Maria Tortorella

A framework for measuring business processes based on GQM

The evolution of business processes and supporting software systems requires their analysis and assessment from both quantitative and qualitative points of view. The analysis and evaluation activities need the support of methodological and technological tools, customizable to the innovation requirements of the chosen processes and supporting software systems. This paper proposes a measurement framework based on the goal-question-metric (GQM) paradigm. It is generally applicable to any business process and supporting software system after its instantiation. The collaborative software environment WebEv, Web for the Evaluation, is proposed for facilitating the collection and elaboration of the required measures. Finally, the paper describes the application of the measurement framework in a real context.

Migrating COBOL systems to the Web by using the MVC design pattern

Integrating legacy Cobol systems into a Web-based architecture is a complex and challenging task. Cobol is not a distributed and object-oriented language, however its integration with other languages or distributed systems is a prerequisite for achieving migration towards Web technologies. Moreover, the user interface and user interaction modalities need to be changed. Numerous strategies have been proposed for wrapping the business logic and re-implementing the user interface, but there is still a great need for experimental research. This paper presents a migration strategy whose target system is a Web-enabled architecture based on the model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern. By extracting all the needed information from the Cobol source code, the realized toolkit can automatically generate wrappers for the business logic and the data model and the Web user interface as Java server pages. The strategy and the toolkit presented have been defined within the project M&S SW, a research project aimed at defining new technological solutions to be transferred to small and medium enterprises operating in information and communication technologies.

Assessment and impact analysis for aligning business processes and software systems

Business processes and existing software systems must be aligned so that software systems can adequately support the business processes in order to be effectively used within them. The alignment characteristic needs to be considered even during the execution of an evolution process. In particular, a strict relationship exists between the evolution of a legacy system and that of the supported business process. Therefore, the requirements for evolving a software system embedded in a business process are to be defined on the basis of the change needing to be performed on the process activities. In fact, any modification performed in the business process activities and/or supporting software system may impact the process activities in terms of input/output and/or purpose of the software system and, therefore, cause misalignment. A coarse grained strategy is proposed for detecting misalignment between software systems and supported business processes when a change is executed. In addition, the strategy supports the identification of all the objects, either software system components or process activities, affected by a change and needing to be considered during the evolution process, for keeping the alignment and ensuring the technological support to the business process. The strategy proposes the exploitation of quality parameters, for codifying the alignment concept, and impact analysis techniques, for propagating the change and identifying all the objects affected by a change and requiring new evolution interventions.

Experiments in identifying reusable abstract data types in program code

The issue of program comprehension is addressed from the software reuse perspective. In particular the identification of abstract data types in existing program code is explored. A candidature criterion is presented and a prototype implementing it is described. The criterion is applied in an experiment that analyses five very different programs and the resulting output is discussed. The work described forms part of the RE/sup 2/ project that addresses the wider issues of software reuse through the exploration of reverse engineering and re-engineering techniques to identify and extract reusable assets from existing systems.<<ETX>>

A workbench for program comprehension during software maintenance

The paper describes the research carried out into the process of program comprehension during software maintenance within the EUREKA project REM (Reverse Engineering and Maintenance). Tools to aid maintenance programmers to achieve and document an overall interpretation of the system being maintained, as well as a deep understanding of the fine details of the source code, are presented. The cognition model assumed exploits both the top down and the bottom up approaches: program comprehension is intended as an iterative process of guessing, constructing hypotheses and verifying them This process is supported by providing maintenance programmers with a flexible system for querying source code and testing hypotheses against the evidence in the code. Several facilities generate new documents at the design and specification level, thus allowing maintenance programmers to record the knowledge gained for future use.

