Ernst Ellmer

A learning component for workflow management systems

In order to compete in todays rapidly changing business environments, an organization has to be able to continuously adjust to new requirements and situations. Two strategies towards achieving this goal are organizational memory and organizational learning. At an abstract level, organizational memory means to store and manage the information an enterprise acquires during performance of their business processes. Organizational learning on the other hand means to use this information in order to continuously improve the knowledge about business performance. The topic of the paper is the support of organizational memory and organizational learning by workflow management systems (WFMSs). A WFMS implements the process definition/instantiation/enactment paradigm and thus relies on an explicit representation of knowledge about how to perform business processes. The authors propose the storing, managing and reuse of this knowledge in order to realize a learning organization.

Evaluating workflow management systems

We describe a project focusing on the evaluation of workflow management systems for a large Austrian bank. In the first part we establish a catalogue of evaluation criteria. It summarizes the huge amount of criteria into smaller classes (criteria categories) and orders the classes in a semantically structured directory. In the second part, we describe a tool implementing the evaluation framework. A database stores the criteria classes along with associated questions as well as the appropriate answers for a set of workflow products. The tool allows to extend the database as well as to perform a customized evaluation process. In the third part of the paper, we describe some of the results of using the tool for evaluating workflow management systems for the First Austrian Savings Bank.

Neural Network Technology to Support View Integration

The most difficult and time consuming activity to perform during view integration is to find correspondences between different view specifications. Such correspondences may be the source for conflicts when integrating the views and thus must be detected and resolved. A manual inspection of the class definitions in each view and a comparison with each class definition in the other views may result in an almost endless process. To support a designer we propose a computerized tool to extract the semantics from view definitions, to transform them into a unique vector representation of each class, and to use the class vectors to train a neural network in order to determine categories of classes. The output of the tool is a ‘first guess’ which concepts in views may be overlapping or which concepts do not overlap at all. This may be of tremendous value because the designers are relieved from manual inspection of all the classes and can direct their focus on classes grouped into the same category.

Extending Process-Centered Environments with Organizational Competence

The baseline of this paper is a process-driven approach to software engineering supported by a process-centered environment. We plead for the extension of PSEEs with organizational competence for two reasons. First, software process improvement relies on the organizational environment within which processes are performed. Second, a PSEE needs organizational knowledge in order to realize its process management potential. The organizational competence of a PSEE has to take into account the special characteristics of software development, namely the existence of a dynamic process-oriented organization between static organization and process. We propose different functional components for extending PSEEs with organizational competence. An organizational modeling approach is needed as well as functionality to manage process team models and process team population. Team modeling and team population has to rely on process progress according to the process model. Furthermore, we propose an agent management function in order to manage agent — activity associations for process performance. Last but not least, we suggest an evolution function to adjust team model and population to changing processes.

Automatic Classification of Semantic Concepts in View Specifications

The design of large database systems often is done by a large number of analysts with different perspectives on the problem domain. That is why the integration of multiple views in database design is a task of tremendous importance. In this paper we report on our experience in using a view comparison tool based on neural network technology. The tool automatically extracts semantic concepts from different view specifications and then transforms them into a vector representation understandable by a neural network. The network is trained and thus performs the job of clustering similar concepts. The output of our tool is a ‘first guess’ which concepts in views may overlap or which concepts do not overlap at all. The two main contributions of our tool thus are first, that the designer is relieved from the burden of manually comparing each semantic concept of the different view specifications, and second, that human interference into the view comparison process is minimized to the specification of views and the interpretation of concept clusters.

Classifying software process models based on natural language descriptions

Reuse of the valuable knowledge gained through the realization of software projects is an important step in overcoming well-known problems of the software industry such as wrong schedules and cost estimations, low productivity, and low product quality. To promote this kind of reuse the authors propose an approach relying on an explicit representation of the software processes by process descriptions and to organize and classify them in a software process library for further use within software projects. A process description is divided into an informal process definition document and a formal process model. The process definition document constitutes the basis for the classification process that is performed by using an artificial neural network. They present an exposition of their approach and discuss the promising results of a case study in structuring a software process library.

Defining a set of criteria for the assessment of tool support for CMM-based software process improvement

Researchers as well as practitioners agree that the quality of a software product relies to a high degree on the quality of the software process. Therefore recent research efforts in software engineering focus on software process assessment and improvement (SPAI). Numerous approaches like the CMM, Bootstrap, SPICE, AMI were developed. An important factor influencing success and progress of the implementation of a SPAI approach in an organization is its software engineering tools environment. The aim of the paper is to determine a set of criteria concerning the assessment of the suitability of a tools environment for the promotion of CMM-based SPAI. We base our investigations on the 316 CMM Key Practices. We structure them according to the issues they address. For each issues cluster we determine the functionality to be provided and artifacts to be managed by a tool as assessment criteria. The degree of fulfillment of a certain criteria depends on if and how the associated function or artifact is provided. Our investigations result in the definition of 12 evaluation criteria. Examples are the necessity to provide computerized process representations or to provide meta process support like process monitoring or process evolution. After defining the criteria we determine their importance for reaching the CMM Maturity Levels and for supporting the Key Practices associated to the CMM Common Features.

Considerations for an organizational memory in software development

We believe that the efficiency and productivity of software development processes can be dramatically increased by making the knowledge gained during past projects persistent and thus reusable for future projects. We plead for the establishment of a computer supported organizational memory for software development organizations. Furthermore, we feel that the accelerated growth of software process modeling techniques provides a convenient equipment for the realization of what we propose. A process model is an explicit representation of process knowledge and may thus serve as a means for storing and retrieving organizational knowledge about software process execution. Thus, we argue for reusing software process models. An organizational memory for software development organizations may be implemented by populating and structuring a process model library and providing mechanisms for retrieving and tailoring process models in order to apply them during the execution (management) of projects.