Rodziah Atan

Unit Testing Approaches for BPEL: A Systematic Review

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a new architectural style for developing distributed business applications. Nowadays, those applications are realized through web services, which are later grouped as web service compositions. Web service compositions language, like the BPELWS 2.0 standard, are extensions of imperative programming languages. Additionally, it presents a challenge for traditional white-box testing, due to its inclusion of specific instructions, concurrency, fault compensation and dynamic service discovery and invocation. In fact, there is a lack of unit testing approaches and tools, which has resulted in inefficient practices in testing and debugging of automated business processes. Therefore, we performed a systematic review study to analyze 27 different studies for unit testing approaches for BPEL. This paper aims to focus on a comprehensive review to identify a categorization, a description of test case generation approaches, empirical evidence, current trends in BPEL studies, and finally to end with future work for other researchers.

Security Framework of Cloud Data Storage Based on Multi Agent System Architecture: Semantic Literature Review

The purpose of this literature review is to provide the information about illustrating the usage of Multi-Agent System (MAS) techniques that can be beneficial in cloud computing platform to facilitate security of cloud data storage (CDS) among it. MAS are often distributed and agents have proactive and reactive features which are very useful for cloud data storage security (CDSS). The architecture of the system is formed from a set of agent’s communities. This paper of literature review described on the theoretical concept and approach of a security framework as well as a MAS architecture that could be implemented in cloud platform in order to facilitate security of CDS, on how the MAS technology could be utilized in a cloud platform for serving the security that is developed by using a collaborative environment of Java Agent DEvelopment (JADE). In order to facilitate the huge amount of security, our MAS architecture offered eleven security attributes generated from four main security policies of correctness, integrity, confidentially and availability of users’ data in the cloud. This paper of literature review also describes an approach that allows us to build a security cloud platform using MAS architecture and this architecture tends to use specialized autonomous agents for specific security services and allows agents to interact to facilitate security of CDS.

Towards New Data Access Control Technique Based on Multi Agent System Architecture for Cloud Computing

With the rise of the era of “cloud computing”, concerns about “Security” continue to increase. Cloud computing environments impose new challenges on access control techniques due to the growing scale and dynamicity of hosts within the cloud infrastructure; we proposed Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture. This architecture consists of two agents: Cloud Service Provider Agent (CSPA) and Cloud Data Confidentiality Agent (CDConA). CSPA provides a graphical interface to the cloud user that facilitates the access to the services offered by the system. CDConA provides each cloud user by definition and enforcement expressive and flexible access structure as a logic formula over cloud data file attributes. This new access control is named as Formula-Based Cloud Data Access Control (FCDAC). A prototype of our proposed FCDAC will be designed using Prometheus Methodology and implemented using the Java Agent Development Framework Security (JADE-S).

A framework of multi-agent system to facilitate security of cloud data storage

Storage in the cloud is slightly different services for slightly different needs, it’s allow users to scale storage space requirements to meet expanding requirements, improve manageability, and can be integrated easily to backup most all aspects of a businesses’ data requirements, from server to laptop. A multi-agent system (MAS) is a collection of agents that work together to achieve goal through communication and collaboration among each other. MAS are often distributed and agent has proactive and reactive features which are very useful. Cloud Computing moves the application software and databases to the large data centers, where the management of the data and services may not be fully trustworthy. In this paper, we focus on cloud data storage security, which has always been an important aspect of quality of service. To verify the correctness, integrity, confidentially and availability of users’ data in the cloud, we propose MAS framework. Considering that the data is distributed, updated, created through different sources. This research shall be carried out in five steps that defined as A Secure Software Development Life Cycle (SecSDLC) used as a research methodology. The MAS followed the Prometheus methodology Tool (PDT) for designing section. In this paper, we consider components of MAS framework, implementing a simulation framework by using JAVA and performing an input analysis of the data and an output analysis of the simulation results.

