An Exploratory Study of Data Quality Management Practices in the ERP Software Systems Context

Quality data are not only relevant for successful Data Warehousing or Business Intelligence applications; they are also a precondition for efficient and effective use of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. ERP professionals in all kinds of businesses are concerned with data quality issues, as a survey, conducted by the Institute of Information Systems at the University of Bern, has shown. This paper demonstrates, by using results of this survey, why data quality problems in modern ERP systems can occur and suggests how ERP researchers and practitioners can handle issues around the quality of data in an ERP software Environment.

Usability-Oriented Software Development Process

Usability is the capability of the software product to be understood, learned, used and attractive to the user, when used under specified conditions. Many studies demonstrate the benefits of usability, yet to this day software products continue to exhibit consistently low levels of this quality attribute. Furthermore, poor usability in software systems contributes largely to software failing in actual use. One of the main disciplines involved in usability is that of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Over the past two decades the HCI community has proposed specific features that should be present in applications to improve their usability, yet incorporating them into software continues to be far from trivial for software developers. These difficulties are due to multiple factors, including the high level of abstraction at which these HCI recommendations are made and how far removed they are from actual software implementation. In order to bridge this gap, the Software Engineering community has long proposed software design solutions to help developers include usability features into software, however, the problem remains an open research question. This doctoral thesis addresses the problem of helping software developers include specific usability features into their applications by providing them with a structured and tangible guidance in the form of a process, which we have termed the Usability-Oriented Software Development Process. This process is supported by a set of Software Usability Guidelines that help developers to incorporate a set of eleven usability features with high impact on software design. After developing the Usability-oriented Software Development Process and the Software Usability Guidelines, they have been validated across multiple academic projects and proven to help software developers to include such usability features into their software applications. In doing so, their use significantly reduced development time and improved the quality of the resulting designs of these projects. Furthermore, in this work we propose a software tool to automate the application of the proposed process. In sum, this work contributes to the integration of the Software Engineering and HCI disciplines providing a framework that helps software developers to create usable applications in an efficient way.

Software Design Guidelines for Usability

For years, the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community has crafted usability guidelines that clearly define what characteristics a software system should have in order to be easy to use. However, in the Software Engineering (SE) community keep falling short of successfully incorporating these recommendations into software projects. From a SE perspective, the process of incorporating usability features into software is not always straightforward, as a large number of these features have heavy implications in the underlying software architecture. For example, successfully including an “undo” feature in an application requires the design and implementation of many complex interrelated data structures and functionalities. Our work is focused upon providing developers with a set of software design patterns to assist them in the process of designing more usable software. This would contribute to the proper inclusion of specific usability features with high impact on the software design. Preliminary validation data show that usage of the guidelines also has positive effects on development time and overall software design quality.

How Blended Learning Reduce Underachievement in Higher Education: An Experience in Teaching Computer Sciences.

This paper presents a blended learning approach and a study evaluating instruction in a software engineering-related course unit as part of an undergraduate engineering degree program in computing. In the past, the course unit had a lecture-based format. In view of student underachievement and the high course unit dropout rate, a distance-learning system was deployed, where students were allowed to choose between a distance-learning approach driven by a moderate constructivist instructional model or a blended-learning approach. The results of this experience are presented, with the aim of showing the effectiveness of the teaching/learning system deployed compared to the lecture-based system previously in place. The grades earned by students under the new system, following the distance-learning and blended-learning courses, are compared statistically to the grades attained in earlier years in the traditional face-to-face classroom (lecture-based) learning.

Essentials in Ontology Engineering: Methodologies, Languages, and Tools

In the beginning of the 90s, ontology development was similar to an art: ontology developers did not have clear guidelines on how to build ontologies but only some design criteria to be followed. Work on principles, methods and methodologies, together with supporting technologies and languages, made ontology development become an engineering discipline, the so-called Ontology Engineering. Ontology Engineering refers to the set of activities that concern the ontology development process and the ontology life cycle, the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, and the tool suites and languages that support them. Thanks to the work done in the Ontology Engineering field, the development of ontologies within and between teams has increased and improved, as well as the possibility of reusing ontologies in other developments and in final applications. Currently, ontologies are widely used in (a) Knowledge Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, (b) applications related to knowledge management, natural language processing, e-commerce, intelligent information integration, information retrieval, database design and integration, bio-informatics, education, and (c) the Semantic Web, the Semantic Grid, and the Linked Data initiative. In this paper, we provide an overview of Ontology Engineering, mentioning the most outstanding and used methodologies, languages, and tools for building ontologies. In addition, we include some words on how all these elements can be used in the Linked Data initiative.

