Deepti Parachuri

Light Weight SOA Governance A Case Study

Here, we present a case study of an ABC company which has recently embarked on a SOA exercise and has adopted a light weight SOA governance process. In SOA Governance world, Service registry and repository play a pivotal role. Service registry can have policies that are needed to govern and enforce the lifecycle management of service. In this case study, we also address versioning and categorization of services using registry.

An empirical study of structural defects in industrial use-cases

Use-cases perform an important role in capturing and analys-ing software requirements in the IT industry. A number of guidelines have been proposed in the literature on how to write use-cases. Structural defects can occur when use-cases are written without following such guidelines. We develop a taxonomy of structural defects and analyse a sample of 360 industrial use-cases to understand the nature of defects in them. Our sample comes from both client-based projects and in-house projects. The results show that, compared to a sample of theoretical use-cases that follow Cockburns guidelines, industrial use-cases on the average exhibit defects such as complex structures, lack of customer focus and missing actors. Given the shortage of analysis of real industry samples, our results make a significant contribution towards the understanding of the strengths and weaknesses in industrial use-cases in terms of structural defects. The results will be useful for industry practitioners in adopting use-case modelling standards to reduce the defects as well as for software engineering researchers to explore the reasons for such differences between the theory and the practice in use-case modelling.

Enforcing structure on textual use cases via annotation models

Textual use cases are commonly used to represent software requirements at initial stages. However in most of the cases, these documents are unstructured. In this paper, we present a linguistic engine for processing textual use cases and extract a structured model in terms of an annotation model out of these use cases. An annotation model of a use case can further be used to generate various UML requirements models, Business Process Models and ontology. The implementation details of Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique employed by us for the linguistic engine is described in this paper in detail. Also, we consider a corpus containing 123 use cases from real-life industrial projects within our company, and translate them into annotation models using our NLP technique. For evaluating the performance of conversion we use a few metrics and report some promising results for our linguistic engine.

Automated Analysis of Textual Use-Cases: Does NLP Components and Pipelines Matter?

Significant time is spent by practitioners to analyze use-cases written in Natural Language (NL). With only prescriptive templates to describe complex scenarios, common errors like misinterpretation and oversight can have costly consequence later during system development. A semi-automatic approach based on NL processing can reduce the time spent on requirement analysis and bootstrap design activity. However, linguistic community has adopted pipeline processing to handle NL ambiguities where several sequential tasks aid in solving a bigger task. Choosing NL processing techniques depends on the domain and task to accomplish. As use-cases are domain specific it is crucial to identify suitable pipelines to process them. This is highlighted in our evaluation of two pipelines consisting of syntactic and semantic techniques on use-cases found in theory and practice. We believe, the promising results has opened up the need for exploring more task specific NLP pipelines and evaluation thereof.

Towards a Foundation for Quantitative Service Analysis An Approach from Business Process Models

Recent advancements in process centric systems, the concept of Services have been adopted widely over business processes. Services which are discrete reusable functional blocks have become the choice to achieve highest order of reuse. However, key to having such services is to identify them with right objectives. Current methods and techniques for service analysis are heuristic and rely heavily on the experience and intuition of the designer. We present the prerequisite formalism for service analysis from business process models and basic quantitative metrics.

Quantitative Service Analysis

Service Orientation has become popular due to dynamic market conditions and changing customer needs. A successful service oriented architecture implementation requires the need for right identification of services from business process models. Service identification is considered to be the main activity in the modeling of service oriented solution, as errors made during service identification flows down through detailed design and implementation of activities.