Rui Couto

Application of ontologies in identifying requirements patterns in use cases

This is partly funded by project LATiCES (ref. NORTE-07-0124-FEDER-000062), co-financed by the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (ON.2 - O Novo Norte), under the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF), through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and by national funds, through the Portuguese foundation for science and technology (FCT).

MapIt: A Model Based Pattern Recovery Tool

Design patterns provide a means to reuse proven solutions during development, but also to identify good practices during analysis. These are particularly relevant in complex and critical software, such as is the case of ubiquitous and pervasive systems. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) presents a solution for this problem, with the usage of high level models. As part of an effort to develop approaches to the migration of applications to mobile contexts, this paper reports on a tool that identifies design patterns in source code. Code is transformed into both platform specific and independent models, and from these design patterns are inferred. MapIt, the tool which implements these functionalities is described.

MODUS: model-based user interfaces prototyping

Model-based methodologies, supported by automatic generation, have been proposed as a solution to reduce software development costs. In the case of interactive computing systems specific challenges arise. On the one hand, a high level of automation requires the use of detailed models, which is contrary to the iterative development process, based on the progressive refinement of user interface mockups, typical of user centered development processes. On the other hand, layered software architectures imply a distinction between the models used in the business logic and in the user interface, raising consistency problems between the models at each level. This article proposes a tool supported approach to user interface generation directly from the architectural models of the business logic. In many situations, user interfaces provide similar features inside a specific domain. The identification of the application domain is thus a key factor in supporting the automation of the generation process.

A Study on the Viability of Formalizing Use Cases

Use case scenarios are known as powerful means for requirements specification. On the one hand, they join in the same modelling space the expectations of the stakeholders and the needs of the developers involved in the process. On the other hand, they describe the desired high level functionalities. By formalizing these descriptions we are able to extract relevant informations from them. Specifically, we are interested in identifying requirements patterns (common requirements with typical implementation solutions) in support for a requirements based software development approach. This paper addresses the transformation of use case descriptions expressed in a Controller Natural Language into an ontology expressed in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), as well as the query process for such information. It reports on a study aimed at validating our approach and our tool with real users. A preliminary set of results is discussed.

The Modelery: A Collaborative Web Based Repository

Software development processes are known to produce a large set of artifacts such as models, code and documentation. Keeping track of these artifacts without supporting tools is not easy, and making them available to others can be even harder. Standard version control systems are not able to solve this issue. More than keeping track of versions, a system to help organize and make artifacts available in meaningful ways is needed. In this paper we review a number of alternative systems, and present the requirements and the implementation of a collaborative web repository which we developed to solve this issue.

The Modelery: a model-based software development repository

Purpose – This paper aims to present the Modelery, a platform for collaborative repository to support model-based software development. The Modelery is a Web platform, composed both by a Web page and Web services for interoperability. Design/methodology/approach – By performing a study in the existing platforms, it was possible to achieve a set of issues to tackle. The issues enabled the possibility to define a set of requirements that allowed the authors to design a new platform, and to perform a model-driven software development process, which started from the requirements until reaching the final software solution. Findings – With this work, it was possible to perform a survey on the currently available artifacts repositories, categorize them and identify their shortcomings. This was essential to define the set of requirements for a new platform to overcome the identified issues. This process leads to a platform able to improve the currently available solutions, and validated in the scientific communit...