Nuno Flores

AGILIPO: Embedding Social Software Features into Business Process Tools

In today’s changing environments, organizational design must take into account the fact that business processes are incomplete by nature and that they should be managed in such a way that they do not restrain human intervention. In this paper we propose the embedding of social software features, such as collaboration and wiki-like features, in the modeling and execution tools of business processes. These features will foster people empowerment in the bottom-up design and execution of business processes. We conclude this paper by identifying some research issues about the implementation of the tool and its methodological impact on Business Process Management.

Patterns for consistent software documentation

Documentation is an important part of the captured knowledge of a software project, providing a flexible and effective way of recording informal contents. However, maintaining documentations consistency requires a considerable effort. Existing solutions encompass different tools and approaches that support the process of creating, evolving and using documents and other artifacts derived from the software development process. Based on existing literature and expertise, we have identified the key problems and solutions for documentation consistency. In concrete, four distinct patterns and their relations were identified, which are here described --- Information Proximity, Co-Evolution, Domain-Structured Information and Integrated Environment.

Incremental knowledge acquisition in software development using a weakly-typed Wiki

Software development is a knowledge-intensive activity and frequently implies a progressive crystallization of knowledge, towards programming language statements. Although wikis have proved very effective, for both collaborative authoring and knowledge management, it would be useful for knowledge acquisition to better support team awareness and the recognition of knowledge structures, their relations, and their incremental evolution. This paper presents Weaki, a wiki prototype especially designed to support incremental formalization of structured contents that uses weakly-typed pages and type evolution. Weaki was applied in academic settings, by students of Software Engineering Labs.

STAlz: Remotely supporting the diagnosis, tracking and rehabilitation of patients with Alzheimer's

As the Worlds population gets older, diseases directly related to aging are increasingly becoming the focus of technological effort and research. Dementia, in general, and Alzheimers disease (AD), in particular, is one of the most common afflictions among elderly people, with studies predicting an even bigger incidence in the next decades. Due to mobility constraints, patients are being inadequately followed by their medical staff, hindering an effective delay of the diseases progression through preventive therapeutics. As such, new ways of diagnosing, tracking and rehabilitating AD patients are needed. This paper presents STAlz, a mobile device based system developed to provide caregivers and medical professionals a way to be in contact and share important information, and to provide patients with a tool that could potentiate the exercise of their cognitive functions. This system was tested with Alzheimers disease caregivers and the initial results proved promising.

Patterns and Tools for Improving Framework Understanding: A Collaborative Approach

Software development is a social activity. Teams of developers join together to coordinate their efforts to produce software systems. This effort encompasses the development of a shared understanding surrounding multiple artifacts throughout the process. Frameworks are a powerful technique for large-scale reuse, but its complexity makes them hard to understand and learn how to use. Developers resort to their colleagues for help and insight, at the expense of time and intrusion, as documentation is often outdated and incomplete. This paper presents an approach to harness this collective knowledge of the team through a collaborative environment. Teams can share, rank and recommend their learning knowledge without too much intrusion and follow best practices of framework understanding.

Patterns for understanding frameworks

Learning and understanding a framework is usually a major obstacle to its effective reuse. Before being able to use a framework successfully, users often go through a steep learning curve by spending a lot of effort understanding its underlying architecture and design principles. This is mainly due to users having to understand not only single isolated classes, but also complex designs of several classes whose instances collaborate for many different purposes, and using many different mechanisms. In addition, frameworks are also full of delocalized plans, and use inheritance and delegation intensively, which makes their design more difficult to grasp. How to obtain the necessary information from the framework itself and its accompanying documentation is the main problem with framework understanding. Considering its importance, this paper presents an initial attempt to capture, in the pattern form, a set of proven solutions to recurrent problems of understanding frameworks. The fundamental objective of this work is to help non-experts on being more effective when trying to learn and understand object-oriented frameworks.

Game Design Techniques for Software Engineering Management Education

Software engineering is an area with a wide range of concepts and knowledge. To this diversity of topics, you may need to apply different teaching and learning techniques to be effective. One such technique is the use of serious games, but the design of such games tends to be complex, currently lacking a map of game design standards that comply with the Software Engineering education requirements. This paper presents the process to identify the game design patterns that can be effective for teaching software engineering, specifically the software project management topic. The process begins by identifying the relationship between game design patterns and teaching and learning functions based on literature review. Then the work follows establishing a relationship between teaching and learning functions and software project management education through questionnaires made to software engineering teachers. Finally, it sets up the relationship between game design patterns and software project management education through an empirical study conducted with master students. These results can be used as a basis for designing and developing serious games for teaching software project management.

DRIVER -- A Platform for Collaborative Framework Understanding

Application frameworks are a powerful technique for large-scale reuse but often very hard to learn from scratch. Although good documentation helps on reducing the learning curve, it is often found lacking, and costly, as it needs to attend different audiences with disparate learning needs. When code and documentation prove insufficient, developers turn to their network of experts. The lack of awareness about the experts, interrupting the wrong people, and experts unavailability are well known hindrances to effective collaboration. This paper presents the DRIVER platform, a collaborative learning environment for framework users to share their knowledge. It provides the documentation on a wiki, where the learning paths of the community of learners can be captured, shared, rated, and recommended, thus tapping into the collective knowledge of the community of framework users. The tool can be obtained at http://bit.ly/driverTool.

Reverse engineering of framework design using a meta-patterns-based approach

Object-oriented frameworks are a powerful reuse technique but they are also very complex and difficult to design. Frameworks design aims at separating the invariant aspects across several applications in a domain - frozen spots - from the aspects that vary among applications and thus must be kept flexible and customizable - hot spots. The flexibility and extensibility provided at hot spots is usually achieved by following common design patterns, which are often hard and tiresome to identify without proper documentation. This paper proposes a reverse engineering approach to identify the design patterns used in a framework, using a high-level hot spot representation. The goals of this work include: researching a design approach that produces usable intermediate reuse information; defining a representation for design patterns based on meta-patterns; and developing a supporting tool to automate the reverse engineering process.

End-to-end Automatic Business Process Validation

Abstract Business Process Testing is the act of validating that end-to-end transactions through enterprise systems continue to work correctly as the underlying packaged applications evolve. End-to-end automatic business process validation can be a challenging task, but an important way to check that business rules continue to work properly and that problems are detected and corrected as soon as possible. This paper presents the design of a test automation platform, ETAP-Pro, to test end-to-end business processes that aims to overcome some challenges in validating business processes.