Rieko Yamamoto

A means of establishing traceability based on a UML model in business application development

This paper describes an easy means of setting traceability in business application artifacts. The traceability is established for completeness verification and impact analysis. There are thousands of functions and screens in real business applications. It is difficult to establish suitable links from these many elements. In addition, there is a constraint that the workload of setting traceability links should be small. This paper proposes a two-step approach to establish traceability in artifacts. In the first step, the software model defines traceability. In the second step, a developer him/herself sets up traceability links during the design phase. The purpose of the first step is to restrict of the set of linkable elements, while the purpose of the second step is to establish links according to the developers intentions. We also devise the second step in two points. The first point is to make a developer set up links while he/she is working on the design. The second point is appropriate categorization to reduce the number of candidate links. We also propose a support tool for setting up links. The approach and tool decrease the developers workload. This paper provides details and evaluation on this model-based approach and tool.

Runtime Composition for Extensible Big Data Processing Platforms

We propose a runtime composition method for creating various applications that comprise elaborate big data processing. Cloud platforms are required to be more capable at applying elaborate big data processing to various services for real businesses. Therefore, the platforms should be extensible to compound emerging runtimes. However, there are two major problems with this extensibility: providing an easy method for compounding a new runtime to the platforms and how to select the most efficient runtimes for each process in various situations. The runtime composition method is based on the model-driven engineering approach. The method searches the types of the most cost-efficient runtimes for each process under the requirements, creates the intermediate model, and, finally, generates files deployed to different processing engines. We designed and implemented four algorithms for selecting the runtimes. To confirm the ease of extending the method, we also designed and implemented four types of plugins. We found that we can separately append each type of information by installing these plugins. Experimental results show that variable depth search is the most preferable because of the accuracy of execution cost, but the greedy algorithm may be also preferable because of the balance among the execution time, the error rate, and the ease of implementation.

Detection of unexpected situations by applying software reliability growth models to test phases

In software development, software reliability growth models (SRGMs) often provide values that do not meet expectations; sometimes the results of the SRGM and the actual data disagree and other times the SRGM overestimates the expected values. The former often occurs in model curves and the predicted number of faults. For example, the software reliability growth curve cannot describe the situation where developers stop testing multiple times because the equations in SRGMs cannot treat such information. The latter can arise when the total number of expected faults is 100, but the SRGM indicates 1000. If developers encounter such situations, they often doubt the SRGM results and hesitate using SRGMs for predictions. In this study, we apply two different cases of SRGM. Two projects of Fujitsu Labs Ltd. are analyzed using SRGM either for the entire dataset or each test phase. Based on the results and interviews with the developers, we found that the model using separate test phases provides a better fit because faults counted in each test phase have different viewpoints and the deviation between SRGM and expectations indicates a problem with development.

Cross-organizational workflows: a classification of design decisions

Web service technology enables organizations to open up their business processes and engage in tightly coupled business networks to jointly offer goods and services. This paper systematically investigates all decisions that have to be made in the design of such networks and the processes carried out by its participants. Three areas of different kinds of design decisions are identified: the value modeling area, which addresses economic viability of the network, the collaboration modeling area, which addresses how business partners interact to produce the goods or services identified in the value modeling area, and the workflow modeling area, which addresses the design of internal processes needed for the interactions identified in the collaboration modeling area. We show, by reporting on a real-world case study, that there are significant differences between these areas: design decisions are unique for each area, IT support for collaboration processes is orthogonal to IT support for workflows, and the role of web choreography standards such as BPEL4WS differs for both of them.

A Metamodel-Driven Business Process Modeling Methodology and Its Integrated Environment for Reusing Business Processes

Reusing business process models and best practices can improve the productivity, quality and agility in the early development phases of enterprise software systems. To help developers reuse the business process models and best practices, we propose a methodology and an integrated environment for business process modeling driven by the metamodel. Furthermore, we propose a process-template design method to unify the granularity and separate the commonality and variability of business processes so that business process models can be reused across different enterprise software systems. The proposed methodology enables to create reuse-oriented business process templates before the business process modeling. To support the proposed methodology, we developed an integrated environment for creating, reusing and verifying the business process models. As the key techniques, we describe the methodology and its integrated environment, including a metamodel and notations. We applied the methodology and integrated environment to an actual enterprise software development project, and evaluated that the productivity of business process modeling is improved by at least 46%. As the conclusion, this paper contributes to prove the effectiveness of the meta-model driven business process modeling methodology for the reuse of business process models.

Defect Analysis and Prediction by Applying the Multistage Software Reliability Growth Model

In software development, defects are inevitable. To improve reliability, software reliability growth models are useful to analyze projects. Selecting an expedient model can also help with defect predictions, but the model must be well fitted to all the original data. A particular software reliability growth model may not fit all the data well. To overcome this issue, herein we use multistage modeling to fit defect data. In the multistage model, an evaluation is used to divide the data into several parts. Each part is fitted with its own growth model, and the separate models are recombined. As a case study, projects provided by a Japanese enterprise are analyzed by both traditional software reliability growth models and the multistage model. The multistage model has a better performance for data with a poor fit using a traditional software reliability growth model.

Automatic Generation of Software Component Wizards based on the Wizard Pattern

When a software component is used, it is often necessary to set initial values in many of its attributes. To set these initial values appropriately, the user of the component must ascertain which attributes are needed to be initialized, and set them programmatically to suitable initial values. The work involved in this sort of initialization can be alleviated by attaching a wizard interface to the target component itself and setting the initial values visually from the wizard. However, there are large development costs associated with devising suitable initial value candidates and producing a new wizard to use these initial values for each individual component. In this paper, we propose a system whereby application programs that use a target component are subjected to dynamic analysis to discover which attributes and initial values are set most often during thr running of the component. The proposed system generates and attaches a wizard, which supports application programmers to initialize the component visually by using these initial values, to the component. The proposed system can be recognized as a system for applying the Wizard pattern to each component automatically. Experiments have shown that the attributes and their initial values chosen for initialization by generated wizards closely resemble the expectations of the component’s original developers. We have thus confirmed that the proposed system can bring about a substantial reduction in wizard development costs.