Nianjun Zhou

Everything as a Service (XaaS) on the Cloud: Origins, Current and Future Trends

For several years now, scientists have been proposing numerous models for defining anything as a service (aaS), including discussions of products, processes, data & information management, and security as a service. In this paper, based on a thorough literature survey, we investigate the vast stream of the state of the art in Everything as a Service (XaaS). We then use this investigation to explore an integrated view of XaaS that will help propose approaches for migrating applications to the cloud and exposing them as services.

Legacy Asset Analysis and Integration in Model-Driven SOA Solution

In this paper, we study legacy asset reuse for SOA design. Typically, the cost of reusing legacy assets is much lower than the cost of creating new services from scratch. As an extension of our SOA service modeling, we use top-down approaches to identify business services, and use asset modeling for legacy asset identification to find potential reusable assets for those services. Using service capacity analysis, we evaluate the maturity of a legacy asset for transformation to a service. Finally, we provide a model transformation to convert a service model with legacy assets into an SOA reference architecture model. Our effort integrates asset reuse as a part of the overall SOA design cycle and increases the possibility of asset reuse. To help architects use our method in engineering practice, we have implemented our method in the SOMA-ME tooling environment.

Towards a Formal Model for Optimal Task-Site Allocation and Effort Estimation in Global Software Development

Motivated by the desire to cut costs and development effort, software organizations have increasingly adopted a global development approach. However, the cost savings, if any, from this globalization, is often offset by hidden costs such as handoffs between sites, synchronization of development among sites, integration of software developed at distributed sites, language/cultural issues, travel costs, communication costs, etc. Although several empirical studies have been conducted on this issue, due to the lack of an integrated formal model, such studies have not produced consistent and usable results. To that end, in this paper, we present an integrated formal model for analyzing global software development. Our model comprises two parts. First, we consider all tasks in a software project that can be geographically distributed, and the possible sites where they can be allocated. We develop an optimal task-site allocation model. Our approach then generates an effort estimate for the new allocation, which is based on the following factors: expected general percentage allocation of overall effort estimate to each task in the development lifecycle, and effort estimate for executing a task at a particular site (in terms of the effort estimate for executing the same task at the home site, viz., without globalization). The final effort estimate is therefore derived as a function of the effort estimate for executing the overall software project in the home site; this estimate provides project managers with a more accurate understanding of expected cost savings from globalization, if any. Throughout our paper, we illustrate our approach using a real global software development project at IBM as a running example.

A Pattern-Based Approach to Cloud Transformation

With the growing interest in cloud computing, more and more businesses are looking not only to migrate their applications to the cloud but also to transform them to better leverage capabilities that are provided by cloud platforms or to enable new business models that are facilitated by the cloud. One problem clients face in this area is a lack of experience and knowledge as to how best to accomplish this transformation. We propose a Cloud Transformation Advisor (CTA) which helps users to select appropriate enablement patterns from a knowledge base of best practices when performing transformation planning. This knowledge base uses a structured representation to capture application information, cloud platform capability information, and enablement pattern information in order to facilitate pattern selection. We describe this representation and a mathematical model which leverages it to choose the best combination of patterns for a given transformation problem. We present an example which illustrates the approach, and describe the usage of the CTA.

Design Quality Analytics of Traceability Enablement in Service-Oriented Solution Design Environment

This paper provides an artifact-pattern-matchingframework and mathematical model to analyze thedynamic behaviors of the SOA solution design in modeldrivenfashion and provide recommendations for optimalsolution pattern enablement for solution artifacts. Theartifact-pattern-matching system can be dynamicallytuned based on the practitioners’ final selections of therecommendations. Specifically, we propose a set ofSolution patterns to guide SOA solution architectsthrough the process of consuming and configuring SOAartifacts for composing SOA solutions. The resultingmulti-dimensional cascading flagging method is alsopresented in this paper. As an example, impact analysispatterns are used as solution patterns to supporttraceability enablement. We present some futuredirections of leveraging reinforcement learningalgorithms to enrich the design quality analytics of SOAsolution.

