Liziane Santos Soares

An Infrastructure Oriented for Cataloging Services and Reuse of Analysis Patterns

Patterns have been employed as a mechanism for reuse in several phases of software development. Analysis patterns consist of artifacts for reuse during the requirements analysis and conceptual modeling. However, they are generally, documented in a textual manner which is not precise to be treated by a computer, thus limiting the dissemination and a wider reuse. Within the geo-processing area, Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) has been used quite effectively as an instrument for the reuse of geospatial data and services. Based on the development of SDIs, this article proposes an Analysis Patterns Reuse Infrastructure (APRI) comprising web services and a metadata representation for the specification of analysis patterns, in order to support the cataloging and reusing of analysis patterns.

Selection of Software Development Good Practices in Micro and Small Enterprises: An Approach Using Knowledge-Based Systems

Currently, companies should turn their attention to the increasing market competition. The quality of their products is directly related to the organizational processes that should be well defined and adopted. Regarding software, it is important that the choice of a development method is aimed at matching organization needs and its production culture. The micro and small enterprises face many problems and one of the largest ones is the lack of policies that can help improving development processes. This paper presents and describes a knowledge-based system that is able to suggest a set of good practices in software development that closely match company needs and culture represented as a profile. The work exposed here is an initial step towards an automation process for the selection of good practices based on a company profile.

A Dublin core application profile for documenting analysis patterns in a reuse infrastructure

Analysis patterns are reusable computational artefacts aimed at the analysis stage of the software development process. Although analysis patterns can facilitate the work of analysts and developers, the access to them is still very poor because of the way they are usually described and made available. In order to reduce these limitations as well as to support the cataloguing and to encourage the reuse of analysis patterns, the Analysis Patterns Reuse Infrastructure (APRI) was proposed. This infrastructure comprises a repository of analysis patterns documented through a specific metadata profile that can be accessed via web services. Based on the proposal of APRI, this paper introduces a machine-processable metadata profile suited to the documentation of analysis patterns, called Dublin Core Application Profile for Analysis Patterns (DC2AP). This metadata profile is described by RDF files identified via URI, thus providing linked data that increase the potential for reusing the analysis patterns.

Selection of good practices for small software development teams: a knowledge-based approach

The world is increasingly dependent on technology and computing systems. Software organizations are facing a highly competitive market, and thus seeking good practices and processes that help keep them competitive. The quality of their products becomes a differentiating factor and is directly associated with these processes. The software products they deliver play a major role in this competitive scenario, to which small organizations do not have easy access. Our study is directed to those small and micro-organizations that lack the necessary financial assets to hire people, adopt and implement expensive processes, or even implement good development practices. In this paper we present our approach to help those organizations find good practices to enhance their software development processes. The method consisted of obtaining a possible company profile based on technical attributes, given as input to a knowledge-based system that derived a list of possible practices to be adopted according to that profile. Then project managers can select those more suitable to the companys present demands, and implement them in smaller steps according to the organization maturity levels. The approach was currently tested in two organizations that are by now implementing the suggested practices. The proposed system is freely available through the internet.

Ontology based software development good practices selection for adoption in micro-enterprises

This paper describes an applied research project developed at Departamento de Informática - Universidade Federal de Viçosa - Brazil, focused on the adoption of software development best practices in micro and small enterprises (MSE) of software, that usually do not have enough professionals, time and budget to target any CMMI levels. The question we tried to answer positively is: how can those companies reach international quality levels in small steps, in order to eventually, lead them to a CMMI levels? Our tested solution consists of an approach that allows the selection of best practices well suited to this kind of enterprise. The approach includes an ontology of software development best practices which are selected based on the enterprises technical profile. The project is in progress, and we present here first good results.