Hugo Estrada

An empirical evaluation of the i * framework in a model-based software generation environment

Organizational modelling has been found to be very effective in facilitating the elicitation of requirements for organizational information systems. In this context, the i* modelling framework has been used widely in research and – some – industrial projects. However, no empirical evaluation exists to-date to identify areas of strength as well as weaknesses of the framework. This paper presents the results of an empirical evaluation of i* using industrial case studies. These were conducted in collaboration with an industrial partner who employs an object-oriented and model-driven approach for software development. The evaluation of i* uses a feature-based framework. The paper reports on lessons learned from this experience, both in terms of strengths and detected weaknesses. The results of this evaluation can play an important role in guiding extensions of the i* framework.

Goal-Based Business Modeling Oriented towards Late Requirements Generation *

Recently, a lot of research efforts in software engineering have focused on integrating business modeling as a key piece in requirements engineering. In these research works, the business models are proposed as the source of the software requirements specification process. However, the majority of these works focus only on the definition of notations that permit the representation of the semantics of the organizational context, and only a few works define processes to generate business models and to use these to generate a requirements model. This lack of both generation methods and traceability relationships between models makes practical application in software development enterprises difficult. The objective of this paper is to define a goal-based methodological approach for the generation of business models and to use these models as the starting point for the process of software requirements specification. This will enable us to develop information systems that integrate the necessary functionality so that the business actors perform their tasks and fulfill their goals.

Conceptual Model Generation from Requirements Model: A Natural Language Processing Approach

In the conceptual modeling stage of the object-oriented development process, the requirements model is analyzed in order to establish the static structure (conceptual model) and dynamic structure (sequence diagrams, state diagrams) of the future system. The analysis is done manually by a requirements engineer, based upon his experience, the systems domain and certain rules of extraction of classes, objects, methods and properties. However, this task could get complicated when large systems are developed. For this reason, a method to automatically generate a conceptual model from the systems textual descriptions of the use case scenarios in Spanish language is presented. Techniques of natural language processing (NLP) and conceptual graphs are used as the basis of the method. The advantage of the proposed method, in comparison to other approaches [1, 2, 3], is that it makes exhaustive use of natural language techniques to face the text analysis. This allows us to consider text with a certain level of ambiguity and to cover relevant linguistic aspects, like composition of nouns, and verbal periphrases.

From early requirements to user interface prototyping: a methodological approach

The objective of this paper is to define a software production process which represents the correspondence between the primitive elements of a business model (represented in the framework i*) and the user interface of the software system. The representation of the user interface is compliant with the Unified Model Language (UML). We use a use case model as an intermediary between the business requirements and the application software. By doing this, we go a step further in the process of properly embedding early requirements engineering into the software production process, because organizational users can validate their requirements as early as possible. This is done through the validation of the user interfaces which are generated as a software representation of these requirements. These interfaces can also be reused for further refinement as a useful starting point in the software development process.

Extending organizational modeling with business services concepts: an overview of the proposed architecture

Nowadays, there is wide consensus on the importance of organizational modelling in the definition of software systems that correctly address business needs. Accordingly, there exist many modelling techniques that capture business semantics from different perspectives: transactional, goal-oriented, aspect-oriented, value-oriented etc. However, none of these proposals accounts for the service nature of most business organizations, nor of the growing importance of service orientation in computing. In this paper, an overview of a new business service-oriented modeling approach, that extends the i* framework, is presented as a solution to this problem. The proposed modeling approach enables analysts to represent an organizational model as a composition of business services, which are the basic building blocks that encapsulate a set of business process models. In these models the actors participate in actor dependency networks through interfaces defined in the business service specification.

Considering Technology Representation in Service-Oriented Business Models

Technology representation at the conceptual level is a key component in the process of producing a business model that explicitly represents the integration between business processes and technological components that give support to these processes. However, not all current business models are well-equipped to represent this business-technology integration. In this paper, a first approach to deal with technology representation in i business process models is presented, which focuses on the identification of quality attributes that are offered by specific technologies, and the representation of these technologies using a particular class of i module. This approach is exemplified by a library organization, in which an automatic identification technology is required to support some specific business processes. This example is used along this paper to show the proposed approach and explore its potential benefits.

Using a Goal-Refinement Tree to Obtain and Refine Organizational Requirements

At present, the organizational requirements are considered to be one of the most important aspects in the development of information systems. Many research efforts in software engineering have focused on integrating organizational modeling as a key piece in requirements engineering. However, the majority of these works focus only on the definition of notations that permit the representation of the semantics of the organizational context, and only a few works define processes that use these notations in a methodological way. This lack of a methodological process for generating organizational models makes practical application in software development enterprises difficult. The objective of this paper is to present a goal-based method to obtain and refine organizational requirements. These requirements are used to validate the understanding of the organizational process before constructing the information system. This will enable us to develop information systems that integrate the necessary functionality so that the organizational actors perform their tasks and fulfill their goals.

A Systematic Review of Proposals for the Social Integration of Elderly People Using Ambient Intelligence and Social Networking Sites

Providing solutions to current issues associated with an aging population has become a major challenge for the scientific community. In late adulthood, social isolation issues are the most frequent and the most threatening for the independent living and cognitive health of elderly adults. In this context, ambient intelligence (AmI) and social networking sites (SNSs) can promote independent living and social integration, improve their health, reduce the chances for developing cognitive decline, and ultimately prevent earlier death. The aim of this paper was to review the literature about how AmI and SNS technologies have been applied in the social integration of elderly adults. Therefore, a systematic review was conducted, which analyzed and classified computational approaches to address the issues of social isolation and social integration of elderly adults. This study revealed a wide variety of research works that are based on AmI and SNS technologies to keep older adults socially active. The paper also identifies the main technological resources and strategies to encourage social integration in this segment of the population. We concluded that this research field is still emerging and there is room for significant contributions.

Incorporating technology in service-oriented i* business models: a case study

In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to enterprise information systems. This interest is motivated by the need for achieving better integration of new technologies (hardware and software) with the business processes of an organization. Business processes have become more and more dependent on technologies because technology has a direct impact on business processes, changing the way they are performed and thus also affecting the way analysts design the software system. However, at the present time, there are still some gaps between the definition of business processes and the technologies used in the organization. In practice, organizations have carried out their business processes using different technologies; however, it is sometimes not possible to determine how technologies are useful in achieving current business goals. This is because business models do not explicitly consider the technologies in the organizational requirements. The goal of this paper is to present a systematic process for integrating business processes and technologies at the conceptual level. To validate our approach, we present a case study that describes the processes of the inventory management department of a public research center.

Predictive Model for Detection of Depression Based on Uncertainty Analysis Methods

: Currently, advances in technology have permitted increases in the life expectancy of older adults. As a result, a large segment of the world population is 60’s years old, and over. Depression is an important disease in older adults is depression, which seriously affects the moods and behavior of elderly. Novel technologies for smart cities allow us to monitor people and prevent problematic situations related to this mental illness. In this paper, we propose a predictive model to automatically detect depression in older adults. The model is based on machine-learning techniques to analyze the data obtained by a sensor that monitores the daily activities of older adults. Also, the model was evaluated obtaining promising results.