Samedi Heng

Unifying and Extending user Story Models

Within Agile methods, User Stories (US) are mostly used as primary requirements artifacts and units of functionality of the project. The idea is to express requirements on a low abstraction basis using natural language. Most of them are exclusively centered on the final user as only stakeholder. Over the years, some templates (in the form of concepts relating the WHO, WHAT and WHY dimensions into a phrase) have been proposed by agile methods practitioners or academics to guide requirements gathering. Using these templates can be problematic. Indeed, none of them define any semantic related to a particular syntax precisely or formally leading to various possible interpretations of the concepts. Consequently, these templates are used in an ad–hoc manner, each modeler having idiosyncratic preferences. This can nevertheless lead to an underuse of representation mechanisms, misunderstanding of a concept use and poor communication between stakeholders. This paper studies templates found in literature in order to reach unification in the concepts’ syntax, an agreement in their semantics as well as methodological elements increasing inherent scalability of US-based projects.

On the difficulties for students to adhere to scrum on global software development projects: preliminary results

We present the 2011 version of the Global Software Development project that we run annually. Developers were distributed across three countries to develop mobile solutions on the theme of sustainability. They followed the Scrum process and used the IBM Rational Team Concert tool. This study elicits the difficulties encountered by the students new to Scrum in adhering to its discipline. We examined if the causes of these difficulties were due to the fact that developers were distributed across time, distance, and culture. We also studied the impact of the chosen tooling.

Bridging User Story Sets with the Use Case Model

User Stories (US) are mostly used as basis for representing requirements in agile development. Written in a direct manner, US fail in producing a visual representation of the main system-to-be functions. A Use-Case Diagram (UCD), on the other hand, intends to provide such a view. Approaches that map US sets to a UCD have been proposed; they however consider every US as a Use Case (UC). Nevertheless, a valid UC should not be an atomic task or a sub-process but enclose an entire scenario of the system use instead. A unified model of US templates to tag US sets was previously build. Within functional elements, it notably distinguishes granularity levels. In this paper, we propose to transform specific elements of a US set into a UCD using the granularity information obtained through tagging. In practice, such a transformation involves continuous round-tripping between the US and UC views; a CASE-tool supports this.

Building a rationale diagram for evaluating user story sets

Requirements representation in agile methods is often done on the basis of User Stories (US) which are short sentences relating a WHO, WHAT and (possibly) WHY dimension. They are by nature very operational and simple to understand thus very efficient. Previous research allowed to build a unified model for US templates associating semantics to a set of keywords based on templates collected over the web and scientific literature. Since the semantic associated to these keywords is mostly issued of the i* framework we overview in this paper how to build a custom rationale diagram on the basis of a US set tagged using that unified template. The rationale diagram is strictly speaking not an i* strategic rationale diagram but uses parts of its constructs and visual notation to build various trees of relating US elements in a single project. Indeed, the benefits of editing such a rationale diagram is to identify depending US, identifying EPIC ones and group them around common Themes. The paper shows the feasibility of building the rationale diagram, then points to the use of these consistent sets of US for iteration content planning. To ensure the US set and the rationale diagram constitute a consistent and not concurrent whole, an integrated Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tool supports the approach.

User-story driven development of multi-agent systems: A process fragment for agile methods

Abstract Agile software development methods are mostly built as a set of managerial guidelines and development concepts on how to handle a software development but are not bounded to software development paradigms like object or agent orientation. Some methods, like eXtreme Programming and SCRUM are driven by operational requirements representation models called User Stories. These User Stories can be used as an anchoring point to agile methods; this means that we could take a User Stories set to drive a software transformation approach embedded in a particular development paradigm. This paper presents a process fragment for Multi-Agent Systems development with agile methods based on User Stories sets. The process fragment indeed takes advantage of an initial set of User Stories to build a reasoning model (called the Rationale Tree; typically several of these are built for a single project) that documents decompositions and means-end alternatives in scenarios for requirements realization. A Rationale Tree can then be aligned with a Multi-Agent design and implemented in an agent-oriented development language. In this paper the transformation is targeted to the JAVA Agent DEvelopment (JADE) framework. The process fragment (at least partially) covers the Requirements Analysis, Multi-Agent System Design and Multi-Agent System Implementation phases. Transformation from one phase to the other is overseen and illustrated on an example.

An intentional perspective on partial agile adoption

Nowadays, the agile paradigm is one of the most important approaches used for software development besides structured and traditional life cycles. To facilitate its adoption and minimize the risks, different metamodels have been proposed trying to unify it. Yet, very few of them have focused on one fundamental question: How to partially adopt agile methods? Intuitively, choosing which practices to adopt from agile methods should be made based on their most prioritized goals in the software development process. To answer this issue, this paper proposes a model for partial agile methods adoption based on intentional (i.e., goal) perspectives. Hence, adoption can be considered as defining the goals in the model, corresponding to the intentions of the software development team. Next, by mapping with our goal-based model, suitable practices for adoption could be easily found. Moreover, the relationship between roles and their dependencies to achieve a specific goal can also be visualized. This will help the software development team to easily identify the vulnerabilities associated with each goal and, in turn, help to minimize risks.

