Fernando Molina

A systematic review of UML model consistency management

Information System (IS) development has been beset by consistency problems since its infancy. These problems are greater still in UML software development, and are principally caused by the existence of multiple views (models) for the same system, and may involve potentially contradictory system specifications. Since a considerable amount of work takes place within the scope of model consistency management, this paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) which was carried out to discover the various current model consistency conceptions, proposals, problems and solutions provided. To do this, a total of 907 papers related to UML model consistency published in literature and extracted from the most relevant scientific sources (IEEE Computer Society, ACM Digital Library, Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, and the SCOPUS Database) were considered, of which 42 papers were eventually analyzed. This systematic literature review resulted in the identification of the current state-of-the-art with regard to UML model consistency management research along with open issues, trends and future research within this scope. A formal approach for the handling of inconsistency problems which fulfils the identified limitations is also briefly presented.

Integrating usability requirements that can be evaluated in design time into Model Driven Engineering of Web Information Systems

In recent years, Web Engineering development projects have grown increasingly complex for and critical to the smooth running of organizations. However, recent studies reveal that a high percentage of these projects fail to attain the quality parameters required by stakeholders. The inadequate consideration of requirements management activities together with the absence of attention to the elicitation and evaluation of requirements and metrics related to certain quality attributes which are of special importance in this kind of systems, such as usability, have proved to be some of the main causes of this failure. This paper attempts to reduce some of the quality failures detected in Web Engineering development projects by proposing the consideration and evaluation of quality attributes from early stages of the development process. The presented approach therefore commences with a reinforcement of the requirements related activities in this discipline, which is carried out by using a requirements metamodel. Once these requirements have been identified, the approach focuses on the extension of the conceptual models used by Web Engineering methodologies with the aim of allowing the explicit consideration of usability requirements along with the evaluation of quality metrics during the design of the system. An example of an application illustrating how the approach can be used, along with the automatic support which was developed for it, are also shown.

Modelling Web-Based Systems Requirements Using WRM

In recent years, Web Information Systems (WIS) development projects have grown increasingly complex and critical for the smooth running of the organizations. However, recent studies reveal that a high percentage of web-based development projects miss the quality parameters required by stakeholders, most of the time due to an incorrect requirements management. In this paper, we try to increase the weight of requirements engineering activities in Web Engineering, and propose a web engineering requirements metamodel extension that can be smoothly integrated with existing web engineering proposals in order to reinforce the first phases of systematic web development. Our proposal is accompanied by a tool that, being developed as an Eclipse plug-in, can also be integrated with any existing web engineering methodology developed under this general framework.

Precise wis development

In recent years, Internet has become the platform that supports most areas in organizations. This fact has led to the appearance of specific tools for the construction of Web Information Systems (WIS). However, in these tools an absence of functionalities for verification and validation (V&V) of the models built has been detected. This work aims to redress this absence with the definition of a strategy for the specification of the models used in the WIS development that can be used with V&V objectives. The approach has been validated in a specific methodology (MIDAS) and an associated tool (MIDAS-CASE), both aligned with the MDA proposal. One of the diagrams used in this methodology has been formalized: the extended navigation model, achieving a precise specification of this diagram. This specification permits the definition and formal verification of properties related to this diagram, as well as its validation. The specification and verification of a concrete property are also shown.

Towards a Requirements-Aware Common Web Engineering Metamodel

In recent years, Web engineering development projects have grown increasingly complex and critical for the smooth running of the organizations. However, recent studies reveal that, due to an incorrect requirements management, a high percentage of these projects miss the quality parameters required by stakeholders. Despite this, current Web Engineering methodologies continue focusing on web design features, thus limiting the Requirements Engineering tasks to the elicitation of high-level functional requirements. This fact has caused a requirements-support gap in the recently proposed Common Web Engineering Metamodel. This paper tries to cover this gap and proposes a requirements extension for this Common Web Engineering metamodel that supports measurable requirements. The reinforcement of the role that requirements play in current Web engineering methodologies, and their explicit connection with quantitative measures that contribute to their fulfilment, is a necessary step in order to reduce some of the quality failures detected in Web engineering development projects, thus increasing the satisfaction of their users.

A generic approach to improve navigational model usability based upon requirements and metrics

In recent years, the fast evolution of Internet and the Web has caused an exponential increase in the number of Web Information Systems (WIS) developed. This has led to the appearance of a new discipline, Web Engineering, which has served as a framework for the development of numerous methodologies and tools which seek to contribute to the development of WIS with the quality parameters required by their users. Among the quality attributes of a WIS are accessibility, usability and the easy of navigation offered by the system. These attributes are usually analyzed when the WIS has been developed, using strategies like the analysis of the HTML code of the WIS or the evaluation of the system by a group of users. This paper presents a proposal to extend the models used in the methodologies for WIS development and to define a set of quality metrics so that modelers can consider usability requirements during WIS modelling. The automatic support for this proposal and the metamodel extension necessary for its integration into the existing methodologies for WIS development are also presented.