Hye-young Paik

Using Scrum in Global Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review

There is a growing interest in applying agile practices in Global Software Development (GSD) projects. The literature on using Scrum, one of the most popular agile approaches, in distributed development projects has steadily been growing. However, there has not been any effort to systematically select, review, and synthesize the literature on this topic. We have conducted a systematic literature review of the primary studies that report using Scrum practices in GSD projects. Our search strategy identified 366 papers, of which 20 were identified as primary papers relevant to our research. We extracted data from these papers to identify various challenges of using Scrum in GSD. Current strategies to deal with the identified challenges have also been extracted. This paper presents the review’s findings that are expected to help researchers and practitioners to understand the challenges involved in using Scrum for GSD projects and the strategies available to deal with them.

Data integration in mashups

Mashup is a new application development approach that allows users to aggregate multiple services to create a service for a new purpose. Even if the Mashup approach opens new and broader opportunities for data/service consumers, the development process still requires the users to know not only how to write code using programming languages, but also how to use the different Web APIs from different services. In order to solve this problem, there is increasing effort put into developing tools which are designed to support users with little programming knowledge in Mashup applications development. The objective of this study is to analyze the richnesses and weaknesses of the Mashup tools with respect to the data integration aspect.

Semantic-Based Mashup of Composite Applications

The need for integration of all types of client and server applications that were not initially designed to interoperate is gaining popularity. One of the reasons for this popularity is the capability to quickly reconfigure a composite application for a task at hand, both by changing the set of components and the way they are interconnected. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has recently become a popular platform in the IT industry for building such composite applications with the integrated components being provided as Web services. A key limitation of solely Web-service-based integration is that it requires extra programming efforts when integrating non-Web service components, which is not cost-effective. Moreover, with the emergence of new standards, such as Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi), the components used in composite applications have grown to include more than just Web services. Our work enables progressive composition of non-Web-service-based components such as portlets, Web applications, native widgets, legacy systems, and Java Beans. Further, we proposed a novel application of semantic annotation together with the standard semantic Web matching algorithm for finding sets of functionally equivalent components out of a large set of available non-Web-service-based components. Once such a set is identified, the user can drag and drop the most suitable component into an Eclipse-based composition canvas. After a set of components has been selected in such a way, they can be connected by data-flow arcs, thus forming an integrated, composite application without any low-level programming and integration efforts. We implemented and conducted extensive experimental study on the above progressive composition framework on IBMs Lotus Expeditor, an extension of an SOA platform called the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) that complies with the OSGi standard.

Risk Identification and Mitigation Processes for Using Scrum in Global Software Development: A Conceptual Framework

There is growing interest in applying agile practices in Global Software Development (GSD) projects. But project stakeholder distribution in GSD creates a number of challenges that make it difficult to use some agile practices. Moreover, little is known about what the key challenges or risks are, and how GSD project mangers deal with these risks while using agile practices. We conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) following existing guidelines to identify primary papers that discuss the use of Scrum practices in GSD projects. We identify key challenges, due to global project distribution, that restrict the use of Scrum and explore the strategies used by project managers to deal with these challenges. Our findings are consolidated into a conceptual framework and we discuss various elements of this framework. This research is relevant to project managers who are seeking ways to use Scrum in their globally distributed projects.

Peer-to-Peer Traced Execution of Composite Services

The connectivity generated by the Internet is opening unprecedented opportunities of automating business-to-business collaborations. As a result, organisations of all sizes are forming online alliances in order to deliver integrated value-added services. Unfortunately, due to a lack of tools and methodologies offering an adequate level of abstraction, the development of these integrated services is currently ad hoc and requires a considerable effort of low-level programming, especially when dealing with coordination, communication, and execution tracing issues. In this paper, we present a framework through which business services can be declaratively composed, and the resulting composite services can be executed in a fully traceable manner. The traces of a composite service executions are collected incrementally through peer-to-peer interactions between the involved providers. Once collected, these traces are stored as linked objects in distributed repositories, which are made available for auditing, customer feedback and quality assessment.

Towards semantic-driven, flexible and scalable framework for peering and querying e-catalog communities

Given that e-catalogs are often autonomous and heterogeneous, effectively integrating and querying them is a delicate and time-consuming task. More importantly, the number of e-catalogs to be integrated and queried may be large and continuously changing. Conventional approaches where the development of an integrated e-catalog requires the understanding of each of the underlying catalog are inappropriate. In this paper, we use the concept of e-catalog communities and peer relationships among them to facilitate the querying of a potentially large number of dynamic e-catalogs. E-catalog communities are essentially containers of related e-catalogs. We propose a flexible and user-centric query matching algorithm that exploits both community descriptions and peer relationships to find e-catalogs that best match a user query. The user query is formulated using a description of a given community.

Formal consistency verification between BPEL process and privacy policy

Despite the increased privacy concerns in the Internet, not much attention has been paid into enforcing privacy policies of organisations who collect and consume personal data using automatic means (e.g., Web services). In this paper, we propose a graph-transformation based framework to check whether an internal business process (implemented using a standard Web service composition language such as BPEL) adheres to the organisations privacy policies. The graph-based specification formalism combines the advantages of an intuitive visual framework with rigorous semantical foundation that allows consistency checking between a business process and privacy policy. The privacy consistency verification framework is defined by a set of rules to build the system state and sets of constraints (positive and negative) to specify the wanted and unwanted substates.

Toward self-organizing service communities

This paper discusses a framework in which catalog service communities are built, linked for interaction, and constantly monitored and adapted over time. A catalog service community (represented as a peer node in a peer-to-peer network) in our system can be viewed as domain specific data integration mediators representing the domain knowledge and the registry information. The query routing among communities is performed to identify a set of data sources that are relevant to answering a given query. The system monitors the interactions between the communities to discover patterns that may lead to restructuring of the network (e.g., irrelevant peers removed, new relationships created, etc.).

Bill Organiser Portal: A Case Study on End-User Composition

Whilst Web services can be composed by technical developers using a language such as BPEL, there is no easy way for non-technical end users to take advantage of these services. The advent of Web 2.0 and mashups has brought about the notion that content from different sources can be brought together by the user themselves to create a new service. Inspired by such ideas, we propose a lightweight end-user service composition paradigm, namely; Stones, Storiesand StoryBoard. A Stone is a representation of a commonly performed task or operation that can be used to construct a Story. StoryBoardprovides an intuitive drag-and-drop style user environment in which the Stories are created, validated and run. We demonstrate the concept through an implementation of a case study on bill management.

Form-Based Web Service Composition for Domain Experts

In many cases, it is not cost effective to automate business processes which affect a small number of people and/or change frequently. We present a novel approach for enabling domain experts to model and deploy such processes from their respective domain as Web service compositions. The approach builds on user-editable service, naming and representing Web services as forms. On this basis, the approach provides a visual composition language with a targeted restriction of control-flow expressivity, process simulation, automated process verification mechanisms, and code generation for executing orchestrations. A Web-based service composition prototype implements this approach, including a WS-BPEL code generator. A small lab user study with 14 participants showed promising results for the usability of the system, even for nontechnical domain experts.