Anne Eerola

Service-oriented software engineering (SOSE) framework

The gap between business decision making and software engineering causes inefficiency and quality problems in software development. Software engineers do not understand organizations value creation objectives and their influence on software production and structure. For this reason software does not fulfill the requirements of business and software quality is inadequate too often. The objective of the authors in the service-oriented software engineering project (SOSE) is to develop methods and tools to improve quality and profitability of software development. In this paper the authors described SOSE framework and clarify with examples its phases, utility, and application in pilot projects. SOSE frameworks first activity is to create a well-defined business case. Then, business processes and data concepts are identified, to meet business requirements of the business case, and modelled with informal diagrams like UML and BPML. Finally, the refinement continues with use case maps, system-level services, and business service components. It is proposed that service, process, entity, and utility components are used as design elements of the business service component. In implementation platform independent and platform specific models were utilized. This study has been carried out in cooperation with ICT companies and their customers in electricity domain in Finland.

Difficulties in establishing a defect management process: a case study

A well-organized defect management process is one of the success factors for implementing software projects in time and in budget. The defect management process includes defect prevention, defect discovery and resolution, defect causal analysis, and the process improvement. However, establishing an organization-wide defect management process is a complicated task. The main research question in this paper is what kind of difficulties organizations have regarding the defect management process. Our findings show that problems are related to defect resolution reports, limited project resources for fixing defects, and challenges in creating a test environment. Results are based on our observations from four case organizations. The main contribution of this study is to help organizations to identify and avoid typical problems with defect management.

A Conceptual Model of IT Service Problem Managementz

IT service providers need a systematic problem management model to handle problems in IT services effectively. However, many IT organizations have difficulties in establishing a problem management model that is suitable for a service-oriented business. This is due to complex IT service management standards that include a large number of new concepts, which partly overlap with those of traditional software engineering. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model which clarifies the concepts within IT service problem management, and connects these concepts to traditional software engineering tasks, such as testing and defect management. A design pattern is used to document our model. This study has been carried out in co-operation with IT companies and their customers in the electricity domain in Finland

Improving Service Management in Supply Chains

Business associates work in groups forming networks in order to satisfy customer requirements with best possible price-quality ratio. In order to achieve effective coupling between provided services and specialization of services coordination between partners is needed. Partners in supply chains have mutual agreements of the service level (SLA), which satisfies requirements of customers and service providers in the network. Our goal is to develop methods and tools for service-oriented software development emphasizing business aspects and quality of software structure. We design a service map for service workflow definitions, utilize service level agreement (SLA) based on ITIL, and clarify protocol requirements using distributed coordination in the SOA environment. We propose a service management pattern for business process negotiations in supply chains. Different service workflow structures are analyzed and their usability in different kind of supply chains is evaluated. We shortly validate our method with experimental results achieved in the service-oriented software engineering (SOSE)-project in co-operation with ICT companies and their customers in electricity and telecommunication domains in Finland

Conformance Testing of Open Interfaces in Healthcare Applications - Case Context Management

In this paper we describe the conformance testing model of the open interfaces developed and applied in the PlugIT project in Finland during 2003–2004. Conformance testing is needed to integrate different software products without a vast amount of extra adaptation work, and to improve software inter-operability. The model has been developed and evaluated with co-operation of several healthcare software companies and hospital districts. The clinical context management interface specification is used as an example in this paper.

Software project effort assessment

Software project assessments and postmortem analyses can increase the success of future projects and forthcoming project phases. However, although assessments and analyses are well-presented in the software engineering literature, they are short of descriptions to assess effort. This paper proposes a stepwise effort assessment method that strives to facilitate learning from past experiences and to increase effort estimation accuracy by exploring realized project effort. The proposed method can be used either to assess the realized project effort of a time span from projects lifecycle or as a part of the whole project postmortem analysis in producing effort information for the project iteration assessment, final report, and annual project portfolio report. In addition, the effort information increases the project teams knowledge on realized activity sets and their relationships, and the information can be utilized in estimation method and model calibration for both re-estimations and future estimations. The method was evaluated with case projects, a sample supplied by Tieto Finland Oy. Copyright© 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Correspondence between UML Diagrams and SGML/XML DTDs

In this paper, we compare the semantics and structure of the conceptual information presented in the Unified Modeling Language (UML), which is used in analyzing object-oriented systems, and Document Type Definitions (DTD), which define the structures of SGML and XML documents. SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) and XML (Extensible Markup Language) are international standards for specifying the notations used for defining structured documents. We present correspondence rules for generating DTDs semiautomatically from UML diagrams. The rules have been developed as a part of the analysis and design method to create the structure definition for a document. As an example, we use a patient record.