts of requirements ontology and those of service taxonomy induced by the WSLD and the WSLA languages. A working prototype is presented that implements the mappings and is used to translate the instances of RE concepts into instances of WSLD and WSLA concepts. The mappings and the prototype facilitate the engineering of WS systems, as fragments of WS descriptions can be generated from requirements as a first specification of a service request.
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      From intentions to code: exploring the life of user goals in two web-based systems
      • Author(s): S. Liaskos ; M. Daoud Jungblut ; J. Mylopoulos
      • Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 2, p. 103 –113
      • DOI:  10.1049/iet-sen.2011.0032
      • Type: Article
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      • p. 103 –113 (11)
        Goal models have been found to be an effective way to represent, communicate and analyse stakeholder requirements. Once such models reach some degree of completeness, a software-intensive system is developed to support the achievement of the identified goals. A question that naturally arises in this process, though, is whether and how the way by which requirements are represented in goal models influences the structure of the design of the system to be built. Does the content and organisation of the resulting source code disclose anything about the stakeholder intentions that have led to its production, and how? In this study the authors focus on web-based systems and describe the experiences in developing two small, layered web applications using goal models as a requirements representation tool and without introducing any goal-model specific methodological, design or platform restrictions. The authors study the artefacts of this process in an effort to identify intentional categories to which different parts of the source code belongs. The results indeed suggest interesting characterisations of goals, source code and relationships thereof that could be useful in developing goal-oriented web engineering frameworks and methodologies.
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      From requirements to implementation of ad-hoc social Web applications: an empirical pattern-based approach
      • Author(s): M. Brambilla
      • Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 2, p. 114 –126
      • DOI:  10.1049/iet-sen.2011.0041
      • Type: Article
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      • p. 114 –126 (13)
        Social technologies are transforming the Web to a place where users actively contribute to content production and opinion making. At B2E level, enterprises look at social networking tools as possible means for improving their operations thanks to the unstructured interaction they foster among employees. This paper tackles the problem of defining a quick and pragmatic approach for specifying the requirements of ad-hoc social web applications and for going down to their implementation. The approach is motivated by the fact that in most cases the ad-hoc needs that the company foresees are just a peculiar subset of the large set of requirements that are addressed by current social platforms. The main contributions of this work include: the classification of the social interactions that can be observed in virtual communities in a comprehensive taxonomy of requirements (based on a broad analysis of the existing social networking platforms, considering both public and enterprise solutions); the definition of requirement specification as a selection process upon this taxonomy; and the mapping to design and implementation artifacts through automatic generation of design models and of running code. This is implemented through a set of pattern-based model transformations that transform the requirements (specified according to a goal-oriented methodology) to UML models and then to running Java code. A validation of the effectiveness of the approach is provided, in terms of percentage of hand-written code with respect to the parts that can be automatically obtained through the transformations.
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  • General articles

    • MCTest: towards an improvement of match algorithms for models
      • Author(s): V. García-Díaz ; B.C. Pelayo G-Bustelo ; O. Sanjuán-Martínez ; E.R. Núñez Valdez ; J.M. Cueva Lovelle
      • Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 2, p. 127 –139
      • DOI:  10.1049/iet-sen.2011.0040
      • Type: Article
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      • p. 127 –139 (13)
        Owing to the increasing importance of model-driven engineering (MDE) and the changes experienced by software systems over their life cycle, the calculation, representation and visualisation of matches and differences between two different versions of the same model are becoming more necessary and useful. This study shows the need for improvement in the algorithms for calculating the relationships between models and presents a tool to test different implementations, thus reducing the effort required to measure, compare or create new algorithms. To demonstrate the need for improvement and the framework developed, the authors have created different models that conform to the metamodel of a domain-specific language. Subsequently, the authors compared these models using the algorithms of the eclipse modelling framework (EMF) Compare tool, part of the eclipse modeling project, which is the framework of reference for MDE. Thus, in the case study, the authors tool is used to measure the quality of the comparisons performed by EMF Compare.
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      Calculating return on investment of training using process variation
      • Author(s): S. Matalonga  and  T. San Feliu
      • Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 2, p. 140 –147
      • DOI:  10.1049/iet-sen.2011.0024
      • Type: Article
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      • p. 140 –147 (8)
        Organisations have relied on training to increase the performance of their workforce. Also, software process improvement models suggest that training is an effective tool for institutionalising a development process. Training evaluation becomes important for understanding the improvements resulting from the investments in training. Like other production process, the software development process is subject to natural and special causes of variation, and process improvement models recommend its statistical management. Return on investment (ROI) has already been proposed as an effective measure to evaluate training interventions. Nevertheless, when applying ROI in production environments, practitioners have not taken into consideration the effects of variation in production processes. This study presents a method for calculating ROI that considers process variation; the authors argue that ROI results should be understood in accordance to statistical management guidance. The proposed method has been piloted at a software factory. The results of the case study are reported. These results show how to calculate ROI by taking into account the variation in a production process.
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      Quality of service measure approach of web service for service selection
      • Author(s): S. Wang ; Q. Sun ; F. Yang
      • Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 2, p. 148 –154
      • DOI:  10.1049/iet-sen.2010.0093
      • Type: Article
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      • p. 148 –154 (7)
        Quality of service (QoS) is critical for service customers to select suitable web services for business applications in open web environment. However, since QoS are often influenced by several factors, traditional approaches are not very efficient and effective in measuring QoS of web service. The authors introduce in this study a novel QoS measure approach to efficiently measure QoS of web service for web service selection. The core of this approach is to take the three factors, that is, service providers, the context of customers and historical statistics into QoS measure. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is efficient and effective in measuring QoS of web service.
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      Usefulness of acceptance testing information for component-based system maintenance
      • Author(s): S. Mahmood
      • Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 2, p. 155 –163
      • DOI:  10.1049/iet-sen.2011.0059
      • Type: Article
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      • p. 155 –163 (9)
        Component-based system (CBS) development usually involves adapting best-matched components and writing integration code to handle the mismatches between system-to-be needs and available components. CBS presents unique maintenance challenges as a system analyst focuses on integrating existing components to build a software application. The lack of detailed individual component specification has been a key area of concern in CBS development because of its impact on the maintenance phase of a CBS development life cycle. Recent research suggests that the framework for integrated test (Fit) helps to better comprehend systems. In this work, the author presents a study to investigate the usefulness of acceptance test cases (Fit tables) information, when used as a functional specification, during the maintenance process. The mean correct implementation percentage with and without Fit tables were 86.19 and 83.52, respectively. Similarly, the mean times for the Fit tables and without Fit tables were 46.5 and 45.73, respectively. The results show that acceptance test cases help improve the functional correctness of changes with a little more effort during the maintenance process of a CBS.
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