Guillermo Horacio Rodríguez

Artificial intelligence in service-oriented software design

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has gained considerable popularity for the development of distributed enterprise-wide applications within the software industry. The SOA paradigm promotes the reusability and integrability of software in heterogeneous environments by means of open standards. Most software companies capitalize on SOA by discovering and composing services already accessible over the Internet, whereas other organizations need internal control of applications and develop new services with quality-attribute properties tailored to their particular environment. Therefore, based on architectural and business requirements, developers can elaborate different alternatives within a SOA framework to design their software applications. Each of these alternatives will imply trade-offs among quality attributes, such as performance, dependability and availability, among others. In this context, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can assist developers in dealing with service-oriented design with the positive impact on scalability and management of generic quality attributes. In this paper, we offer a detailed, conceptualized and synthesized analysis of AI research works that have aimed at discovering, composing, or developing services. We also identify open research issues and challenges in the aforementioned research areas. The results of the characterization of 69 contemporary approaches and potential research directions for the areas are also shown. It is concluded that AI has aimed at exploiting the semantic resources and achieving quality-attribute properties so as to produce flexible and adaptive-to-change service discovery, composition, and development.

Teaching scrum to software engineering students with virtual reality support

Scrum has received significant academic attention because of its widespread application in software development industries. Teaching agile software development can be illustrated by teaching with lecture-based classes. However, involving students in a real software environment is a trendy alternative which fosters their engagement. Software engineering graduates are not appropriately prepared for applying their skills in a real software project. Thus, we focus on teaching and integrating teamwork-oriented skills in a real software development environment based on Scrum. In this work, we present Virtual Scrum (VS), a virtual reality environment that assists students with the running of a software project following the Scrum framework. VS supports artifacts needed for carrying out Scrum meetings and media-based tools to achieve permanent communication among Scrum members. A survey of students, who used the tool in a Software Engineering (SE) course, showed that VS is helpful to exercise Scrum practices.

Unsupervised Learning for Detecting Refactoring Opportunities in Service-Oriented Applications

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has been widely used for building distributed and enterprise-wide software applications. One major problem in this kind of applications is their growth; as size and complexity of applications increase, the probability of duplicity of code increases, among other refactoring issues. This paper proposes an unsupervised learning approach to assist software developers in detecting refactoring opportunities in service-oriented applications. The approach gathers non-refactored Web Service Description Language (WSDL) documents and applies clustering and visualization techniques to deliver a list of refactoring suggestions to start working on the refactoring process. We evaluated our approach using two real-life case-studies by using internal validity criteria for the clustering quality.