An architectural model for software testing lesson learned systems

Software testing is a key aspect of software reliability and quality assurance in a context where software development constantly has to overcome mammoth challenges in a continuously changing environment. One of the characteristics of software testing is that it has a large intellectual capital component and can thus benefit from the use of the experience gained from past projects. Software testing can, then, potentially benefit from solutions provided by the knowledge management discipline. There are in fact a number of proposals concerning effective knowledge management related to several software engineering processes. Objective: We defend the use of a lesson learned system for software testing. The reason is that such a system is an effective knowledge management resource enabling testers and managers to take advantage of the experience locked away in the brains of the testers. To do this, the experience has to be gathered, disseminated and reused. Method: After analyzing the proposals for managing software testing experience, significant weaknesses have been detected in the current systems of this type. The architectural model proposed here for lesson learned systems is designed to try to avoid these weaknesses. This model (i) defines the structure of the software testing lessons learned; (ii) sets up procedures for lesson learned management; and (iii) supports the design of software tools to manage the lessons learned. Results: A different approach, based on the management of the lessons learned that software testing engineers gather from everyday experience, with two basic goals: usefulness and applicability. Conclusion: The architectural model proposed here lays the groundwork to overcome the obstacles to sharing and reusing experience gained in the software testing and test management. As such, it provides guidance for developing software testing lesson learned systems.

Supporting End-User Development through a New Composition Model: An Empirical Study

End-user development (EUD) is much hyped, and its impact has outstripped even the most optimistic forecasts. Even so, the vision of end users programming their own solutions has not yet materialized. This will continue to be so unless we in both industry and the research community set ourselves the ambitious challenge of devising end to end an end-user application development model for developing a new age of EUD tools. We have embarked on this venture, and this paper presents the main insights and outcomes of our research and development efforts as part of a number of successful EU research projects. Our proposal not only aims to reshape software engineering to meet the needs of EUD but also to refashion its components as solution building blocks instead of programs and software developments. This way, end users will really be empowered to build solutions based on artefacts akin to their expertise and understanding of ideal solutions

Including hardware/software co-design in the ASSERT model driven engineering process.

Abstract. The ASSERT project de?ned new software engineering methods and tools for the development of critical embedded real-time systems in the space domain. The ASSERT model-driven engineering process was one of the achievements of the project and is based on the concept of property- preserving model transformations. The key element of this process is that non-functional properties of the software system must be preserved during model transformations. Properties preservation is carried out through model transformations compliant with the Ravenscar Pro?le and provides a formal basis to the process. In this way, the so-called Ravenscar Computational Model is central to the whole ASSERT process. This paper describes the work done in the HWSWCO study, whose main objective has been to address the integration of the Hardware/Software co-design phase in the ASSERT process. In order to do that, non-functional properties of the software system must also be preserved during hardware synthesis. Keywords : Ada 2005, Ravenscar pro?le, Hardware/Software co-design, real- time systems, high-integrity systems, ORK