MASK-SM: Multi-Agent System Based Knowledge Management System to Support Knowledge Sharing of Software Maintenance Knowledge Environment

Knowledge management (KM) has become an important topic as organizations wish to take advantage of the information that they produce and that can be brought to bear on present decisions. This paper described a system to manage the information and knowledge generated during the software maintenance process (SMP). Knowledge Management System (KMS) is utilizing to help employees build a shared vision, since the same codification is used and misunderstanding in staff communications may be avoided. The architecture of the system is formed from a set of agent communities each community of practice (CoP) is in charge of managing a specific type of knowledge. The agents can learn from previous experience and share their knowledge with other agents or communities in a group of multi-agent system (MAS). This paper also described on the theoretical concept and approach of multi-agent technology framework that could be implemented software maintenance process (SMP) in order to facilitate knowledge sharing among the maintainers of the learning organization. as well as to demonstrate it into the system wise, on how the multi-agent technology could be utilized in the software maintenance process (SMP) system model for serving the maintainer that is developed by using groupware such as Lotus Notes software. This architecture will be named as MASK-SM (MAS Architecture to Facilitate Knowledge Sharing of Software Maintenance). The author followed the Prometheus methodology to design the MAS architecture. This paper applied the definition of ISO 9241-11 (1998) that examines effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. The emphasis will be given to the software maintenance process (SMP) activities that may concern with multi-agent technology to help the maintainers especially in learning organization to work collaboratively including critical success factor in order to ensure that software maintenance process (SMP) initiatives would be delivered competitive advantage for the community of practice (CoP) as well as users of the organization.

Knowledge Management system architecture in agricultural industries environment

Knowledge Management (KM) has emerged as the hottest topic in the entire global world of business. Its contributions toward the successful of the organizations are currently been proved and saluted. The power of KM as a system is no longer possesses any limitations. In fact, many KM system practitioners have claimed it as the most desired and demanded energizer to the organizations today, as the role it plays is absolutely important. The role of KM system could be determined by looking on technicalities issues, challenges and opportunities of how to make sure that the right knowledge could be disseminated to the right people at the right time for any purposes. Besides that, KM also could be looked on how the processes involved in gathering and storing the knowledge in the proper placing and formating it as well to be able to access or use when it is needed. While, the agriculture-based industries environment which deal with business of plantation, forestries, and animals, including soil cultivation, crop and livestock management as well as many other activities which have a lot of potential to promote knowledge sharing among its community of practice (CoP) in term of best practice and lesson learnt. This paper analyzes the concept and the system architecture of KM in the agriculture-based industries and discusses various aspects in terms of its technicalities of KM system (KMS) as well as issues, challenges and opportunities involved in this field that will help CoP to increase their productivity and quality as well as to gain return on investment (ROI).

An exploratory study on the accuracy of FPA to COSMIC measurement method conversion types

