1,720,973 research outputs found
Understanding the Dynamics of Software Compatibilities
No full textSoftware compatibility is a persistent headache facing IT departments, one that routinely makes change painful. Your
work’s cut out for you whether your organization switches to a different vendor’s software or simply upgrades to a new
version of existing software. How often have you wrestled with converting existing files and data to formats the new
software can handle?
In a perfect world, all software would be compatible and you could move files freely from any application or
platform to any other. Many factors work against this utopia, however. Understanding the market dynamics that drive
software producers to increase or diminish compatibility among different software packages can help you purchase
wisely—and give you advance warning when a troublesome conversion looms
Reflecting Business Process Variability in Information Systems
No full textInformation systems are a fundamental support for the business processes of a firm.
Information systems should be shaped on the needs of the business process
throughout the life of the firm. This poses the problem of tracking changes in the
business process and to reflect those changes in the information system. Assumptions
and constraints are necessary in any real software project but can impair flexibility
and evolution. The paper discusses variability in information systems as a
consequence of variability in business processes and analyzes this topic under three
perspectives: requirements, architecture, and components
Strategic Software Production with Domain-Oriented Reuse
No full textSoftware reuse is one of the most common buzzwords in today software engineering. We
know that through reuse we can achieve quality, productivity, reliability, flexibility, low
costs and all the goodies that one could dream. Unfortunately, in most of the cases we do
not know how to achieve reuse.
The fact is that software reuse is a quite pervasive property of software systems. Trying
to achieve reuse just by good will is quite like trying find the analytic solutions of a tenth
order polynomial equation. It can be considered an act of good will. People have
published tons of papers and obtained several academic degrees in this attempt. However,
it is simply not possible by the very nature of the problem.
This book proposes a Copernican Revolution in the way of perceiving software reuse.
Rather that studying how to modify the software development process to add “reuserelated”
activities, it discusses how software reuse can be instilled in the “usual”
development process. Reuse is not any longer an abstract entity to reach. Reuse is the
glasses that we use to view the problems to solve
Standardizing the Reuse of Software Processes
No full textWe describe a model to define a set of standard reusable processes. To standardize and reuse a software
process, we first need to describe it. We adopt Ivar Jacobson’s use cases as a starting point and then generate scenarios and identify people and their roles. The data collected are significant enough to start mapping the enterprise—we use an OMT-like technique. By adopting
activity-based management, it is possible to validate the “off-line” model directly “on-line.” After
the necessary corrections, the model is a good representation of the firm’s real production process.
This forms the basis for the reengineering process
The pivotal role of network externalities in software systems: a case study on Microsoft Word 97
No full textNetwork externalities are the effects on the value of a product that can be ascribed to the presence of a network of users of such
product. They play an essential role in the business success of any product. The authors think that such role is even larger in the
software industry, where (a) documentation and effective training often lack, and (b) consumers regard as major benefits
interoperability and compatibility, because of the ever increasing need to share information and re-process it over and over
again with different tools. However, only few studies exist on this topic.
Network externalities are caused by choices operated at different level of the design of a product: data format, GUI metaphors,
keyboard sequences, API, and so on. Understanding and planning their presence in a product is difficult. However, the ability
of manipulating them properly provides a clear competitive advantage.
The study of the network externalities of Microsoft Word 97 evidences the several different kinds of externalities present in it.
The authors focus their considerations on the data format, the API, and the human-computer interaction paradigm
Framework Extraction with Domain Analysis
No full textSherlock is a domain analysis methodology for the extraction of reusable frameworks. Sherlock
is based both on Proteus and on FODA domain analysis techniques. The input of Sherlock is a
description of the domain based on domain applications, literature, user requirements, and
interviews with domain and market experts. The output of Sherlock is a framework comprising a
set of components organized in architectures. In this paper we describe the main features of
Sherlock and present a case study regarding the development of a graphic user interface
framework for business and management information systems
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