1.
Modelling the evolution of legacy systems to Web-based systems - Lavery, Janet; Boldyreff, Cornelia; Ling, Bin; Allison, Colin
To advance operational legacy systems, with their out-of-date software, distributed data and entrenched business processes, to systems that can take advantage of current Web technologies to give consistent, customized and secure access to existing information bases and legacy systems is a complex and daunting task. The Institutionally Secure Integrated Data Environment (INSIDE) is a collaborative project between the Universities of St Andrews and Durham that is addressing the issues surrounding the development and delivery of integrated systems for large institutions, constrained by the requirement of working with the existing information bases and legacy systems. The work has included an exploration...
3.
Historical awareness support and its evaluation in collaborative software engineering - Nutter, David; Boldyreff, Cornelia
The types of awareness relevant to collaborative soft-
ware engineering are identified and an additional type,
"historical awareness" is proposed. This new type of
awareness is the knowledge of how software artefacts re-
sulting from collaboration have evolved in the course of
their development.
The types of awareness that different software engineer-
ing environment architectures can support are discussed. A
way to add awareness support to our existing OSCAR sys-
tem, a component of the GENESIS software engineering
platform, is proposed. Finally ways of instrumenting and
evaluating the awareness support offered by the modified
system are outlined.
4.
Supporting collaborative grid application development within the escience community - Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David
The systemic representation and organisation of software artefacts, e.g. specifications, designs, interfaces, and implementations, resulting from the development of large distributed systems from software components have been addressed by our research within the Practitioner and AMES projects [1,2,3,4]. Without appropriate representations and organisations, large collections of existing software are not amenable to the activities of software reuse and software maintenance, as these activities are likely to be severely hindered by the difficulties of understanding the software applications and their associated components. In both of these projects, static analysis of source code and other development artefacts, where available, and subsequent application...
5.
WETICE 2004 Evaluating Collaborative Enterprises (ECE) Workshop - Final report - Nutter, David; Boldyreff, Cornelia
A summary of the fifth Evaluating Collaborative Enterprises (ECE)
workshop which ran on June 14th at University of Modena, Italy. The
overall theme of the workshop this year was evaluation within the
software lifecyle rather than as a separate activity. Each of the
five papers touched on this subject and the subsequent winner of
Best Paper covered it thoroughly.
Concerns about the level of interactivity within the workshop and
WETICE itself prompted a format change to ``paired-paper'' sessions
with plenty of discussion time.
Several outstanding issus were identified during the discussion,
including development of ``evaluation components'' alongside
software components, the...
6.
Determination and evaluation of web accessibility - Boldyreff, Cornelia
The Web is the most pervasive collaborative
technology in widespread use today; however,
access to the web and its many applications cannot
be taken for granted. Web accessibility encompasses
a variety of concerns ranging from societal,
political, and economic to individual, physical, and
intellectual through to the purely technical. Thus,
there are many perspectives from which web
accessibility can be understood and evaluated. In
order to discuss these concerns and to gain a better
understanding of web accessibility, an accessibility
framework is proposed using as its base a layered
evaluation framework from Computer Supported
Co-operative Work research and the ISO standard,
ISO/IEC 9126 on software quality. The former is
employed in recognition of the collaborative...
7.
Towards the effective distribution of agile practice - Adams, Paul J; Boldyreff, Cornelia
The agile methods are quickly gaining notoriety amongst
software engineers. Having been developed over the past decade, they now present a mature, lightweight alternative to the "classic" approaches to software engineering. Although agile methods have solved some of the problems of established software engineering practice, they
have created some problems of their own. Most importantly, we can infer a, potentially problematic, requirement of collocation. In this research I intend to develop a system that will allow the effective distribution of agile practice, with a particular focus on the eXtreme Programming method. This paper discusses the motivation for this research and outlines the...
8.
Evaluation of an awareness distribution mechanism: a simulation approach - Nutter, David; Boldyreff, Cornelia
In distributed software engineering, the role of informal communication is frequently overlooked. Participants simply employ their own ad-hoc methods of informal communication. Consequently such communication is haphazard, irregular, and rarely recorded as part of the project documentation. Thus, a need for tool support to facilitate more systematic informal communication via awareness has been identified. The tool proposed is based on the provision of awareness support that recognises the complete context of the evolution of software artefacts rather than single events.
