Thierry Bodhuin

Supporting impact analysis: a semi-automated technique and associated tool

The paper presents a technique, and associated tool, for supporting the analysis of the impacts of changes on software systems. The approach is to exploit the dependencies that exist within the software system to be modified, modelled as a graph of objects and links. Changes are modelled as events that are propagated upon the graph according to predefined propagation rules. To cover situations in which a deeper analysis is required, it is possible to define potential propagation rules; the impacts of such rules are then declared as potential and a human decision is required to check whether they are real or not. The associated tool encompasses a propagation engine, which implements the automatic propagation of impacts, and a set of user oriented features supporting the control of the propagation engine and providing an highly interactive user interface for analysing the results of the automatic propagation.

A framework for measuring business processes based on GQM

The evolution of business processes and supporting software systems requires their analysis and assessment from both quantitative and qualitative points of view. The analysis and evaluation activities need the support of methodological and technological tools, customizable to the innovation requirements of the chosen processes and supporting software systems. This paper proposes a measurement framework based on the goal-question-metric (GQM) paradigm. It is generally applicable to any business process and supporting software system after its instantiation. The collaborative software environment WebEv, Web for the Evaluation, is proposed for facilitating the collection and elaboration of the required measures. Finally, the paper describes the application of the measurement framework in a real context.

Migrating COBOL systems to the Web by using the MVC design pattern

Integrating legacy Cobol systems into a Web-based architecture is a complex and challenging task. Cobol is not a distributed and object-oriented language, however its integration with other languages or distributed systems is a prerequisite for achieving migration towards Web technologies. Moreover, the user interface and user interaction modalities need to be changed. Numerous strategies have been proposed for wrapping the business logic and re-implementing the user interface, but there is still a great need for experimental research. This paper presents a migration strategy whose target system is a Web-enabled architecture based on the model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern. By extracting all the needed information from the Cobol source code, the realized toolkit can automatically generate wrappers for the business logic and the data model and the Web user interface as Java server pages. The strategy and the toolkit presented have been defined within the project M&S SW, a research project aimed at defining new technological solutions to be transferred to small and medium enterprises operating in information and communication technologies.

A toolkit for applying a migration strategy: a case study

Many organizations manage their activities by using legacy systems. These are very important for them as they represent an important support for the achievement of the business goals. Numerous strategies have been proposed for migrating legacy systems toward modern architecture. By starting from approaches presented in the literature, this paper provides a reference schema to be applied for incrementally migrating a COBOL legacy system toward a modern technological platform. To efficiently applying the strategy, a toolkit has been implemented. It automatically performs the decomposition of the legacy software by identifying the software components to be encapsulated in different wrappers and creating new programs. Data flow analysis is used to identify the formal parameter in the new program interfaces. The strategy and the toolkit presented have been defined within the project M&S SW, a research project aiming to define new technological solutions to be transferred to ICT SMEs.

Building an RFID Document Management Service

Innovations in information and communication technology (ICT) aim at providing services oriented systems to improve organizations business and end users quality life. This paper discusses how the radio frequency identification (RFID) technology can create value in an organization and describes the RFID service defined for supporting document management. This service aims at monitoring paper documents in order to capture further information with reference to traditional document management systems. The captured information could improve the knowledge of who manages, carries out and uses the business processes of an organization and, consequently, offers an advantage to its business. This paper also briefly describes the platform hosting the designed service and facilitating the adoption of RFID within an organization

WebEv - a collaborative environment for supporting measurement frameworks

Assessment activities play a key role when an enterprise wants to evolve its business processes for adopting innovative information and communication technologies. The assessment regards business processes and supporting software systems and, to be effective, it requires the support of adequate software environments that facilitate the collaboration among the involved assessors. The definition and implementation of such a kind of environment implies the previous definition of a measurement framework that may guide the specification and design of the environment. This paper presents the collaborative software environment WebEv to support any kind of assessment framework whose definition is based on the goal question metric paradigm. The environment is flexible and easily customizable to any context and arising needs. It can represent a practical mean for the collection of the available quantitative information regarding the processes and/or software systems of an enterprise.

A toolkit for developing Web-based information systems: case studies

The widespread usage of Internet increases the need of Web-based software applications for diffusing, searching and exchanging information useful to support a large variety of activities, such as business exchange, collaborative work, training, etc. The use of Internet allows the enterprise to experiment new and more efficient organization models through innovative elements that simplify the communication among their different sites. This situation motivates the increasing need of Web-based applications and calls for a quick development of new tools making easier the interaction with and/or between the enterprises information systems. This paper briefly introduces an approach for a quick development of Web-based Information Systems by using a toolkit, named MVCGen, Model/View/Controller Generator. The name exhibits that the software systems produced are based on the Model-View-Controller design pattern. The paper presents a set of experiences regarding the automatic generation of Web-based software systems.

PODoJA: Packaging Optimizer for Downloadable Java Applications

Applications are often distributed and accessible on the network for being downloaded when needed. However, the way applications are created does not usually consider the optimization of downloading time and bandwidth usage. This is a relevant problem for applications that are deployed in relatively slow networks. When the download time means cost, like usually for the GSM/GPRS communication network, applications that are packaged for reducing the average downloading time in a set of classical execution scenarios will improve the user experience. This paper presents an approach and supporting toolset for packaging a Java application as a set of jar files so that the downloading time/cost for a set of execution scenarios is minimized. The approach relies on run-time analysis performed by executing scenarios over a dynamically downloaded and traced application, and uses genetic algorithms for determining the sub-optimal packaging of classes/resources in jar files