1,721,037 research outputs found
Modeling the Process of a Software Company with Pescarenico
No full textModeling the process of a software company is difficult.
The level of industrialization is usually low; even when the
process is defined several hidden activities exist. However,
a reliable model is a prerequisite of any process
improvement. This paper presents Pescarenico, a tool kit to
model the development process of a software firm. A
methodology, Gertrude, a tool, Egidio, and a metrics
system, the Balanced Scorecards, compose Pescarenico.
Gertrude uses Object Orientation and Activity Based
Costing to model the process. Egidio has been developed
under Windows NT with Microsoft Visual Basic. The
Balanced Scorecards has been devised by Kaplan in the
field of process management. The paper contains a case
study: it is the description of the introduction of
Pescarenico in a large Italian software firm. An assessment
of Pescarenico concludes the paper
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
A Software Production Infracstructure for the New Millennium
No full textSoftware development involves several people with very different
skills: customers, managers, accountants, business analysts,
systems analysts, designers, developers, etc. Each one of them
tends to focus on his or her specific aspect and to consider it the
cornerstone of the whole development process. To involve these
people in the software development there are many different
views of the same knowledge base at the time of the involvement
of a specific person. The build and synchronization of these views
is a complex task and include a remarkable overhead in the
process. This paper presents a set of problems and an overview of
a possible solution to the development of an integrated
development platform
Service Based Product Lines
No full textProduct lines are sets of products designed to solve
complex problems that a single tool is not able to approach
because of the complexity. Moreover product lines are
scalable: customers can buy only components that they
need to work at present. Future enhancement could be done
with little training effort due to the homogeneity of
products inside a product line. These method of software
production is convenient also for producers that design
application using a big set of software components shared
by all software inside a product line.
In the next few years web services will became very
common on the Internet although only some basic services
are available at present. These simple services could be
used as low level building blocks to provide more complex
functionalities through their integration. Product lines are
still based on traditional components, but an evolution
towards a web based architecture is needed to fulfill users
requirements. Technology to build web based products line
comes from the XML language family that provides
mechanisms to allow information exchange between
automated users. This paper analyze technological aspects
of web based product lines
From Process Modeling to Domain Modeling
No full textThe hype on software process and software reuse as the capitalization on software as a valuable asset is encountering more and more appreciation. This paper presents an experience in modeling and extracting valuable process assets to build a framework in a small Italian firms specialized in telecommunications personalized solutions.The company has been modeled at first by means of interviews and then analyzing the components in terms of fours main entities.Then, domain analysis was performed. The results of the two phases gave birth to a set of organizational patterns of reuse in the firm that lead to a general organizational framework. The framework can then be refined in a more specific meta-pattern definition or a design framework
Capitalizing The Improvements In Software Development With Object Oriented Models
No full textThis chapter presents Gertrude, a methodology for business process modeling. Gertrude uses Object Orientation, and conjugates it with Activity Based Costing. The methodology is simple, easy to use and understand, and concise. It accounts for what-if analysis, and variation in the perception of the firm. It can serve as enabler for a BPR process, or monitor a continuous improvement in the production process. It is the basis for corporate experience capitalization
Integrating the Balanced Scorecards in RSEB
No full textThis paper presents a technique to employ a metric system to guide the application of a software production business
environment.
Software production companies face increasing competition, upgrade in user expectations, and complexity growth
more than most other companies. Many different techniques and methodologies have been conceived to cope with
this problem. The software science is relatively new in the scientific panorama, and so are software engineering
methods. Nevertheless, software engineering is gaining wider industrial acceptance, as “programming in the large”
projects require coordinated efforts of hundredths of man-years. Organizations no longer see a single software
product as a strategic objective. Rather, they try to capitalize on the experience gained from preceding project. It is
still unclear, though, what experience capitalization is for software firms. The notions of Application Domain and
Domain Engineering and the increasing emphasis on software component reuse suggest that the software itself and
the production byproducts such as internal libraries are valuable assets besides the final product (Arango, 1993).
Many business techniques and software engineering methodologies focus on this idea
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