María del Carmen Penadés

Document product lines: variability-driven document generation

In this paper, we propose a process model, which we call Document Product Lines, for the intensive generation of documents with variable content. Unlike current approaches, we identify the variability sources at the requirements level, including an explicit representation and management of these sources. The process model provides a methodological guidance to the (semi)automated generation of customized editors following the principles, techniques, and available technologies of Software Product Line Engineering. We illustrate our proposal with its application to the intensive generation of Emergency Plans.

Introducing business process into legacy information systems

The majority of legacy information systems running today were built without adopting a business process approach. In these systems, the control over the execution of the process activities is partial, leaving out all those activities that have not been automated. Moreover, the activities that constitute the process are not formally interconnected, causing loss of the overall business process context. This paper presents a method for gradually integrating the underlying business processes supported by these systems, without disrupting the automation they already support. The method is particularly attractive for legacy systems that are expected to last a long time and whose redevelopment costs are high.

An approach for teaching software engineering through reverse engineering

As the number of existing software systems increases, it also does the number of software engineers involved in the maintenance of large existing systems. Maintenance projects are becoming more usual than new software developments. For this reason, Computer Science education should also consider the development of abilities to deal with large existing software systems. This paper describes an approach to teach software engineering by using existing real-life software systems, through reverse software engineering techniques. The approach introduces the student into a medium-sized team which has to perform a set of modifications over an unknown large software system. The learning process is directed towards the improvement of abstraction skills, a key skill for software engineers.

A product line approach to customized recipe generation

Document Product Lines (DPL) is an approach to variable content document generation based on the definition of document families that share parts of common content while differ in others. Following principles of the Software Product Line Engineering, the production of the different documents in a family is performed with a high degree of reuse of document components. In this paper, we have used DPL for the development of variable content recipe documents. We describe a flexible approach to recipe generation that allows the customization of recipe content in terms of different factors such as, user expertise, ingredients, and even delivery format.

Deriving document workflows from feature models

Despite the increasing interest in the Document Engineering community, a formal definition of document workflow is still to come. Often, the term refers to an abstract process consisting in a set of tasks to contribute to some document contents, and some techniques are being developed to support parts of these tasks rather than how to generate the process itself. In most proposals, these tasks are implicit in the business processes running in an organization, lacking an explicit document workflow model that could be analysed and enacted as a coherent unit. In this paper, we propose a document-centric approach to document workflow generation. We have extended the feature-based document meta-model of the Document Product Lines approach with an organiza-tional metamodel. For a given configuration of the feature model, we assign tasks to different members of the organization to con-tribute to the document contents. Moreover, the relationships between features define an ordering of the tasks, which may be refined to produce a specification of the document workflow model automatically. The generation of customized software manuals is used to illustrate the proposal.

Strong vs. weak links: making processes prevail over structure in navigational design

We introduce a process-based approach to navigational design of hypermedia applications. Unlike most current methods, which use the information structure as the basis for building the navigational structure, we start from a workflow-like process model to create a two-level navigational model. On one hand, the strong navigational schema is composed of nodes called activity views and links derived from control flow relationships of the process model. On the other hand, a weak navigational schema is developed for each activity view based on the information a given actor has to use to perform the associated activity. Our approach allows designers to solve in a natural way the problems where the business processes prevail over the information structure.