Lotte De Rore

Handling transactional business services

This article discusses the handling of transactional business services, which are service compositions that orchestrate and coordinate underlying services to process a high-level business activity. The main contribution made in this article is the presentation of the pattern TBS handler, which describes how one can implement a transactional business service (TBS). This pattern functions as an overview pattern for a complete pattern language that is outlined in the text. This pattern language provides the appropriate ingredients for the implementation of a TBS. It is presented using thumbnails.

COCOMO II as Productivity Measurement: A Case Study at KBC

Software productivity is generally measured as the ratio of size over effort, whereby several techniques exist to measure the size. In this paper, we propose the innovative approach to use an estimation model as productivity measurement. This approach is applied in a case-study at the ICT-department of a bank and insurance company. The estimation model, in this case Cocomo II, is used as the norm to judge about productivity of application development projects. This research report describes on the one hand the set-up process of the measurement environment and on the other hand the measurement results. To gain insight in the measurement data, we developed a report which makes it possible to identify productivity improvement areas in the development process of the case-study company.

Software Patterns to Improve Knowledge Transfer: An Experiment

Patterns for software development have been a hot topic for some time within the object-oriented community. Patterns are part of a software engineering problem-solving discipline. It all started with Design Patterns [11], but gradually patterns were used in a larger number of areas of system development. The goal of patterns within the software community is to create a body of literature to help soft-ware developers resolve recurring problems encountered throughout all areas of software development. Patterns help to create a shared language for communicating insight and experience about these problems and their solutions [4]. In this research report, first, a definition of software patterns is given, including some history, an overview of the different kinds of software patterns, the elements of a pattern and the different pattern formats. Secondly, as patterns claim to improve transfer of knowledge, we performed an experiment to test this hypothesis. This experiment is described in Section 2. Finally, Section 3 formulates the conclusions about this experiment.