Janis, Jelena, Constantinos and Iyad will spend 12-13 May attending the annual seminar of SIREN in Jonköping. On the seminar, we will present our ongoing research and results in the areas of the alignment between business strategy and RE (Constantinos), as well as in the integration of RE with Model-Driven Development (Iyad)
Paper accepted in EMMSAD 2011 Conference
A paper titled “Analyzing the Integration between Requirements and Models in Model Driven Development” has been accepted for the EMMSAD 2011 Conference (http://www.emmsad.org/), which is held in conjunction with CAiSE 2011 in London, UK.
Authors: Iyad Zikra, Janis Stirna, Jelena Zdravkovic
Abstract: In Model Driven Development (MDD), models replace software code as the development artifact. At the same time, requirements represent the information that is elaborated in models. However, despite the tight relationship between models and requirements, only a few MDD approaches provide the necessary methodological guidelines and tool support to explicitly facilitate this relationship. In this paper, we analyze existing approaches for integrating requirements with models within MDD. Based on the analysis, we elicit a set of general properties that need to be fulfilled when considering the integration of requirements and models, and we assess the contribution of the considered approaches accordingly.
Professor Michaël Petit in SYSLAB this week!
During this week Prof. Michaël Petit from University of Namur (Belgium) is going to continue his collaboration with our research lab. This time the effort is set on an integration of well-established Business Strategy approaches such as Strategy Maps, Value Chain, Blue Ocean and others for a better understanding of their use in the requirements engineering scope. From our side, Paul, Constantinos, Birger and Jelena are engaged in the work.
2 Contributions accepted for IEEE RCIS 2011
The research papers of our PhD students, Khurram Shahzad and Constantinos Giannoulis have been accepted for the 5th IEEE International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS 2011). Short summaries of their works, the first on a process analysis approach using warehouses, and the other on business strategy modelling, are provided below:
Towards Goal-driven Access to Process Warehouse: Integrating Goals with Process Warehouse for Business Process Analysis (Shahzad, Zdravkovic)
Analysis and improvement of business processes, one of the core phases in the BPM life cycle, is becoming on top of the agenda for many enterprises and organisations. An emerging approach to analyze business processes is to use the business intelligence approaches that attempt to facilitate the analytical capabilities of business process management systems by employing process-oriented data warehouse and decision making techniques. However, very little work has been done on employing a business orientation in the design and utilization of process warehouse. The approach presented in this paper, addresses that limitation by attempting to integrate business goals with warehouse. The proposed approach to integration spans across two levels, conceptual and implementation; the first defines the concepts that are used to relate goals and process warehouse; the latter is used to implement the concepts and the relations to link warehouse data and goal records for relational databases. The latter is used identify the records that are related with goals. The proposed approach enhances the way users access warehouse data and interpret the data. To facilitate the use of the proposed approach we have developed a prototype. The evaluation results, though preliminary, provides evidence of the usefulness of our approach.
Modeling Business Strategy: A meta-model of Strategy Maps and Balance Scorecards (Giannoulis, Petit, Zdravkovic)
Business strategy is aimed to support the vision of an enterprise, by paving the way to achieve it through goals that direct the strategy’s execution. However, there is a lack of means to establish and assess the alignment of business strategy and goal oriented requirements engineering. The objective of our ongoing research is to model business strategy in order to establish well-defined and traceable links with system requirements. In this paper, we propose a business strategy meta-model for Strategy maps and Balance Scorecards. The validity and applicability of the meta-model is demonstrated through a case scenario using OWL and Telos.
A workshop on value modeling and business ontologies
The 5th International Workshop on Value Modeling and Business Ontologies (VMBO 2011) was arranged 7-8 February by the University of Ghent, Belgium. This excellent workshop drew about 30 participants where DSV was represented by myself (Birger), Paul Johannesson, and Maria Bergholtz.
More info about it can be found at the workshop’s official home page. More info about the VMBO series of workshops can be found by clicking through the links at this page.
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- The belfry of Ghent
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- Lunch mingle
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- Roberta Ferrario
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- A happy Christian
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- Bill, Maria, Hans, and Paul
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- Pavel Hruby on the fence
DSV is Co-organising BUSITAL 2011
The 6th International Workshop on Business/IT-Alignment and Interoperability is arranged in London the 20th of June, 2011.
Members of DSV staff are involved in various ways in the arrangements. Please consider contributing to the workshop by submitting your research reports.
The Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE’11, an important conference) is co-located with the workshop.
Additional info can be found at the workshop site. Info about CAiSE’11 can be found at http://www.caise2011.com/index.php
Tharaka Ilayperuma PhD Dissertation
Today, Tharaka Ilayperuma defended his PhD thesis “Improving E-Business Design through Business Model Analysis”. The opponent was William Song from Durham University, and the examination committee consisted of Marianne Nilsson from Stockholm University, Eva Söderström from Högskolan Skövde and Henrik Hansson from DSV. Paul Johannesson and Jelena Zdravkovic have been supervisors.
William gave a very thorough opposition including more general as well as very specific questions, ranging from the meaning of e-business to the role of the Semantic Web in business models.
Abstract
To a rapidly increasing degree, traditional organizational structures evolve in large parts of the world towards online business using modern Information and Communication Technology (ICT) capabilities. For efficient applications of inter-organizational information systems, the alignment between business and ICT is a key factor. In this context, business analysis using business modelling can be regarded as a first step in designing economically sustainable e-business solutions.
This thesis examines how business modeling can be used to improve e-business design. We examine how business stakeholder intentions and different objectives of business collaborations can be used to obtain an explorative business model that can be used as a basis for designing e-business solutions. The thesis proposes a set of artifacts for business modeling and e-service design. In regard to business modeling, we propose methods that consider internal aspects such as strategic intentions of actors and external aspects such as business collaborations among them. Considering stakeholder intentions, we introduce a method to design business models based on goal models. A set of templates for designing goal models and a set of transformation rules to obtain business models based on goal models are proposed. To further improve business models considering business collaborations, we suggest a classification of business transactions that considers underlying business objectives of business collaborations. Utilizing the suggested business transactions, we then propose a method to improve business modeling. Finally, we propose a method for designing e-services using business models. The methods suggested support business modelers as well as process and services designers in executing their tasks effectively. The methods have been assessed through applications in two cases.
Tharaka phd presentation2010
View more presentations from pajo01.
A Paper on MDA-based Transformations of Services
At the EDOC Enterprise Computing conference (IEEE EDOC 2010), I presented a paper that proposed the elicitation of Web services, using a MDA-aligned model. In particular, we considered business value models and an established collaboration framework for creating a service-centric CIM; by utilizing well-defined mappings, the model is further transformed into a standardized UML-based e-service model at the PIM level.
The full title:
“A Model-Driven Approach for Designing E-Services Using Business Ontological Frameworks”, Jelena Zdravkovic and Tharaka Ilayperuma
Link: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=5628338