Chris Wild

Towards a flexible deployment of business rules

Abstract Business rules give rise to an important set of requirements on any system being developed or procured for an enterprise. While most of the work done in this area focuses on identifying and documenting business rules, we have proposed a methodology that addresses several aspects of the business rules lifecycle: acquisition, deployment and evolution. The methodology assumes that business rules are expressed in terms of business concepts and corporate knowledge that are captured in a high level architecture. The architecture proposed consists of three interconnected components: the enterprise model, the business rules model and the decision support model. This approach permits a greater variety of rules to be specified while providing an opportunity to automate the production of deployable business rules. The ability to deal with the inconsistent and ambiguous rules is crucial in capturing the conflicting requirements placed on the operation of any large scale enterprise. This paper presents a flexible deployment of business rules, which not only supports decision making in the face of conflicting requirements, but also the evolution of those requirements in the face of changing regulatory environments, competitive markets and corporate goals.

Towards a software maintenance support environment

The authors have designed a software maintenance support environment (SMSE) to assist in the maintenance of existing source code. They model software maintenance as a hybrid distributed problem-solving activity, in which the application-dependent knowledge is provided by the system, and common sense, programming expertise, and problem-solving knowledge are provided by the people on the project team. To define a set of requirements to be satisfied by a SMSE, a series of maintenance tasks were performed on an inventory control application consisting of about 68000 lines of Cobol program. These results of experiments, including lessons learned and requirements for an SMSE, are presented. A key role of the SMSE is to help the software engineer find all information relevant to a particular maintenance task without examining a lot of extraneous material. Access to the decision structure and the ability to assess the impact of decisions constitute the most important issue to be addressed by the SMSE. The experiments indicate that a high degree of reusability could be achieved for certain tasks using the information contained in the closure of that task.<<ETX>>

IRI-h, a Java-based distance education system: architecture and performance

We used our Original Interactive Remote Instruction (IRI) system to teach scores of university classes over the past years at sites up to 300 km apart. While this system is a prototype, its use in real classes allows us to deal with crucial issues in distributed education instruction systems. We describe our motivation and vision for a reimplementation of IRI that supports synchronous and asynchronous distance education. This new version, called IRI-h (h for hetergeneous), is coded in Java and executes on several different platforms. IRI-h extends IRI both to multiple platforms and heterogeneous network experiences with the developing prototype, including preliminary performance evaluation, and also unresolved issues still to be addressed.

Decision-based software development

Current software development paradigms focus on the products of the development process. Much of the decision-making process which produces these products is outside the scope of these paradigms. The decision-based software development (DBSD) paradigm views the design process as a series of interrelated decisions which involve the identification and articulation of problems, alternatives, solutions and justifications. Decisions made by programmers and analysts are recorded in a project database. Unresolved problems are also recorded and resources for their resolution are allocated by management according to the overall development strategy. This decision structure is linked to the products affected by the relevant decisions and provides a process-oriented view of the resulting system. Software maintenance uses this decision view of the system to understand the rationale behind the decisions affecting the part of the system to be modified. The relationships between decisions help assess the impact of changing one or more decisions. We describe D-HyperCase, a prototype Decision-Based Hypermedia System and give results of applying the DBSD approach during its development.

Software engineering life cycle support-decision based systems development

The software engineering life cycle encompasses a broad range of activities, from the initial elicitation of the system requirements to the continuing evolution of the operational system. These activities can be best supported if there is a unifying paradigm which can integrate functional and non-functional problem-solving, process management, and knowledge acquisition and reuse. The decision based software development (DBSD) paradigm structures the software development and evolution process as a continuous problem-solving and decision making activity. In the DBSD paradigm, the software engineering team identifies and articulates software development problems, proposes alternative solutions, and develops supporting justifications from which a decision is made. This paper describes our experiences an using DBSD on five diverse projects.<<ETX>>

Virtual classrooms and interactive remote instruction

SUMMARY Through the integration of high speed computer networks and interactive multimedia workstations, the IRI (Interactive Remote Instruction) system creates a geographically dispersed virtual classroom. Each student participates in a lesson using a personal workstation which can be used to view multimedia lectures, to make presentations, to take notes in a multimedia notebook and to interact via audio/video and shared computer tools. We compare this approach with other modes of instruction and describe lessons learned from the instructor, student and technical perspectives.

Decision-based software development: design and maintenance

A software maintenance task comprises the activities of understanding, assessment, analysis, realization and verification of the required changes. A decision-based software development methodology in which the various software objects are related by the decisions in which they are involved, is proposed. A decision relates a problem to its solution, gives alternate solutions which were considered and justifies the particular solution chosen. A decision or related set of decisions, provides a view of the software system relevant to that decision and allows the retrieval of source code which resulted from that decision. The design of D-HyperCase, a prototype decision-based software development support system, is described. Since this system is being developed using the decision-based approach, development experiences are discussed.<<ETX>>

A process model for decision based software development

A process model for software maintenance using the decision-based software development (DBSD) paradigm is described. The DBSD paradigm models the process of software development and maintenance as a continuous problem-solving activity where the decision is the focal point. An important aspect of this process is the preparation for perfective and corrective maintenance by identifying conditional decisions whose validation depends on experience with the production system. Validation requires the instrumentation of the production system to collect data which will support or refute the decision. The authors discuss the instrumenting of a prototype DBSD support environment to collect data to validate the proposed process model. Also given are the results of some preliminary data.<<ETX>>

Decision-based-support-paradigm: a new method to structure source code

The decision-based software development (DBSD) paradigm is being developed to support the process of developing and maintaining software systems. The DBSD paradigm views the design process as a series of interrelated decisions which involve the identification and articulation of problems, alternatives, solutions, and justifications. Decisions made by programmers and analysts are recorded in a project database. Unresolved problems are also recorded, and resources for their resolution are allocated by management according to the overall development strategy. This decision structure is linked to the products affected by the relevant decisions and provides a process-oriented view of the resulting system. Software maintenance uses this decision view of the system to understand the rationale behind the decisions affecting the part of the system to be modified. The relationships between decisions help assess the impact of changing one or more decisions. The authors describe D-HyperCase, a prototype decision-based hypermedia system and give results of applying the DBSD approach during its development.<<ETX>>

Processes for managing project uncertainty with contingency planning

One of the most pervasive problems faced by project managers is controlling a large project in an uncertain and distributed work environment. We believe that many of the inherent difficulties in managing large engineering and software projects result from difficulties in managing the uncertainty inherent in any lengthy, complex undertaking. Currently available project management tools allow the project manager to perform “what-if” and risk analyses, but do not support the management of an uncertain project environment. Existing decision support systems allow analysis of known facts about the project, but they focus upon what should be done with information after it is available. They do not support decision-making in the face of evolving and often insufficient project information, and they do not support the decision-maker when a plan must be enacted even before a decision can be made. Also, they assume that decisions are made once, instantaneously, and in isolation from the external project environment.