Ivonne Erfurth

A Look at Typical Difficulties in Practical Software Development from the Developer Perspective--A Field Study and a First Solution Proposal with UPEX

In the first part of this paper we summarize the results of a questionnaire for software professionals which we, the Software Engineering Group at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, handed out to (local) small and medium-sized IT businesses. The questionnaire targeted the true state of the art in practical software development with a focus on questions regarding the benefits and drawbacks of standard methodologies and all forms of user participation in such an environment. Especially interesting for us was the degree of customer integration into the development process, the understandability of used notations from the developer and user perspective, and the possible reasons for difficulties in the interaction between customer and developer teams. In the second part we present a first look at the UPEX methodology which takes into account the results of the questionnaire

Towards business alignment of IT services in universities: Challenges in elicitations of requirements for IT services

Universities tackle with requirement elicitation for suitable IT support. The integration of stakeholders is challenging. Furthermore, business processes in administration, education and research of universities are not available for all subjects or not with necessary details. IT departments work in traditional ways to provide IT systems. A coupling between university governance and IT organization with regard to content is missing mostly. IT frameworks like ITIL and COBIT are promising to achieve an alignment of the IT to business demands. However, the frameworks need an adaption to university contexts. Furthermore a cultural change might be necessary to enable universities for the application of such frameworks - an organizational development of IT might help as well as the introduction of IT service management and IT governance.

Customer-oriented development of complex distributed systems

Complex and distributed systems are more and more common. Hardware is going from strength to strength and is embedded in high performance peer-to-peer networks mostly. The task of a software engineer is to develop software systems which are able to take part in these new possibilities. Hereby, the drawback is the simple fact that such software systems and their modeling are getting more and more complex. If we are looking at the difficulties between customer and developer teams, especially misunderstandings between both, then the challenge to model customer oriented systems is even higher. For customers, it is hard to understand the frequently used terms, process models, and technological concepts. Developers have a hard time to understand domain specific processes and structures, and exhibit a tendency to abstract concrete examples to higher level constructs. These problems are especially hard to avoid during the development of dynamic, distributed systems with multiple nodes and possibly asynchronous behavior. In our research, we develop a customer-friendly reference model to demonstrate the aspects of dynamic distributed systems understandable to the customer. This model presents and simulates the dynamic aspects of (distributed) systems without immediate abstraction from examples and allows for a stepwise generalization and evaluation with help of the customer team. In its final version the reference model serves as a requirements statement for the professional developer