Background: Functional size measurement methods are increasingly being adopted by software organizations due to the benefits they provide to software project managers. The Function Point Analysis (FPA) measurement method has been used extensively and globally in software organizations. The COSMIC measurement method is considered a second generation FSM method, because of the novel aspects it brings to the FSM field. After the COSMIC method was proposed, the issue of convertibility from FPA to COSMIC method arose, the main problem being the ability to convert FPA historical data to the corresponding COSMIC Function Point (CFP) data with a high level of accuracy, which would give organizations the ability to use the data in their future planning. Almost all the convertibility studies found in the literature involve converting FPA measures to COSMIC measures statistically, based on the final size generated by both methods. Objectives: This paper has three main objectives. The first is to explore the accuracy of the conversion type that converts FPA measures to COSMIC measures statistically, and that of the type that converts FPA transaction function measures to COSMIC measures. The second is to propose a new conversion type that predicts the number of COSMIC data movements based on the number of file type references referenced by all the elementary processes in a single application. The third is to compare the accuracy of our proposed conversion type with the other two conversion types found in the literature. Method: One dataset from the management information systems domain was used to compare the accuracy of all three conversion types using a systematic conversion approach that applies three regression models: Ordinary Least Squares, Robust Least Trimmed Squares, and logarithmic transformation were used. Four datasets from previous studies were used to evaluate the accuracy of the three conversion types, to which the Leave One Out Cross Validation technique was applied to obtain the measures of fitting accuracy. Results: The conversion type most often used as well as the conversion type based on transaction function size were found to generate nonlinear, inaccurate and invalid results according to measurement theory. In addition, they produce a loss of measurement information in the conversion process, because of the FPA weighting system and FPA structural problems, such as illegal scale transformation. Our proposed conversion type avoids the problems inherent in the other two types but not the nonlinearity problem. Furthermore, the proposed conversion type has been found to be more accurate than the other types when the COSMIC functional processes comprise dataset applications that are systematically larger than their corresponding FPA elementary processes, or when the processes vary from small to large. Finally, our proposed conversion type delivered better results over the tested datasets, whereas, in general, there is no statistical significant difference between the accuracy of the conversion types examined for every dataset, particularly the conversion type most often used is not the most accurate. Conclusions: Our proposed conversion type achieves accurate results over the tested datasets. However, the lack of knowledge needed to use it over all the datasets in the literature limits the value of this conclusion. Consequently, practitioners converting from FPA to COSMIC should not stay with only one conversion type, assuming that it is the best. In order to achieve a high level of accuracy in the conversion process, all three conversion types must be tested via a systematic conversion approach.

Formulating a security layer of cloud data storage framework based on multi agent system architecture.

The tremendous growth of the cloud computing environments requires new architecture for security services. In addition, these computing environments are open, and users may be connected or disconnected at any time. Cloud Data Storage, like any other emerging technology, is experiencing growing pains. It is immature, it is fragmented and it lacks standardization. To verify the correctness, integrity, confidentially and availability of users’ data in the cloud, we propose a security framework. This security framework consists of two main layers as agent layer and cloud data storage layer. The propose MAS architecture includes five types of agents: UserInterface Agent (UIA), User Agent (UA), DER Agent (DERA), Data Retrieval Agent (DRA) and Data Distribution Preparation Agent (DDPA). The main goal of this paper is to formulate our secure framework and its architecture.

Semantic conflicts detection of heterogeneous messages of web services: Challenges and solution

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a new design style that has promised to alleviate the semantic interoperability problem between Web services. Exchanging the messages seamlessly between heterogeneous Web services is required but, it is still difficult due to data heterogeneity. As a result, a noticeable number of works has been proposed with the aim of solving this problem, but yet, the problem has not been solved efficiently. Furthermore, it is important to observe the lack of sufficient approaches in the state of the art, whose purposes are semantic conflicts detection between heterogeneous messages of Web services. It is for these reasons we take a step back to the detection step before providing the solution. This study proposes a new ontology-based approach that aim at detecting semantic conflicts between heterogeneous messages of Web services. The main purposes of this approach are to detect any conflict types between the messages during message exchange process and to identify the conflict type for each detected conflict. The proposed approach plays as a vital step for improving the semantic interoperability between heterogeneous Web service messages, since it facilitate the process of addressing semantic conflicts. A real scenario was used in order to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Coalescence of XML-based really simple syndication (RSS) aggregator for blogosphere

RSS (Really Simple Syndication), an XML-based format for sharing and distributing web content to the RSS reader has actively been used for retrieving the latest updates weblogs information among the bloggers in blogosphere environment. However, RSS aggregators that are used to feed the RSS web-contained from the different formats have lead to the issues of RSS syndication confusion. Although their ability to aggregate the latest updated weblogs in timely manner, weblogs that are published in chronological order from multiple sites with different RSS syndication format have lead to ambiguity problem, resulting an uncategorized and irrelevancy of aggregated result. In this paper, a synthetic analyzer named PheRSS is presented. PheRSS is able to collect the different syndication format to achieve a broader set of metadata. With the rules and constraints applied, a more relevant set of data based on user interest can be obtained. The experiment is done to evaluate the accuracy of the result. It is founded that the result achieved better accuracy comparing to Feed Demon.