Eman S. Nasr

A Requirements Elicitation Approach for Cloud Based Software Product Line ERPs

Implementing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in business organizations aims to integrate all business units of an organization. Configuring and customizing ERP systems are the main challenges that face the implementation process. ERP systems contain many similar modules and units which can be implemented for most of the ERP systems. Software Product Lines (SPLs) as a trend in software engineering is very promising, as it can offer a lot of facilities and benefits for all types of stakeholders. Building SPLs for ERP systems will affect the implementation process of ERP systems and will increase the flexibility of configuration and customization. Moreover, moving ERPs to the cloud will facilitate the implementation process and will affect the Return On Investment (ROI) due to scalability plans in cloud services. This research introduces an SPLs requirements elicitation approach for cloud ERP systems. This approach combines the principles of SPLs with ERP systems in the cloud environment.

Appraisal and Analysis of Various Self-Adaptive Web Service Composition Approaches

Service-Oriented Requirements Engineering (SORE ) plays a significant role in eliciting, specifying, and validating service requirements that will be developed by Web service technology . With the increasing complexity of users’ requirements, Web services need to be combined together to fulfill them. The process of building new value-added services by integrating sets of existing Web services to satisfy users’ requirements is called Web Service Composition (WSC). The main objective of WSC is to develop composite services to satisfy users’ requirements, which does not only include Functional Requirements (FR), but also Non-Functional Requirements (NFR). One of the main challenges of WSC is how it deals with dynamic environments. Since the Web service properties and composition requirements are frequently changeable, this demands that SORE activities must be equipped with a self-adaptation mechanism to provide the most appropriate composite services and satisfy users’ requirements emerged. Self-adaptation occurs in either a proactive or reactive manner. In this chapter, we appraise and analyze existing reactive adaptation research that deals with the problem of WSC in a dynamic environment in order to identify the research gaps in this field. These approaches are classified into three categories: used of variability models, context-awareness, and multi-agent approaches. Most of these approaches are not able to deal with continuous and unanticipated changes in complex uncertain contexts because they need to define the contexts in design time. It is usually difficult to predict all of the possible situations that might arise in an uncertain environment.

Automating Requirements Elicitation of Cloud-Based ERPs

Cloud computing (CC) imposed its presence in various domains as a computing model based on what it offers for enterprises. ERP systems as a domain is one of the beneficiary domains of SaaS applications. Eliciting requirements for cloud ERP systems is a challenging process due to the complex nature of ERP systems in addition to the distributed nature of CC. Most of the current techniques for eliciting ERP requirements do not take into consideration working in cloud environments. This paper is concerned with automating the requirements elicitation process for cloud-based ERPs. It also presents an interactive prototype to be used in a distributed environment, which uses the principals of the Form-Based Model (FBM). We use a real-life case study to demonstrate the automation process.

Serious Educational Games’ Ontologies: A Survey and Comparison

Serious Educational Games (SEGs) are games not having a mere purpose of entertainment. They benefit from the main characteristics of games, such as engagement and immersiveness to achieve pedagogic objectives. In spite of the promising results of SEGs reported in the literature, their analysis and design still require complex tasks that incorporate game design activities within an educational context. Ontologies that include concepts, relations, and governing rules for both games and education domains could offer an approach to solve such problem. An ontology, as a domain modeling tool, could be used as a meta-model to guide a SEG designer, in addition to bridging the communication gap between the game design and pedagogic domains. This paper presents a survey of available ontologies for SEGs in the literature, in addition to comparing them. We managed to find only two SEGs’ ontologies and a meta-model in the literature, and hence presented and compared them. After presenting the survey, and result analysis and general comparison, we followed an ontologies’ comparison method called OntoMetric for further evaluation of the current SEGs’ ontologies. Our research results revealed that SEGs’ ontologies in the literature have two main diverse perspectives. One perspective intensively focuses on the game domain concepts, and the other perspective focuses on the pedagogic domain concepts. In addition, there is little proof that a comprehensive web-based SEGs ontology, which is characterized by completion, consistency, and reusability exists.