CloudRoom: una plataforma universitaria social, semántica y ubicua

Estamos viviendo la era de la Internetificación. A día de hoy, las conexiones a Internet se asumen presentes en nuestro entorno como una necesidad más. La Web, se ha convertido en un lugar de generación de contenido por los usuarios. Una información generada, que sobrepasa la idea con la que surgió esta, ya que en la mayoría de casos, su contenido no se ha diseñado más que para ser consumido por humanos, y no por máquinas. Esto supone un cambio de mentalidad en la forma en que diseñamos sistemas capaces de soportar una carga computacional y de almacenamiento que crece sin un fin aparente. Al mismo tiempo, vivimos un momento de crisis de la educación superior: los altos costes de una educación de calidad suponen una amenaza para el mundo académico. Mediante el uso de la tecnología, se puede lograr un incremento de la productividad, y una reducción en dichos costes en un campo, en el que apenas se ha avanzado desde el Renacimiento. En CloudRoom se ha diseñado una plataforma MOOC con una arquitectura ajustada a las últimas convenciones en Cloud Computing, que implica el uso de Servicios REST, bases de datos NoSQL, y que hace uso de las últimas recomendaciones del W3C en materia de desarrollo web y Linked Data. Para su construcción, se ha hecho uso de métodos ágiles de Ingeniería del Software, técnicas de Interacción Persona-Ordenador, y tecnologías de última generación como Neo4j, Redis, Node.js, AngularJS, Bootstrap, HTML5, CSS3 o Amazon Web Services. Se ha realizado un trabajo integral de Ingeniería Informática, combinando prácticamente la totalidad de aquellas áreas de conocimiento fundamentales en Informática. En definitiva se han ideado las bases de un sistema distribuido robusto, mantenible, con características sociales y semánticas, que puede ser ejecutado en múltiples dispositivos, y que es capaz de responder ante millones de usuarios. We are living through an age of Internetification. Nowadays, Internet connections are a utility whose presence one can simply assume. The web has become a place of generation of content by users. The information generated surpasses the notion with which the World Wide Web emerged because, in most cases, this content has been designed to be consumed by humans and not by machines. This fact implies a change of mindset in the way that we design systems; these systems should be able to support a computational and storage capacity that apparently grows endlessly. At the same time, our education system is in a state of crisis: the high costs of high-quality education threaten the academic world. With the use of technology, we could achieve an increase of productivity and quality, and a reduction of these costs in this field, which has remained largely unchanged since the Renaissance. In CloudRoom, a MOOC platform has been designed with an architecture that satisfies the last conventions on Cloud Computing; which involves the use of REST services, NoSQL databases, and uses the last recommendations from W3C in terms of web development and Linked Data. For its building process, agile methods of Software Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction techniques, and state of the art technologies such as Neo4j, Redis, Node.js, AngularJS, Bootstrap, HTML5, CSS3 or Amazon Web Services have been used. Furthermore, a comprehensive Informatics Engineering work has been performed, by combining virtually all of the areas of knowledge in Computer Science. Summarizing, the pillars of a robust, maintainable, and distributed system have been devised; a system with social and semantic capabilities, which runs in multiple devices, and scales to millions of users.

Systems in Engineering Education: account of an experience

Systems Engineering (SE in the following) has not received much attention as a subject matter in engineering curricula. There are several dozens of universities around the world offering programs (most of them at the graduate level) on systems science and engineering. However, SE is, per se, rarely found among the courses offered by engineering schools. This observation does not strictly mean that systems concepts be left apart. For example, it is usual to find specialized courses for systems of some particular classes (e.g., courses on software systems engineering for computing curricula) or for particular phases of the system life cycle (e.g., courses on systems analysis). Even so, these kinds of courses tend to over-emphasize the importance of specific methodologies and, in consequence, to deviate the attention from the realm of systernness

Seismic performance case study of bridge pile cap foundation

The purpose of this report is to build a model that represents, as best as possible, the seismic behavior of a pile cap bridge foundation by a nonlinear static (analysis) procedure. It will consist of a reproduction of a specimen already built in the laboratory. This model will carry out a pseudo static lateral and horizontal pushover test that will be applied onto the pile cap until the failure of the structure, the formation of a plastic hinge in the piles due to the horizontal deformation, occurs. The pushover test consists of increasing the horizontal load over the pile cap until the horizontal displacement wanted at the height of the pile cap is reached. The output of this model will be a Skeleton curve that will plot the lateral load (kN) over the displacement (m), so that the maximum movement the pile cap foundation can reach before its failure can be calculated. This failure will be achieved when the load at that specific shift is equal to 85% of the maximum. The pile cap foundation finite element model was based on pile cap built for a laboratory experiment already carried out by the Master student Deming Zhang at Tongji University. Two different pile caps were tested with a difference in height above the ground level. While one has 0:3m, the other rises 0:8m above the ground level. The computer model was calibrated using the experimental results. The pile cap foundation will be programmed in a finite element environment called OpenSees (Open System for Earthquake Engineering Simulation [28]). This environment is a free software developed by Berkeley University specialized, as it name says, in the study of earthquakes and its effects on structures. This specialization is the main reason why it is being used for building this model as it makes it possible to build any finite element model, and perform several analysis in order to get the results wanted. The development of OpenSees is sponsored by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center through the National Science Foundation engineering and education centers program. OpenSees uses Tcl language to program it, which is a language similar to C++.

