Ricardo Argenton Ramos

Integration of aspects with i* models

The i* framework has been widely adopted for agent-oriented modeling, as it offers a notation that provides a description in terms of dependency relationships among agents. However, the resulting models may be large and complex, with scattered concerns within the same, or among several models. These crosscutting concerns are not handled explicitly in i* models, affecting several other elements in the same model. In this paper we investigate if the Early Aspects, as promoted by the Aspect-Oriented Software Development community, can help to deal with the complexity which may arise when i* is used to develop large multi-agent systems. To achieve this we identify crosscutting concerns, keeping them in separate models. The consequence is a reduction in complexity and size of the original model. Composition rules are defined simultaneously, to keep a record of these modularized crosscutting elements. Thus, these rules work as transformations in model-driven engineering allowing us to recover the original, more refined model.

The AOSD Research Community in Brazil and Its Crosscutting Impact

In this paper, we present the birth, growth, and maturation of Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) research over the last years, with emphasis on the Brazilian AOSD community and its research contributions. These research contributions are illustrated from different perspectives: (i) an overview of the research work developed by our community in several prominent software engineering areas; (ii) a historical chronology of the community; and (iii) the growth, impact and quality of research outcomes.

Quality Improvement for Use Case Model

Requirements documents tend to be inundated by requirements that are no longer meaningful, descriptions that are unnecessarily long and convoluted, duplication of information, among other shortcomings. These syntactical problems hinder the overall understandability of requirements documents throughout the whole development process. Quality evaluation strategies are not very helpful if they only include lists of expected product qualities. They should also incorporate guidelines to help practitioners to effectively measure and improve the qualities of requirements documents. AIRDoc is a step forward to fill this gap proposing a process that supports the evaluation and improvement of requirements documents specified based on use cases. This process is founded on the elaboration of goals and definition of questions that will be answered by hypotheses and metrics. The quality of requirements documents is improved through refactorings and patterns. A case study demonstrates how the process of improvement has been successfully applied in an industrial requirements document.

Towards the improvement of use case models: the AIRDoc process

A requirements document tends to be full of requirements that are no longer meaningful, descriptions that are unnecessarily long-winded and complicated, and duplicated information, among other shortcomings. These problems hinder the overall understandability of the requirements document and might compromise the subsequent development phases. A requirements document quality evaluation strategy should incorporate also guidelines to help practitioners to effectively measure and improve their requirements documents. In this poster paper we brief describe a process that supports the evaluation and improvement of use case models named AIRDoc.

QUALISIS-Br: An Approach to Improve the Quality of Brazilian Health Information Systems

The main source of Brazilian health information comes from health information systems. Consequently, in order to obtain a reliable and secure information from this health system the data quality insurance are an essential step. This paper presents the QUALISIS-BR, an approach to guide the improvement of the quality in health information systems. This approach were conducted in a well-known Brazilian health information system named SINAN. This first conduction produced information, in catalog format, about the problems and possible solutions from SINAN. Experts, in the area of quality and health information system, performed an experiment validation using questionnaires to discover how applicable the problems and solutions are. The outcome from this experiment showed good preliminary results. Therefore, the QUALISIS-BR is the first step toward to achieve the goal of conducting the data quality improvement of Brazilian health information system.

Em direção à melhoria da qualidade de sistemas de informação em saúde no Brasil

A dispersao das informacoes em saude com base na melhoria de sua qualidade constitui um dos grandes desafios da sociedade brasileira. No Brasil, as principais fontes de informacoes da area da saude estao disponibilizadas atraves de Sistemas de Informacoes em Saude (SIS), em que a producao e a utilizacao dessas informacoes envolvem diversos fatores relacionados a qualidade e ao uso desta informacao. Este artigo tem como objetivo apresentar uma abordagem para auxiliar a melhoria da qualidade de dados dos sistemas de informacao em saude em âmbito nacional. Atraves da afericao da qualidade de dados de um sistema de informacao em saude, o Sistema de Informacao de Agravos de Notificacao (SINAN) os problemas e as solucoes foram levantados, gerando dois catalogos, um sobre problemas encontrados e outro de possiveis solucoes para esses problemas, podendo ser utilizados para ajudar a melhorar a qualidade de dados em outros sistemas de informacao em saude. Uma validacao qualitativa atraves de questionarios aplicados a especialistas na area foi realizada para verificar a aplicabilidade dos catalogos aos possiveis problemas e solucoes encontrados. O resultado mostrou-se satisfatorio no atendimento dos objetivos propostos inicialmente pelos catalogos. Assim, a elaboracao desses instrumentos e o primeiro passo com o objetivo de conduzir a melhoria da qualidade de informacoes dos SIS no Brasil.

Divide and conquer refactoring: dealing with the large, scattering or tangling use case model

Problems in use case models such as use cases that are abandoned and no longer relevant, descriptions that are unnecessarily long and complex, information that is duplicated and use case models that are very large and complex may compromise understandability of the requirements and as a result reusability and maintainability are reduced. In this paper, it is proposed a refactoring to assist the requirements engineer to improve use case models. Refactoring opportunities are presented to indicate where and when the refactoring could be used. We also describe how our approach was applied in a real example from an existing organization.

IDEAS01: Refactoring to Requirements Documents: An approach Aspect Oriented

Typical problems of a requirements document, regarding its contents and organization, involve deficient modularization where requirements artifacts may deal with too much information, duplication of requirements, scattering requirements, tangled problems, among other problems. In this paper we describe how to improve requirements documents by removing duplication of information using aspect-oriented refactoring.