Incorporating design explanation within formal object-oriented method (FOOM)

Requirements engineering is a commencing phase in the development of either software applications or information systems. It is concerned with understanding and specifying the customer's requirements of the system to be delivered. Throughout the literature, this is agreed to be one of the most crucial and, unfortunately, problematic phases in development. Despite the diversity of research directions, approaches and methods, the question of process understanding and management is still limited. Among contemporary approaches to the improvement of the current practice of Requirements Engineering, Formal Object-Oriented Method (FOOM) has been introduced as a new promising solution. The FOOM approach to requirements engineering is based on a synthesis of socio-organisational theory, the object-oriented approach, and mathematical formal specification. The entire FOOM specification process is evolutionary and involves a large volume of changes in requirements. During this process, requirements evolve through various forms of informal, semi-formal, and formal while maintaining a semantic link between these forms and, most importantly, conforming to the customer's requirements. A deep understanding of the complexity of the requirements model and its dynamics is critical in improving requirements engineering process management. This thesis investigates the benefits of documenting both the evolution of the requirements model and the rationale for that evolution. Design explanation explains and justifies the deliberations of, and decisions made during, the design activity. In this thesis, design explanation is used to describe the requirements engineering process in order to improve understandability of, and traceability within, the evolving requirements specification. The design explanation recorded during this research project is also useful in assisting the researcher in gaining insights into the creativity and opportunistic characteristics of the requirements engineering process. This thesis offers an interpretive investigation into incorporating design explanation within FOOM in order to extend and advantage the method. The researcher's interpretation and analysis of collected data highlight an insight-driven and opportunistic process rather than a strictly and systematically predefined one. In fact, the process was not smoothly evolutionary, but involved occasional 'crisis' points at which the model was reconceptualised, simplified and restructured. Therefore, contributions of the thesis lie not only in an effective incorporation of design explanation within FOOM, but also a deep understanding of the dynamic process of requirements engineering. The new understanding of the complexity of the requirements model and its dynamics suggests new directions for future research and forms a basis for a new approach to process management.

The design and development of an integrated system for object-oriented finite element computing

Finite Element Method (FEM) is widely used in Science and Engineering since 1960’s. The vast majority of FEM software is procedure-oriented. However, this conventional style of designing FEM software encounters problems in maintenance, reuse, and expansion of the software. Recently the object-oriented finite element method attracts the attention of lots of researchers, and now there is a growing interest in this method. In this paper, the object-oriented finite element (OOFE) is briefly introduced. Then the design and development of an integrated OOFE system is described. A comparison of the integrated OOFE system and a procedure-oriented system shows that our OOFE system has many advantages.

Object oriented finite element analysis: a distributed approach to mesh generation

The object-oriented finite element method (OOFEM) has attracted the attention of many researchers. Compared with the traditional finite element method, OOFEM software has the advantages of maintenance and reuse. Moreover, it is easier to expand the architecture to a distributed one. In this paper, we introduce a distributed architecture of a object-oriented finite element preprocessor. A comparison between the distributed system and the centralised system shows that the former, presented in the paper, greatly improves the performance of mesh generation. Other finite element analysis modules could be expanded according to this architecture.

Object oriented regular expressions

Regular expressions are used to parse textual data to match patterns and extract variables. They have been implemented in a vast number of programming languages with a significant quantity of research devoted to improving their operational efficiency. However, regular expressions are limited to finding linear matches. Little research has been done in the field of object-oriented results which would allow textual or binary data to be converted to multi-layered objects. This is significantly relevant as many of todaypsilas data formats are object-based. This paper extends our previous work by detailing an algorithmic approach to perform object-oriented parsing, and provides an initial study of benchmarks of the algorithms of our contribution

Performance analysis for object-oriented software: a systematic mapping

Performance is a crucial attribute for most software, making performance analysis an important software engineering task. The difficulty is that modern applications are challenging to analyse for performance. Many profiling techniques used in real-world software development struggle to provide useful results when applied to large-scale object-oriented applications. There is a substantial body of research into software performance generally but currently there exists no survey of this research that would help identify approaches useful for object-oriented software. To provide such a review we performed a systematic mapping study of empirical performance analysis approaches that are applicable to object-oriented software. Using keyword searches against leading software engineering research databases and manual searches of relevant venues we identified over 5,000 related articles published since January 2000. From these we systematically selected 253 applicable articles and categorised them according to ten facets that capture the intent, implementation and evaluation of the approaches. Our mapping study results allow us to highlight the main contributions of the existing literature and identify areas where there are interesting opportunities. We also find that, despite the research including approaches specifically aimed at object-oriented software, there are significant challenges in providing actionable feedback on the performance of large-scale object-oriented applications.

Object-oriented security modelling for healthcare

With the convergence of paper to electronic, the health industry is relying more on technology to maintain and update the well-being of patients. This reliance on technology requires an acute level of protection from unwanted technological disasters and/or human threats. Research shows insufficiencies with the implementation and use of security controls; as well as current analysis methods lacking the techniques to analyse technical and social aspects of security. The aim of this paper is to introduce an information security evaluation methodology for health information systems based on UML.

Prototyping real-time systems using Petri net and object-oriented models

The objective of the research for this thesis is to develop techniques in order to build an executable model of a real-time system. This model is to be used early in the development of the system not only to detect errors in the specification of the system but also to validate expectations of the developer as to the operation of the system. A graphical specification of a real-time system called the transformation schema was chosen to be used to build the model. Two executable models of a real-time system are described.

Management information systems in job shops : design of interfaces

A study of management information system technology suitable for the job shop environment, highlighting deficiencies in generic software with respect to supplying users the information they actually require. To solve this problem a set of flexible interfaces was developed through the use of object-oriented programming. The methods used were simple enough to be adopted by vendors of any generic MIS application.

Health information security evaluation: continued development of an object-oriented method

With the convergence of paper to electronic, the health industry is relying more on technology to maintain and update the well-being of patients. This reliance on technology requires an acute level of protection from
unwanted technological disasters and/or human threats. Research shows insufficiencies with the implementation and use of security controls; as well as current analysis methods lacking the techniques to analyse technical and social aspects of security. The aim of this paper is to introduce an information security evaluation methodology for health information systems based on UML.

Design of user interfaces for job shop environment

User-computer interface development has gone through rapid development in recent years. These developments, however, have not yet been fully implemented in management information system (MIS) design for job shop manufacturing situations. Most of the commercially available MISs are operationally inflexible and do not support management in report generation and decision making, particularly in job shops. This paper describes a framework in developing system user interfaces for job shop manufacturing situations to highlight how a generic information system can be made more useful to managerial decision making. Object-oriented programming technology has been used to provide flexible access to information stored by a generic MIS. Twenty interfacing programs have been developed. For illustration, only three of those interface programs relating to generation of strategic level management reports are discussed here.

OVIE : object-oriented and vector-based image editing

A powerful image editing system called OVIE is described, which provides fast and accurate creation, composition, rendering and other manipulation of image contents. Flexibility and convenience of the system are achieved by including two modules: image decomposition and image vectorization to understand and represent an image respectively. To understand an image comprehensively, we propose to integrate image segmentation, shape completion and image completion techniques to ensure a seamless image editing. An array of pixels is replaced by vector data with geometric edit ability for image representation since the geometrically-based editing has physical meanings and thus it is more natural or intuitive for users to edit. Compared to the existing works, our system is more convenient and can generate effects with higher quality. © 2012 IEEE.