Today's world economic situation is ruled by issues such as reducing cost, improving quality, maximizing profit, and improving and optimizing processes at organizations. In this context, business process management can be an essential strategy, but it is not usually consolidated at software organizations because software process properties involve a complex business process management application on software lifecycle. Consequently, software organizations often focus on Software Process Modeling (SPM), and each involved role performs process execution and orchestration independently and manually. This fact makes software processes maintenance, monitoring, and measurement become difficult tasks. This paper proposes a model‐based approach for SPM taking into account concepts related to process execution, orchestration, and monitoring. It is framed into a model‐driven engineering‐based and tool‐based framework: Process Lifecycle Management for Business Software (PLM4BS). We present a SPM metamodel and its concrete syntax (through Unified Modeling Language profiles) that lays the foundation for extending PLM4BS. Its underlying metamodel allows managing processes automatically. Furthermore, PLM4BS improves current state‐of‐the‐art proposals in 6 dimensions: expressiveness, understandability, granularity, measurability, orchestrability, and business variables and rules. Also, PLM4BS has been evaluated in a multiple‐case study, in which the 6 mentioned dimensions were already validated.
In addition, it is a pleasure to mention that this research is framed into two projects: POLOLAS (TIN2016-76956-C3-2-R), which is funded by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness; and TRoPA (Early Testing in Medical Robotics Process Automation) (CEI-12), which is funded by Andalusian Regional Ministry of Economy, Knowledge, Business and University.
Web requirements engineering is an essential phase in the software project life cycle for the project results. This phase covers different activities and tasks that in many situations, depending on the analyst's experience or intuition, help getting accurate specifications. One of these tasks is the conciliation of requirements in projects with different groups of users. This paper presents an approach for the systematic conciliation of requirements in big projects dealing with a model-based approach. The paper presents a possible implementation of the approach in the context of the NDT (Navigational Development Techniques) Methodology and shows the empirical evaluation in a real project by analyzing the improvements obtained with our approach.
Blockchain technology promises to spark a real revolution. One of most important concepts associated with this technology is smart contracts, which enable the automatic execution of agreements and augur a world without intermediaries. The conditions and rules of "contracts" are established in a computer codes and trust is enforced by consensus among the participants. One relevant feature associated with smart contract is the immutability property, which establishes the non-alteration of blockchain network data after the clauses of the contract are been approved by all parties or entities involved. For this reason, smart contract development requires more effort and care than the development of other common programs. They require systematic mechanisms to collect requirements and functional specifications. In addition, it is necessary to verify and validate the agreed functionality and the implemented code before they are deployed in the blockchain platform. This paper presents a systematic literature review of primary studies in the field of Software Development Life Cycle, focusing on model-based software design and testing in the blockchain domain of smart contracts. This research aims to identify gaps and/or opportunities for further research. After carried out this review, it was observed that no clear methodology exists for evaluating and validating the quality either of this software or the overall development process. This means that software developers may implement smart contract code in which bugs and serious security vulnerabilities appear when the software is delivered to their customers.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.