Carine Souveyet

An approach for defining ways-of-working

Abstract Process modelling is considered today as a key issue by both, the Software Engineering (SE) and the Information Systems Engineering (ISE) community. However, most recent process models are descriptions of software development activities written in an executable form that computer systems can enforce. There is a need for process models which take into account heuristic knowledge to guide humans performing systems development. We refer to such guidance centred process models as ‘ways-of-working’. So far, most work has concentrated on developing and experimenting with process modelling approaches and little attention has been paid to the problem of developing a method for defining a new process model. We propose in this paper, an approach for defining ways-of-working in a systematic manner. It is a meta-modelling approach in which a given way-of-working is constructed by instantiation of a process meta-model allowing to deal with a large variety of situations in a flexible, decision-oriented manner. Based on the properties of the meta-model, ways-of-working are formally defined, with an appropriate level of genericity, and in a modular way to facilitate their evolution and improvement. They are designed for providing automated and flexible guidance in decision making during the process. The paper presents the approach, exemplifies it with the way-of-working defined within the Esprit project F3 and illustrates how the process is guided on an F3 case study.

Guiding use case authoring: results of an empirical study

This paper presents results from the first of two empirical studies which examine the effectiveness of guidelines for use case authoring. The ESPRIT 21.903 CREWS long-term research project has developed style and content guidelines for authoring use cases for requirements acquisition and validation. The effectiveness of these guidelines has been evaluated under different conditions. Results indicate that: the authoring guidelines improve the overall quality of the use case prose; the different guidelines work differently and with different levels of efficiency; and use cases are never entirely correctly written; thus, they can be systematically corrected. The paper details a qualitative and quantitative comparison between guided and non-guided use case authoring. It outlines lessons learned and implications for the CREWS software tools design.

Eliciting service composition in a goal driven manner

The connectivity generated by the Internet is opening opportunities of services composition. As a consequence, organizations are forming online alliances in order to deliver integrated value-added services. However, due to the lack of methodologies and tools, the development of such composite service across organizations is usually ad-hoc and poses problems especially in the identification, composition and orchestration issues. In this paper, we propose a <i>goal driven approach</i> to understand the needs of different organizations for a new added-value composite service and to model the cooperative process supporting this service provision in a declarative, goal driven manner. The goal model called <i>Map</i>, is then used for service elicitation, distribution and orchestration. The paper presents the approach and illustrates it with an e-government cooperative service.

An Intentional Approach to Service Engineering

Despite its growing acceptance, Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) remains a computing mechanism to speed up the design of software applications by assembling ready-made software services. We argue that it is difficult for business people to fully benefit of SOC if it remains at the software level. The paper proposes a move toward a description of services in business terms, i.e., intentions and strategies to achieve them and to organize their publication, search, and composition on the basis of these descriptions. In this way, it leverages SOC to an intentional level, ISOC. We present ISM, the model to describe intentional services, and populate the service registry with their descriptions. We highlight its intention-driven perspective for service description, retrieval, and composition. Thereafter, we propose a methodology to determine intentional services that meet business goals and to publish them in the registry. Finally, the paper introduces a set of transformations to bridge the gap from the intentional level to the implementation one.

Modelling and engineering the requirements engineering process: An overview of the NATURE approach

This paper presents an overview of the process theory developed in the context of the ESPRIT project NATURE.1 This theory proposes means for modelling and engineering the requirements engineering (RE) process. The key element of this theory is a situation-and decision-based process meta-model independent of any RE methodology. The process meta-model acts as a shell for defining process models by instantiation. An enactment mechanism implemented in a tool environment has been defined. It allows execution of process models and provides effective guidance to the requirements engineer. Construction of process models is also supported based on generic method knowledge chunks. The formalization of our approach is based on a free algebra.

Semantic representation of context models: a framework for analyzing and understanding

Context-aware systems are applications that adapt themselves to several situations involving user, network, data, hardware and the application itself. In this paper, we review several context models proposed in different domains: content adaptation, service adaptation, information retrieval, etc. The purpose of this review is to expose the representation of this notion semantically. According to this, we propose a framework that analyzes and compares different context models. Such a framework intends helping understanding and analyzing of such models, and consequently the definition of new ones. This framework is based on the fact that context-aware systems use context models in order to formalize and limit the notion of context and that relevant information differs from a domain to another and depends on the effective use of this information. Based on this framework, we consider in this paper a particular application domain, Business Processes, in which the notion of context remains unexplored, although it is required for flexibility and adaptability. We propose, in this paper, an ontology-based context model focusing on this particular domain.

Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering

Requirements engineering has since long acknowledged the importance of the notion that system requirements are stakeholder goalsrather than system functionsand ought to be elicited, modeled and analyzed accordingly. In this book, Nurcan and her co-editors collected twenty contributions from leading researchers in requirements engineering with the intention to comprehensively present an overview of the different perspectives that exist today, in 2010, on the concept of intention in the information systems community. These original papers honor Colette Rolland for her contributions to this field, as she was probably the first to emphasize that intention has to be considered as a first-class concept in information systems engineering. Written by long-term collaborators (and most often friends) of Colette Rolland, this volume covers topics like goal-oriented requirements engineering, model-driven development, method engineering, and enterprise modeling. As such, it is a tour dhorizon of Colette Rollands lifework, and is presented to her on the occasion of her retirement at CaISE 2010 in Hammamet, the conference she once cofounded and which she helped to grow and prosper for more than 20 years.

Describing Business Processes with a Guided Use Case Approach

Business Process (BP) improvement and alike require accurate descriptions of the BPs. We suggest to describe BPs as use case specifications. A use case specification comprises a description of the context of the BP, the interactions between the agents involved in the BP, the interactions of these agents with an automated system supporting the BP and attached system internal requirements. Constructing such specifications remains a difficult task. Our proposal is to use textual scenarios as inputs, describing fragments of the BP, and to guide, using a set of rules, their incremental production and integration in a use case specification also presented in a textual form. The paper presents the structure of a use case, the linguistic approach adopted for textual scenarios analysis and the guided process for constructing use case specifications from scenarios along with the guidelines and support rules grounding the process. The process is illustrated with a real case study borrowed to an Electricity Company.

Patterns for Extending an OO Model with Temporal Features

We identify a set of generic patterns which can be used to introduce temporal features in existing OO models. Patterns are generic in the sense that they are applicable to any OO model having the basic features of class, attribute, domain and class association. The paper shows the application of these patterns to the O* model.

Service Discovery Mechanism for an Intentional Pervasive Information System

Pervasive Information System (PIS) provides a new vision of Information System available anytime and anywhere. The users of these systems must evolve in a space of services, in which several services are offered to him. However, PIS should enhance the transparency and efficiency of the system. We believe that a user-centric vision is needed to ensure a transparent access to the frequently changing space of services regardless of how to perform it. In this paper, we propose a new approach of PIS, both context-aware and intentional called IPIS. In this approach, services are proposed in order to satisfy users intention in a given context. Then, we propose a context-aware intentional service discovery mechanism. Such mechanism is based on an extension of OWL-S taking into account the notion of context and intention. We present in this paper IPIS platform. Then, we detail the proposed service discovery mechanism and present experimental results that demonstrate the advantage of using our proposition.