Leszek A. Maciaszek

Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering, ENASE 2014, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in April 2014. The 11 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers reflect a growing effort to increase the dissemination of new results among researchers and professionals related to evaluation of novel approaches to software engineering. By comparing novel approaches with established traditional practices and by evaluating them against software quality criteria, the ENASE conferences advance knowledge and research in software engineering, identify most hopeful trends, and propose new directions for consideration by researchers and practitioners involved in large-scale software development and integration.

Business System Management and Engineering

Business value networks will become increasingly important in the world’s economy in the future. Their appropriate IT support must efficiently realize business collaborations between globally spread organizations. The ability to adapt to changing market and business requirements together with the ability to reflect the business adaptations on the level of the connected ICT systems constitute key challenges for the support of business network formations. In this paper, the evolution of business trends and business process support during the last decades is briefly addressed. After the introduction of a reference model of business value networks, this paper discusses some pressing research challenges that have to be addressed to realize business value networks and their ICT system support in the future.

Adaptive Integration of Enterprise and B2B Applications

Whether application integration is internal to the enterprise or takes the form of external Business-to-Business (B2B) automation, the main integration challenge is similar – how to ensure that the integration solution has the quality of adaptiveness (i.e. it is understandable, maintainable, and scalable)? This question is hard enough for stand-alone application developments, let alone integration developments in which the developers may have little control over participating applications. This paper identifies main strategic (architectural), tactical (engineering), and operational (managerial) imperatives for buil-ding adaptiveness into solutions resulting from integration projects.

From Hubs Via Holons to an Adaptive Meta-Architecture — the “AD-HOC” Approach

The ever increasing sophistication of software systems brings with it the ever increasing danger of humans losing control over their own creations. This situation, termed the’ software crisis’, is said to have existed since the early days of software engineering and has been characterized by the inability of software developers to produce adaptive systems, This paper addresses the roots of the software crisis — the software cognitive and structural complexity and how it could be conquered through the imposition of a meta-architecture on software solutions. The meta-architecture, called PCBMER, epitomizes some important characteristics of holons and holarchies underpinning the structure and behavior of living systems.

Management of Inconsistent Information in Federated Systems

Lack of global consistency control mechanisms, replication of data and uncontrolled transfer of information among the database servers of a federated database system are the main reasons for information inconsistencies in such systems. Database models are largely incapable of handling inconsistent information and the responsibility for managing inconsistencies is transferred to the application or ”middleware” software. The paper introduces an object database model that provides for the flexible representation of a variety of inconsistent information. The model can be considered as a middleware solution to the problem. The model includes the definition of a declarative query language and the evaluation of its formulas in a database with inconsistently specified objects. Furthermore, the problems related to the elimination of redundancies and the nonloss decomposition of the inconsistent information are discussed. The decomposition reduces the complexity of inconsistently specified objects. The decomposed objects can be reconstructed and, therefore, the inconsistent information coming from a number of different sources can be consistently merged. Basic operators for the manipulation of inconsistently specified properties of objects are defined.

Architecture-Centric Software Quality Management

Software quality is a multi-faceted concept defined using different attributes and models. From all various quality requirements, the quality of adaptiveness is by far most critical. Based on this assumption, this paper offers an architecture-centric approach to production of measurably-adaptive systems. The paper uses the PCBMER (Presentation, Controller, Bean, Mediator, Entity, and Resource) meta-architecture to demonstrate how complexity of a software solution can be measured and kept under control in standalone applications. Meta-architectural extensions aimed at managing quality in integration development projects are also introduced. The DSM (Design Structure Matrix) method is used to explain our approach to measure the quality. The discussion is conducted against the background of the holonic approach to science (as the middle-ground between holism and reductionism).

Record-to-Area Mapping in the CODASYL Environment

A physical level design problem of record-to-area mapping is addressed in terms of an integrated database design methodology. A problem of gathering record usage statistics, as a prerequisite of the record-to-area mapping, is discussed. A stepwise heuristic algorithm for the record-to-area mapping in the CODASYL database environment is proposed and illustrated by an example. The iterative character of the algorithm and the necessity for the design refinements and feedbacks are exposed.

Managing Complexity of Enterprise Information Systems

The complexity of modern software is not that much in the size of systems as it is in the “wires” — in the linkages and communication paths between system components. The inter-component linkages create dependencies between distributed components that are difficult to understand and manage. The difficulty is inflated by the fact that components are frequently developed and managed by separate teams and by various component providers.

Project Failures: Continuing Challenges for Sustainable Information Systems

Much has been written and many discussions have taken place on the causes and cures of IT projects. This introspection is not a new phenomenon. It has been going on as long as industrial size IT systems became into being. The continuing reliance of businesses, government and society on such systems coupled to the realisation that only a little progress has been made in the last 20–30 years in delivering effective and efficient systems are sufficient motivations for continuing this debate. This paper is the product of such a public debate by the authors during the 2004 International Conference on Enterprise Information System. The paper focuses on four topics: ecological complexity, product complexity, project management and education.

Confluent Factors, Complexity and Resultant Architectures in Modern Software Engineering - A Case of Service Cloud Applications

There is a wealth of evidence that contemporary landscape of software development has been resisting the disciplined, rigorous, formally managed, architecture-driven, forward-engineering practices. The whole field of traditional software engineering needs a re-definition alongside the practices widely used in production of modern software systems, in particular service-oriented cloud-based applications. This paper argues that contemporary software engineering must re-focus and re-define its theoretical foundations and base it on acknowledgment that quality software and systems can (and by and large should) be constructed using principles of resultant architectures and roundtrip engineering.