Antonio Ruiz Cortés

IMPROVING THE AUTOMATIC PROCUREMENT OF WEB SERVICES USING CONSTRAINT PROGRAMMING

Software solutions to automate the procurement of web services are gaining importance when technology evolves, the number of providers increases and the needs of the clients become more complex. There are several proposals in this field, but they all have important drawbacks, namely: many of them are not able to check offers and demands for internal consistency; selecting the best offer usually relies on evaluating linear objective functions, which is quite a naive solution; the language to express offers is usually less expressive than the language to express demands; and, last but not least, providers cannot impose constraints on their clients. In this article, we present a solution to overcome these problems that relies on constraint programming; furthermore, we present a run-time framework, some experimental results, and a comparison with other proposals.

Hints on How to Face Business Process Compliance

The concept business process compliance refers to the degree of conformance between the business processes of an organization and the regulations and rules that govern it. This paper intends to be a starting point for people interested in business process compliance who have no knowledge about how to address compliance checking. We introduce the four most relevant points to be considered before facing the problem and present some hints for those points in the form of a state of the art based on the literature about business process compliance checking. We also state possible future work in the context of business process compliance derived from this study.

Modelling Service Level Agreements for Business Process Outsourcing Services

Many proposals to model service level agreements (SLAs) have been elaborated in order to automate different stages of the service lifecycle such as monitoring, implementation or deployment. All of them have been designed for computational services and are not well–suited for other types of services such as business process outsourcing (BPO) services. However, BPO services supported by process–aware information systems could also benefit from modelling SLAs in tasks such as performance monitoring, human resource assignment or process configuration. In this paper, we identify the requirements for modelling such SLAs and detail how they can be faced by combining techniques used to model computational SLAs, business processes, and process performance indicators. Furthermore, our approach has been validated through the modelling of several real BPO SLAs.

Automatic Extraction of Semantically-Meaningful Information from the Web.

The semantic Web will bring meaning to the Internet, making it possible for web agents to understand the information it contains. However, current trends seem to suggest that the semantic web is not likely to be adopted in the forthcoming years. In this sense, meaningful information extraction from the web becomes a handicap for web agents. In this article, we present a framework for automatic extraction of semantically-meaningful information from the current web. Separating the extraction process from the business logic of an agent enhances modularity, adaptability, and maintainability. Our approach is novel in that it combines different technologies to extract information, surf the web and automatically adapt to web changes.

Mixing Rasci Matrices and BPMN Together for Responsibility Management

Organizations need to manage the responsibility of the employees with respect to all the activities that are carried out daily. RACI matrices are used to this end, providing information about who must do what, i.e., the responsibility of each human resource regarding each activity, e.g. responsible for its execution, responsible for approving it once executed, etcetera. On the other hand, nowadays organizations increasingly use modelling notations to represent their processes, being BPMN the standard for business process modelling. In this paper we focus on a concrete type of RACI matrices called RASCI and introduce a novel approach to build RASCI-aware business process models in BPMN based on what we have called RASCI patterns. Furthermore, we explain how the transformation of information between RASCI matrices and RASCIaware BPMN models can be (semi-)automatically performed. We believe the transformation from RASCI to BPMN and vice versa may be very useful to organizations, since it releases them from having to manually maintain BPMN models and RASCI matrices separately and it allows them to focus on only one of them for responsibility management.

A Practical Agent-Based Method to Extract Semantic Information from the Web

The semantic Web will bring meaning to the Internet, mak - ing it possible for web agents to understand the information it contains. However, current trends seem to suggest that it is not likely to be adopted in the forthcoming years. In this sense, meaningful information extraction from the web becomes a handicap for web agents. In this article, we present a framework for automatic extraction of semantically-meaningful information from the current web. Separating the extraction process from the business logic of an agent enhances modularity, adaptability, and maintainability. Our approach is novel in that it combines different technologies to extract information, surf the web and automatically adapt to some changes.

Methodology to Extend RAL

Resource Assignment Language (RAL) is a language for the selection of organisational resources that can be used, for example, for the assignment of human resources to business process activities. Its formal semantics have allowed the automation of analysis operations in several phases of the business process lifecycle. RAL was designed considering a specific organisational metamodel and pursuing specific purposes. However, it can be extended to deal with similar problems in different domains and under different circumstances. In this paper, a methodology to extend RAL is introduced, and an extension to support another organisational metamodel is described as a proof-of-concept.

Mass Customisation Along Lifecycle of Autonomic Homes

Autonomic homes adapt themselves to give the user the best possible experience of the services they provide. They dynamically adapt its behavior at run-time in response to changing conditions in end-user needs and the surrounding environment devices. From the development point of view, producing and maintaining a large amount of autonomic homes need an affordable solution such as dynamic software product lines (DSPL). DSPL produce a set of products that share features and have the ability of reconfiguring at runtime. Since users maintain and modify their preferences in opportunistic and improvisational ways, an autonomic home must evolve in time according to user expectations. Current DSPL architectures implement the ability of reconfiguring a product but ignore user preferences. We present an extension to our DSPL architecture to incorporate user preferences so user customisation of autonomic homes is not limited to installation time but all along the lifetime.

An experimental replication on the effect of the practice of mindfulness in conceptual modeling performance

Context: Mindfulness is a meditation technique aimed to increase clearness of mind and awareness. In the 2013–2014 academic year, an experiment was carried out to test whether the practice of mindfulness during 4 weeks improved or not the conceptual modeling performance using UML class diagrams of 32 second–year students of Software Engineering at the University of Seville. Objective: An internal replication with some changes in the original design was performed in the first semester of the 2014–2015 academic year in order to confirm the insights provided by the original study and increase the confidence in its conclusions. The sample were 53 students with the same profile than in the original study. Method: Half the students (27 subjects) practiced mindfulness during 6 weeks, while the other half (26 subjects), i.e. the control group, received no treatment during that time. All the students developed two conceptual models using UML class diagrams from a transcript of an interview, one before and another after the 6 weeks of mindfulness sessions, and the results were compared in terms of conceptual modeling effectiveness and efficiency. Results: The results of both experiments were similar, showing that the practice of mindfulness significantly improves conceptual modeling efficiency. Regarding conceptual modeling effectiveness, an improvement is observed in practice, but the analysis shows that such improvement is not statistically significant. After a reanalysis of data, consistent results have also been obtained. Conclusion: After a replication that leads to the same conclusions as the original study, the adequacy of the original experiment is confirmed and the credibility of its results is increased. Thus, we can state that the practice of mindfulness can improve the efficiency of Software Engineering students in the development of conceptual models, although further experimentation is needed in order to confirm the results in other contexts and other Software Engineering activities different from conceptual modeling.

A template-based approach to describing metamorphic relations

Metamorphic testing enables the generation of test cases in the absence of an oracle by exploiting relations among different executions of the program under test, called metamorphic relations. In a recent survey, we observed a great variability in the way metamorphic relations are described, typically in an informal manner using natural language. We noticed that the lack of a standard mechanism to describe metamorphic relations often makes them hard to read and understand, which hinders the widespread adoption of the technique. In this paper, we propose a template---based approach for the description of metamorphic relations. The proposed template aims to ease communication among practitioners as well as to contribute to research dissemination. Also, it provides a helpful guide for those approaching metamorphic testing for the first time. For the validation of the approach, we used the proposed template to describe 17 previously published metamorphic relations from different domains and groups of authors, without finding expressiveness problems. We hope that this work eases the diffusion and adoption of metamorphic testing, contributing to the progress of this thriving testing technique.