Hiding complexity and heterogeneity of the physical world in smart living environments

Continuous technological advances lead to computerize all the electronic devices and connect them in a network, so that in the future physical and virtual worlds will be integrated and interoperate each other at the point that browsing the reality will be similar to browsing the Web. Heterogeneous networked devices, services satisfying needs of people and living environments equipped with devices and services, will have to collaborate instead of working independently for offering to the end-user a better quality of the daily life. As a consequence, developers of ubiquitous computing and communication software infrastructures should address their efforts toward the abstraction of the implemented concepts. They have to abstract concepts from direct and immediate human needs in specific smart environments, avoid undue assumptions about the available devices or services and promote decoupling among distinctive, physical and functional features of devices and services.This paper briefly describes the extensible software architecture for smart environments the authors designed and implemented and presents the approach used for representing the physical world in a useful, comprehensible and more abstract manner and facilitating connections with the virtual world.

An assessment strategy for identifying legacy system evolution requirements in eBusiness context

The enactment of e Business processes requires the effective usage of the existing legacy applications in the e Business initiatives. Technical issues are not enough to drive the evolution of the existing legacy applications, but problems concerning the perspectives, strategies, and business of the enterprises have to be considered. In particular, there is a strict relationship between the evolution of the legacy systems and the evolution of the e Business processes. This paper proposes a strategy to extract the requirements for a legacy system evolution from the requirements of the e Business evolution. The proposed strategy aims at characterizing the software system within the whole environment in which its evolution will be performed. It provides a useful set of attributes addressing technical, process, and organizational issues. Moreover, a set of assessment activities is proposed affecting the order in which the attributes are assessed. Copyright

Using grid technologies for Web-enabling legacy systems

The adoption of the Internet technologies favors the diffusion of Web and grid-based applications. However, the development of new applications exploiting the modern interfaces and distribution channels have to face the problems connected with the integration of existing software systems. This aspect often requires the migration of legacy systems toward the Web technologies, as they are very important for the business they support and cannot be simply discarded. In fact, they encapsulate a great deal of knowledge and expertise about the application domain. Many migration strategies have been proposed in the literature. The introduction of dynamic activation and discovery of services is rarely considered in the proposed approaches, even if these aspects can be considered as important evolution factors for the future of the legacy systems. With this in mind, this paper extends an approach, already proposed by the authors for migrating to the Web legacy software systems with character-based user interface, with grid technologies.

Measuring the alignment between business processes and software systems: a case study

The alignment degree existing between a business process and the supporting software systems strongly affects the performance of the business process execution. Methods are needed for detecting this kind of alignment and keeping a business process aligned with a supporting software system even when one of the two evolves. Actually, any modification performed in the business process activities and/or supporting software systems may impact the process activities and/or software components, in terms of input/output and/or purpose and, therefore, cause misalignment. This paper proposes a framework including a set of metrics codifying the alignment concept with the aim of measuring it and detecting misalignment if it occurs. The application of the framework is explored through a case study.

Quality evaluation of floss projects: Application to ERP systems

Abstract Context The selection and adoption of open source software can significantly influence the competitiveness of organisations. Open source software solutions offer great opportunities for cost reduction and quality improvement, especially for small and medium enterprises that typically have to address major difficulties due to the limited resources available for selecting and adopting a new software system. Objective This paper aims to provide support for selecting the open source software that is most suitable to the specific needs of an enterprise from among the options offering equivalent or overlapping functionality. Method This paper proposes a framework for evaluating the quality and functionality of open source software systems. The name of the framework is EFFORT (Evaluation Framework for Free/Open souRce projecTs). It supports the evaluation of product quality, community trustworthiness and product attractiveness. The framework needs to be customised to the analysis of software systems for a specific context. Results The paper presents the customisation of EFFORT for evaluating Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) open source software systems. The customised framework was applied to the evaluation and comparison of five ERP open source software systems. The results obtained permitted both the refinement of the measurement framework and the identification of the ERP open source software system that achieved the highest score for each chosen characteristic. Conclusion EFFORT is a useful tool for evaluating and selecting an open source software system. It may significantly reduce the amount of negotiation conducted among an enterprise’s members and reduce the time and cost required for gathering and interpreting data. The EFFORT framework also considers the users’ opinions by introducing relevance markers associated with the metrics and questions in the data aggregation process.