Marcelo Fantinato

WS-CONTRACT ESTABLISHMENT WITH QOS: AN APPROACH BASED ON FEATURE MODELING

Electronic contracts describe inter-organizational business processes in terms of supply and consumption of electronic services (commonly Web services). The establishment of e-contracts in a particular business domain usually involves a set of well-defined common and variable properties. These properties are not fully exploited by the existing e-contract establishment approaches. Feature modeling is a software engineering technique that has been widely used for capturing and managing commonalities and variabilities of product families in the context of software product line. This paper presents a feature-based approach to support Web services e-contract (WS-contract) establishment. The approach aims at improving the information structure and reuse of WS-contracts, including the QoS attributes. Features are used to represent possible WS-contract elements in order to drive WS-contract template instantiation, thus acting as a configuration space manager. A toolkit named FeatureContract was developed to autom...

The use of software product lines for business process management

ContextBusiness Process Management (BPM) is a potential domain in which Software Product Line (PL) can be successfully applied. Including the support of Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), BPM and PL may help companies achieve strategic alignment between business and IT. ObjectivePresenting the results of a study undertaken to seek and assess PL approaches for BPM through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Moreover, identifying the existence of dynamic PL approaches for BPM. MethodA SLR was conducted with four research questions formulated to evaluate PL approaches for BPM. Results63 papers were selected as primary studies according to the criteria established. From these primary studies, only 15 papers address the specific dynamic aspects in the context evaluated. Moreover, it was found that PLs only partially address the BPM lifecycle since the last business process phase is not a current concern on the found approaches. ConclusionsThe found PL approaches for BPM only cover partially the BPM lifecycle, not taking into account the last phase which restarts the lifecycle. Moreover, no wide dynamic PL proposal was found for BPM, but only the treatment of specific dynamic aspects. The results indicate that PL approaches for BPM are still at an early stage and gaining maturity.

Applying Extended Finite State Machines in Software Testing of Interactive Systems

Model Based Testing (MBT) is a functional testing technique that makes use of information from behavioral models of the software to carry out the testing task. This technique has been commonly used in testing of interactive systems, where the used model represents the system behavior reacting to user’s actions. Finite State Machines (FSMs) are one of the most used modeling techniques for MBT. However, traditional FSMs do not provide mechanisms to model important behavioral aspects of the software such as its data flow. This paper proposes an extension to the traditional FSMs, which provides data flow modeling mechanisms and is used as a basis to define a set of functional testing criteria, extending known structural testing criteria. Moreover, the application of the defined functional testing criteria is compared, through a practical experiment, to the application of their corresponding structural testing criteria – both applied as adequacy criteria.

A Feature-based Approach to Electronic Contracts

E-contracts are used to describe the supply and the consumption details of e-services within a business process. The establishment of e-contracts in a given application domain usually involves a set of well-defined common and variation points. This paper proposes a feature-based approach in order to decrease the complexity in e-contract establishment and to foster inter-organizational cooperation. Feature modeling is a technique that has been widely used for capturing and managing commonalities and variabilities of product families in the software product line context. The feasibility of the approach is shown by a case study carried out within the telecom context and based on experimental software engineering concepts

A survey on reuse in the business process management domain

Business process management (BPM) is an important technological support to improve organisation competitiveness. BPM can benefit from reuse approaches and techniques at several stages of the business process life cycle in order to increase dynamism, flexibility and competitiveness. Existing reuse techniques from areas such as software engineering can be extended to this emerging domain. This paper presents the results of a literature review of reuse in the BPM domain. It aims to provide an overview and an overall discussion of most relevant research projects that have been developed applying reuse in BPM.

Web service e-contract establishment using features

Electronic contracts describe inter-organizational business processes in terms of supply and consumption of electronic services (commonly Web services). In a given contract domain, it is usually possible to identify a set of well-defined common and variation points. Feature modeling is an ontology-like technique that has been widely used for capturing and managing commonalities and variabilities of product families in the context of software product line. This paper proposes a feature-based approach in order to decrease the complexity in Web service e-contract establishment. The feasibility of the approach is shown by a case study carried out within the telecom context and based on experimental software engineering concepts.

Supporting QoS Negotiation with Feature Modeling

Feature modeling is a technique that has been widely used for capturing and managing commonalities and variabilities of product families in the context of software product line. This paper presents a feature-based approach to be applied in QoS negotiation during the establishment of a Web services e-contract. Its motivation is that the e-negotiation process, aiming at defining attributes and levels for QoS --- in a particular business domain, usually involves a set of well-defined common and variation points.

Improvements to the Function Point Analysis Method: A Systematic Literature Review

Function point analysis (FPA) is a standardized method to systematically measure the functional size of software. This method is proposed by an international organization and it is currently recommended by governments and organizations as a standard method to be adopted for this type of measurement. This paper presents a compilation of improvements, focused on increasing the accuracy of the FPA method, which have been proposed over the past 13 years. The methodology used was a systematic literature review (SLR), which was conducted with four research questions aligned with the objectives of this study. As a result of the SLR, of the 1600 results returned by the search engines, 454 primary studies were preselected according to the criteria established for the SLR. Among these studies, only 18 specifically referred to accuracy improvements for FPA, which was the goal of this study. The low number of studies that propose FPA improvements might demonstrate the maturity of the method in the current scenario of software metrics. Specifically in terms of found issues, it was found that the step for calculating the functional size exhibited the highest number of problems, indicating the need to revise FPA in order to encompass the possible improvements suggested by the researchers.

A Contribution to Organizational and Operational Strategic Alignment: Incorporating Business Level Agreements into Business Process Modeling

The purpose for achieving strategic alignment between Information Technology (IT) and Business areas refers to the need of large organizations to exploit the ITs ability to deliver good products and services, thereby standing out in a competitive scenario. Within this context, Business Process Management and Service Orientation tend to gain space in organizations, since they are able to automate and optimize processes and services for the business. In the business process analysis and modeling phase, it is important to treat not only functional properties, but also process quality and operating constraints, usually grouped as Non-Functional Properties (NFP); thereby preventing that investments in IT are wasted on inefficiency and rework. In order to address these constraints, Business Level Agreements (BLA) and Service Level Agreements (SLA) should be used. The most prestigious languages for business process modeling, including Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), lack the representation of these NFPs. The approach proposed in this paper, BLA@BPMN, extends BPMN to embody BLAs, as part of a bigger approach to foster strategic alignment in this context. A BLA is specified in the process model level so that it can be mapped to a set of SLAs at the executable process level.

Experimental studies of e-contract establishment in the PL4BPM context

Electronic contract (e-contract) establishment is a complex activity due to both sundry involved information and required parameters. PL4BPM, previously presented in other works, is an approach to support e-contract establishment and other activities related to business process management (BPM). It supports process reuse based on concepts of product line (PL) focusing on feature modelling to represent commonalities and variabilities of e-contracts. This paper complements the previous works with two experimental studies carried out to evaluate the e-contract establishment in PL4BPM context. The first study was undertaken within the academic environment and the second in the industrial one. Participants of both studies assessed the approach benefits over ad hoc procedures, especially focusing on its usability and feasibility. Both studies provide strong evidences of the advantages of PL4BPM approach over ad hoc approaches. The paper contributes to provide experimental data and process knowledge concerning approaches to e-contracts, business processes and related technologies.