Guidance for the development of accessibility evaluation tools following the Unified Software Development Process

Automated and semi-automated accessibility evaluation tools are key to streamline the process of accessibility assessment, and ultimately ensure that software products, contents, and services meet accessibility requirements. Different evaluation tools may better fit different needs and concerns, accounting for a variety of corporate and external policies, content types, invocation methods, deployment contexts, exploitation models, intended audiences and goals; and the specific overall process where they are introduced. This has led to the proliferation of many evaluation tools tailored to specific contexts. However, tool creators, who may be not familiar with the realm of accessibility and may be part of a larger project, lack any systematic guidance when facing the implementation of accessibility evaluation functionalities. Herein we present a systematic approach to the development of accessibility evaluation tools, leveraging the different artifacts and activities of a standardized development process model (the Unified Software Development Process), and providing templates of these artifacts tailored to accessibility evaluation tools. The work presented specially considers the work in progress in this area by the W3C/WAI Evaluation and Report Working Group (ERT WG)

Determining the effectiveness of three software evaluation techniques through informal aggregation

An accepted fact in software engineering is that software must undergo verification and validation process during development to ascertain and improve its quality level. But there are too many techniques than a single developer could master, yet, it is impossible to be certain that software is free of defects. So, it is crucial for developers to be able to choose from available evaluation techniques, the one most suitable and likely to yield optimum quality results for different products. Though, some knowledge is available on the strengths and weaknesses of the available software quality assurance techniques but not much is known yet on the relationship between different techniques and contextual behavior of the techniques. Objective: This research investigates the effectiveness of two testing techniques ? equivalence class partitioning and decision coverage and one review technique ? code review by abstraction, in terms of their fault detection capability. This will be used to strengthen the practical knowledge available on these techniques.

Including functional usability features in a Model-Driven Development Method

The Software Engineering (SE) community has historically focused on working with models to represent functionality and persistence, pushing interaction modelling into the background, which has been covered by the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community. Recently, adequately modelling interaction, and specifically usability, is being considered as a key factor for success in user acceptance, making the integration of the SE and HCI communities more necessary. If we focus on the Model-Driven Development (MDD) paradigm, we notice that there is a lack of proposals to deal with usability features from the very first steps of software development process. In general, usability features are manually implemented once the code has been generated from models. This contradicts the MDD paradigm, which claims that all the analysts? effort must be focused on building models, and the code generation is relegated to model to code transformations. Moreover, usability features related to functionality may involve important changes in the system architecture if they are not considered from the early steps. We state that these usability features related to functionality can be represented abstractly in a conceptual model, and their implementation can be carried out automatically.

MIA - a free and open source software for gray scale medical image analysis

Background Gray scale images make the bulk of data in bio-medical image analysis, and hence, the main focus of many image processing tasks lies in the processing of these monochrome images. With ever improving acquisition devices, spatial and temporal image resolution increases, and data sets become very large. Various image processing frameworks exists that make the development of new algorithms easy by using high level programming languages or visual programming. These frameworks are also accessable to researchers that have no background or little in software development because they take care of otherwise complex tasks. Specifically, the management of working memory is taken care of automatically, usually at the price of requiring more it. As a result, processing large data sets with these tools becomes increasingly difficult on work station class computers. One alternative to using these high level processing tools is the development of new algorithms in a languages like C++, that gives the developer full control over how memory is handled, but the resulting workflow for the prototyping of new algorithms is rather time intensive, and also not appropriate for a researcher with little or no knowledge in software development. Another alternative is in using command line tools that run image processing tasks, use the hard disk to store intermediate results, and provide automation by using shell scripts. Although not as convenient as, e.g. visual programming, this approach is still accessable to researchers without a background in computer science. However, only few tools exist that provide this kind of processing interface, they are usually quite task specific, and don’t provide an clear approach when one wants to shape a new command line tool from a prototype shell script. Results The proposed framework, MIA, provides a combination of command line tools, plug-ins, and libraries that make it possible to run image processing tasks interactively in a command shell and to prototype by using the according shell scripting language. Since the hard disk becomes the temporal storage memory management is usually a non-issue in the prototyping phase. By using string-based descriptions for filters, optimizers, and the likes, the transition from shell scripts to full fledged programs implemented in C++ is also made easy. In addition, its design based on atomic plug-ins and single tasks command line tools makes it easy to extend MIA, usually without the requirement to touch or recompile existing code. Conclusion In this article, we describe the general design of MIA, a general purpouse framework for gray scale image processing. We demonstrated the applicability of the software with example applications from three different research scenarios, namely motion compensation in myocardial perfusion imaging, the processing of high resolution image data that arises in virtual anthropology, and retrospective analysis of treatment outcome in orthognathic surgery. With MIA prototyping algorithms by using shell scripts that combine small, single-task command line tools is a viable alternative to the use of high level languages, an approach that is especially useful when large data sets need to be processed.