Coding-Free Model-Driven Enablement Framework and Engineering Practices of a Context-Aware SOA Modeling Environment

The rapid adoption of model-driven design (MDD) methodology in SOA-based solution design requires an adaptive tooling environment that can systematically improve designers productivity. Ideally, the environment should be flexible enough to both handle frequently changing requirements and support new features without intensive coding efforts. In this paper, we provide a coding-free enablement framework to realize such extensible tooling environments based on a mathematical abstraction of key models in SOA solution design using graph theory definition. This abstraction formalizes the SOA modeling logic and semantics, and also guides the implementation of an extensible and customizable tooling environment. As a case study, we illustrate how our framework is able to transform the development style from Java programming to text editing through our implementation of a UML 2.0 based SOA modeling environment using IBMpsilas Rational Software Architect (RSA) development platform.

Hierarchical Aggregation of Consumer Ratings for Service Ecosystem

With the wide availability of products and services through popular e-commerce platforms and dozens of similar offerings to choose from, there is a need to accurately assess and evaluate the quality of offerings. Several studies have shown that consumer feedback is an important source of information. This paper presents: (a) consumer Rating as a Service (RaaS) -- a building block service that can be used to add the consumer feedback lifecycle feature in the development of e-commerce platforms, (b) an approach to evaluate the quality of composite offerings based on the aggregation of consumer ratings using the composition structure and component relationships. Benefits of the proposed service include reduced development effort, shorter delivery time and a fine-grained aggregation of consumer ratings for composite offerings even with limited ratings.

On the Quantification of Global Team Performance and Profitability

Globalization helps international companies create distinct competitive and operational advantages over centrally managed counterparts. Such advantages come from increased business opportunity and high profitability through outsourcing. To achieve the benefits of outsourcing, in this paper we describe a general model that characterizes globalized project productivity. We examine several factors related to global team performance including: 1) time zone differences, 2) language difference, 3) working time alignment (such as vacations and holidays), and 4) turnover rates among skilled workers in expanding economies. We then show how the models can be used to analyze project profitability through team performance, and how to address the combined impact of multiple globalization factors. Beyond this, we also provide suggestions on how to overcome those challenges. The key contribution of this paper is the development of models that quantify the impact of several global factors. In two cases, we show that the right organizational structure is required to achieve benefits of lower labor costs. In another case, due to the smaller difference in labor costs and the high complexity of the project, we show that the combined effects of the factors could lead to reduced profitability. It is these cases that reveal there is an opportunity to improve global delivery. Our objective is to show how to maximize the benefits of globalization and how an effective management approach can avoid some of the potential risks by deeply understanding the effects of global factors.

On the Analysis of Global Team Performance

Motivated by the need to achieve high profitability, many projects are delivered through teams distributed between a home country and one or more global development countries. As globalization becomes more widespread, problems with productivity and quality have surfaced. To maximize the benefit of utilizing a global team, a quantitative analysis is required to relate the global team performance to the underlying factors affecting the team. Starting from a general model that relates project size, effort, duration, and productivity, we show how effort and duration changes affect productivity. Using this model we show how to address the combined impact of multiple globalization factors, each causing changes in effort and duration, on productivity. Then, we focus on analyzing the individual effects of globalization factors on performance, such as under-communication due to time zone differences, work hour slippage due to working time alignment issues (different vacation periods, holidays, and regular working hours), and additional effort due to language barriers. For each of those factors, we further quantify the additional effort and time needed in global project delivery. Combining these results, we estimate the potential team productivity, and the change in cost of delivering a project as a function of the globalization factors and project characteristics.

Leveraging Cloud Platform for Custom Application Development

Compared with packaged application, custom application developments (CAD) experience the frustration of higher project overhead and less certainty. The typical time spent on building the infrastructure for a CAD project is, on average, several weeks. Project uncertainty comes from unique customer requirements and lack of standardized methods and toolsets to follow. Therefore, a CAD project is more difficult to achieve cost reduction and asset reuse. In this paper, we present a cloud platform to alleviate this problem through an integration of a) standard methods, b) standardized toolsets aligned with those methods, c) project management environments with pre-defined work breakdown structure (WBS) aligned with those methods and toolsets, and d) infrastructure support from the cloud technology. We believe that such a cloud platform will become a fundamental approach for large enterprises to develop CAD or other solutions for their clients.