A Requirements Elicitation Tool for Cloud-Based ERP Software Product Line

Software Product Line (SPL) 1 is a very promising trend of software reusability. It could be applied in different fields in order to enhance and facilitate the software development process. In the last years, SPLs have broken into Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. An increasing need showed up for techniques, approaches and tools that combine SPL with ERP. Cloud ERP systems offer many benefits for Small and Medium Enterprises (SME). Managing the requirements elicitation process for Cloud ERP SPLs is a challenging process that faces many difficulties, such as the indirect interaction and the larger context of the target consumers. Facilitating the requirements elicitation process for cloud-based ERP SPLs by using automated tools will help to solve the faced difficulties. To the best of our knowledge, in the context of ERP SPLs, there are no tools for eliciting the requirements of cloud--based ERP SPLs nor even for ERP SPL. This paper exploits the advantages of the Form-Based Model (FBM) as a conceptual model to integrate it with cloud based ERP SPL. In addition, based on this integration, the paper presents a tool for eliciting the requirements of cloud-based ERP SPLs

Implementing an ERP System in an Egyptian Research Center: Lessons from Practice

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)1 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are widely implemented in all enterprises in different domains nowadays. They work on managing an enterprises data in a single central place. Their implementation is a challenging process that faces many difficulties. It is affected by many factors, such as an organizations size, and type, in addition to the culture of the people. Critical Success Factors (CSFs) became widely used to evaluate the success of an implementation process. This short paper briefly presents the fulfillment of CSFs in implementing an ERP system in one of the Egyptian research centers.

CrowdSWD: A Novel Framework for Crowdsourcing Software Development Inspired by the Concept of Biological Metaphor

Crowdsourcing software development is a broad term that describes large-scale distributed systems that comprise many computing elements, each of which may have their own individual characteristics, objectives, and actions. Our society increasingly depends on such systems, in which collections of heterogeneous computing elements are tightly entangled with human and social structures to plan collective intelligence. The premise of this research is that existing frameworks for crowdsourcing software development are not powerful enough to cover large classes of aspects-relevant problems. To address this, we explored one instance of system development life cycle, which can be used to solve those problems. The outputs were in the form of (1) mechanisms for modeling the crowdsourcing software that empowers a crowd socially to solve complex problems that require effective management among participants with relevant abilities and limitations, (2) modeling supportive environments for crowdsourcing software, (3) modeling an adaptive engine that learns relevant characteristics of participants based on observations of their behavior and learned models, and (4) designing 34 heterogeneous computing elements that can be used in crowdsourcing software. A single experimental study, presented in this chapter, provides a richness of data and can lead to a deep understanding of a phenomenon in a single context.

A New Hybrid Approach Using Genetic Algorithm and Q-learning for QoS-aware Web Service Composition

Web Service composition (WSC) is a technology for building an application in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). In WSC the sets of atomic Web services combine together to satisfy users’ requirements. Due to the increase in number of Web services with the same functionality and variety of Quality of Services (QoS), it became difficult to find a suitable Web service that satisfies the functional requirements, as well as optimizing the QoS. This has led to the emergence of QoS-aware WSC. However, to find an optimal solution in QoS-aware WSC is an NP-hard problem. In this paper, we propose a new approach that combines the use of Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Q-learning to find the optimal WSC. The performance of GAs depends on the initial population, so the Q-learning is utilized to generate the initial population to enhance the effectiveness of GA. We implemented our approach over the .NET Framework platform 4.7 using C# programming language. The experiment results show the effectiveness of our proposed approach compared to Q-learning algorithm and GA.

Use of Arabic Sentiment Analysis for Mobile Applications’ Requirements Evolution: Trends and Challenges

The rapidly increasing volume of reviews for the different mobile applications (apps) makes it almost impossible to analyze user feedback reviews manually. Reviews can contain star ratings, emotions, and text reviews for a proposed feature, a bug report, and/or a confidentiality protest. Stakeholders can benefit from reviews after analyzing them using Sentiment Analysis (SA) as user requirements, ideas for improvements, user sentiments about specific features, and descriptions of experiences with these features. This paper investigates the field of research of using Arabic SA for mobile apps’ requirements evolution. We assembled answers from the literature for four Research Questions (RQs) we formulated. The results revealed three main points. First, the use of SA trends in general for mobile apps’ requirements evolution research can be grouped to automating extraction of future requirements, applying ranking frameworks to classify reviews to informative and non-informative, and proposing visualization techniques for users’ feedback. Second, there turned to be many current challenges that face the field of using Arabic SA for user comments of mobile apps’ requirements evolution because of the inherent challenges of three intersecting fields. Finally, there is little proof that there is any study conducted till now that applies the use of Arabic SA on user comments of mobile apps for the purpose of requirements evolution.

Enhancing requirements prioritization based on a hybrid technique

There are several requirements prioritization (RP) techniques in software development systems. RP problem is mainly a type of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problems. However, selecting an appropriate RP method in a certain situation must subject to a number of evaluation criteria and performance measures. This includes scalability, uncertainty, time consumption and complexity. In this paper, a hybrid-based RP method is proposed. The proposed method is based on a hybrid combination of both of cumulative voting and decision-weighted matrix techniques. The results of an illustrative multiple goals example ensures clarity, simplicity and efficacy of the proposed method.