Vjeran Strahonja

Modeling Legislation by using UML State Machine Diagrams

The basic idea of modeling law, as presented in this paper, is capturing domain knowledge of legislation and specifying it in a generic way by using commonly agreed and understandable modeling concepts of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). State machine diagrams provide a graphical notation for describing the dynamic (time-dependent) behavior of a system. Business oriented behavioral models of legislation enable to understand the system better, support the detection of anomalies and help to improve the quality of legislation by validation and verification. Different types of anomalies in legislation are classified and described in the article. More specific, this paper presents a static analysis approach to the checking of correctness and consistency of the UML state machine diagrams specifications of legislation. The presented framework includes semantic and syntactic anomalies. Other motivation for modeling legislation is a desire to build court case management systems. The prerequisite of building such models is the transformation of legislation and regulations into system models that focus on different aspects of the computer system, such as programs that automates the business process and business rules, database, user interface, system procedures etc. Based on empirical research, assessment of proposed method is made

The Evaluation Criteria of Workflow Metamodels

This paper defines the evaluation framework of workflow metamodels, based on a list of evaluation criteria. The presented evaluation criteria combine domain specific evaluation approach and some of the existing quality metrics, defined in the field of software. Well established evaluation criteria of workflow metamodels should enable their comparison, selection and proper use of methods and tool built upon them. The final result is a list of nine categories of evaluation criteria, decomposed into more than forty subcategories, but the list of subcategories is extendable. The practical validation of proposed evaluation highlighted some topics for future research.

Methodologies for development of mobile applications

The paper presents the results of literature review performed in order to identify newly created methodologies targeting the development of mobile applications. As mobile development differs from development of other software systems we also discuss the challenges of such development and recon that methodological approach in development is necessary. However, there were no systematic studies identifying methodologies for mobile applications development. Systematic literature review we performed included more than 6700 initial studies, identified 49 (0.73%) potentially relevant studies, and after extracting data and applying quality check procedures 14 methodologies are identified. Only one of these methodologies is reported to be used in practice.

The analysis of CSFs in stages of ERP implementation — Case study in small and medium-sized (SME) companies in Croatia

This paper elaborates the stages of ERP implementation in terms of critical success factors in small and medium-sized enterprises in Croatia. These stages and their associated success factors were evaluated by company executives, implementation managers and advanced users. The implementation is an extremely critical process especially in small companies which have limited resources, particularly human resources, where some people often have to perform more than one business function. The paper shows that the number of critical success factors of implementation significantly differs in six examined stages and the quantity of critical factors in the stage with the highest number of them is 100% higher than in the stage with the lowest number of them. If we sum up the factors obtained through the stages and compare the result to the global list of critical success factors of implementation - the results differ to a considerable extent.

Scrutinizing Systematic Literature Review Process in Software Engineering

Performing the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) in the turbulent field of Software Engineering (SE) brings different obstacles and uncertainties. The commonly used guidelines for performing the SLR in this field are adapted from health sciences and presented by Kitchenham and Charters in 2007. This paper follows the Kitchenham’s three-phases-review-process and fulfils it with the findings, observations and recommendations from other influential authors in the field. The process of SLR is observed from the perspective of appliance in the field of SE and supplemented by the important precautious measures that should be undertaken by the authors performing it. Thus, this paper aims to present the state-of-the-art in performing the SLR in SE.

User interface modeling within application system development

A well-designed user interface, nowadays exclusively graphical, is one of the key factors determining the applications appeal to the user. GUI modeling should be a part of the overall process of application system development. The aim of this article is to show different methodological approaches to the GUI modeling. Nowadays, UML is a widely used standard for object-oriented modeling software in the software industry. The paper investigates whether it is possible to successfully model GUI by using UML and suggests a way in which this can be achieved. by using some UML extensions without disrupting the standardization.

Taxonomy of Anomalies in Business Process Models

Anomalies in business process models refer to deviations from their expected structure, functionality, behavior, semantics, use of concepts and their expression, among others. The research in this paper focuses on anomalies in business process models with the aim to propose taxonomy of anomalies and devise ways to avoid them or to eliminate them when they occur. Anomalies are divided into basic categories and subcategories to the level of granularity that allows their differentiation, description of their specific causes and workarounds as well as their expression in the pattern format.