Developing a multi-agent platform supporting patient hospital stays following a socio-technical approach: Management and governance benefits

Abstract Most of the caregivers working in hospitals are highly skilled and educated work force. Even if they are supported by administrative staff, part of their time still consists of administrative procedures or trying to empirically fill or retrieve agendas on the basis of real-time constraints. Similarly, patients waste time waiting for adequate treatments so they occupy slots (beds) in hospitals while their hospitalization is not a necessity. This leads to huge wastes of resources for the hospital that has to hospitalize and prioritize patients in more effective need of care and monitoring. In order to ensure real-time patient support during its entire stay in the hospital (in terms of bed occupancy, appointments with doctors and/or for medico-technical exams) as well as to furnish a central solution open for future IT integration we propose, in this paper, to build a Multi-Agent System (MAS) based software solution. The latter has been built following a socio-technical approach; it maps, at runtime, the working processes of a Belgian hospital. Processes have been modeled in a patient-centric way in order to identify most relevant stages and bottlenecks in bed, cares and medico-technical exams management; real-time data transmission allows to update and re-optimize slots statuses as well as schedules. Also, data analysis (i.e., business intelligence) functions are supported by the MAS implementation for decision making/taking. Further than the proof of concept that shows the managerial support of the software solution, the MAS modules’ benefits to the overall hospital strategy is studied. The latter shows the relevance of the solution to the hospital’s governance.

Designing an MOOC as an agent-platform aggregating heterogeneous virtual learning environments

ABSTRACT With the emergence of cloud technologies, on the one hand, and social networks, on the other hand, the possibilities for e-learning have been drastically enhanced in the latest years. Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) can now indeed contain a huge amount of learning resources; in parallel, large user communities are available in social networks. These nevertheless remain different systems but, by using these heterogeneous software environments together, the possibilities for interaction could be multiplied. That is why, this paper suggests to build a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) environment through a Multi-Agent System (MAS) working as a virtual abstraction layer over heterogeneous software platforms. The idea is to aggregate different traditional VLE to dispose of the learning objects they own as well as other platforms such as social networks to furnish an easy access to the MOOC of their large user communities. The MAS design has been architectured around a real-life organisational pattern – the joint venture – allowing one to deal with the complexity of heterogeneous software environments in a manner that real-life companies set up joint governance. Communication scenarios issued of a field analysis are pointed out in the paper; these are supported by the MOOC platform in the native environment as well as in Facebook. The proposal is indeed validated through the development of a prototype using Facebook as a case study for third-party platform interfacing. We finally highlight the benefits for the user experience.

On Modelers Ability to Build a Visual Diagram from a User Story Set: A Goal-Oriented Approach

[Context and Motivation] User Stories (US) are often used as requirement representation artifacts within agile projects. Within US sets, the nature, granularity and inter-dependencies of the elements constituting each US is not or poorly represented. To deal with these drawbacks, previous research allowed to build a unified model for tagging the elements of the WHO, WHAT and WHY dimensions of a US; each tag representing a concept with an inherent nature and defined granularity. Once tagged, the US elements can be graphically represented with an icon and the modeler can define the inter-dependencies between the elements to build one or more so-called Rationale Trees (RT). [Question/Problem] RT and their benefits have been illustrated on case studies but the ability to easily build a RT in a genuine case for software modelers not familiar with the concepts needs to be evaluated. [Principal ideas/results] This paper presents the result of a double exercise aimed to evaluate how well novice and experienced modelers were able to build a RT out of an existing US set. The experiment explicitly forces the test subjects to attribute a concept to US elements and to link these together. [Contribution] On the basis of the conducted experiment, we highlight the encountered difficulties that the lambda modeler faces when building a RT with basic support. Overall, the test subjects have produced models of satisfying quality. Also, we highlight these necessary conditions that need to be provided to the lambda modeler to build a consistent RT.

Mapping IT Governance to Software Development Process: From COBIT 5 to GI-Tropos

Mapping IT Governance principles from frameworks like COBIT 5 to Requirements-Driven Software Processes such as (GI-) Tropos or even RUP-based ones allows IT managers to propose governance and management rules for software development to cope with stakeholders’ requirements. On the one hand, IT Governance in software engineering has to ensure that software organization business processes meet strategic requirements of the organization. On the other hand, requirements-driven software methods are development processes using high-level social-oriented models to drive the software life cycle both in terms of project management and deductive iterative engineering techniques. Typically, such methods are well-suited for the inclusion and adaptation of governance principles immediately into the software development life cycle. To consolidate both perspectives, this paper proposes a generic framework allowing mapping IT governance principles to the GI-Tropos software processes.