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking has been successfully
employed to develop various distributed software engineering support tools. However, there are scalability problems inherent...
9.
Communication and conflict issues in collaborative software research projects - Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen
The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OS-
CAR) was developed under the auspices of the GENESIS
project to store data produced during the software development process. Significant problems were encountered during the course of the project in both the development itself and management of the project. The reasons for and potential solutions to these problems are examined with the intention of developing a set of guidelines to enable participants in other collaborative projects to avoid these pitfalls.
We wish to make it clear that we attach no opprobrium
to any of the participants in the GENESIS project as many of the issues we...
10.
Support for Collaborative Component-Based Software Engineering - Rank, Stephen; Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Kyaw, Phyo; Lavery, Janet
Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software...
11.
Environments to support collaborative software engineering - Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen; Smith, Mike; Wilcox, Pauline; Dewar, Rick; Weiss, Dawid; Ritrovato, Pierluigi
With increasing globalisation of software production, widespread use of
software components, and the need to maintain software systems over long
periods of time, there has been a recognition that better support
for collaborative working is needed by software engineers.
In this paper, two approaches to developing
improved system support for collaborative software engineering are
described: GENESIS and OPHELIA.
As both projects are moving towards industrial trials and eventual publicreleases of their systems, this exercise of comparing and
contrasting our approaches has provided the basis for future
collaboration between our projects particularly in carrying out
comparative studies of our approaches in practical use.
12.
An artefact repository to support distributed software engineering - Nutter, David; Boldyreff, Cornelia; Rank, Stephen
The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OSCAR)
system is a component of the GENESIS platform designed to
non-invasively inter-operate with work-flow management systems, development tools and existing repository systems to support a distributed software engineering team working collaboratively. Every artefact possesses a collection of associated meta-data, both standard and domain-specific presented as an XML document. Within OSCAR, artefacts are made aware of changes to related artefacts using notifications, allowing them to modify their own meta-data actively in contrast to other software repositories where users must perform all and any modifications, however trivial.
This recording of events, including user interactions provides a complete picture...
13.
Adaptive reuse of Libre software systems for supporting on-line collaboration - Adams, Paul; Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen
In this paper, the adaptive reuse of Plone; an open source content management system is described. In one instance, Plone has been used as the backbone of a collaboration and communication support infrastructure within a large research project. In the other, Plone has been used as the main web-presence of a specialist group of the British Computer Society. This paper analyses the benefits and problems of reusing Plone to support collaboration. Based on this reuse experience, a more systematic approach to supporting Plone reuse is proposed. This approach takes into account the special case of reuse support relevant to open...
14.
An evaluation framework to drive future evolution of a research prototype - Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen; Boldyreff, Cornelia
The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OSCAR) requires
evaluation to confirm its suitability as a development environment
for distributed software engineers. The evaluation will take note of
several factors including usability of OSCAR as a stand-alone system,
scalability and maintainability of the system and novel features not
provided by existing artefact management systems. Additionally, the
evaluation design attempts to address some of the omissions (due to
time constraints) from the industrial partner evaluations.
This evaluation is intended to be a prelude to the evaluation of the
awareness support being added to OSCAR; thus establishing a baseline
to which the...
15.
Architectural requirements for an open source component and artefact repository system within GENESIS - Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen
When software is being created by distributed teams of software
engineers, it is necessary to manage the
work-flow, processes, and artefacts which are involved in the
engineering process. The GENESIS project aims to address some of the
technical issues involved by providing a software system to support
distributed development. One of the parts of the system will be known
as OSCAR, a repository for managing distributed artefacts. Artefacts
can be process models, software components, design documents, or any
other kind of entity associated with the software engineering
process. OSCAR will be designed as a light-weight distributed system,
managing the storage and access to a distributed repository of
artefacts.
This paper presents and...
16.
Supporting collaborative Grid application development within the e-Science community - Nutter, David; Boldyreff, Cornelia; Rank, Stephen; Kyaw, Phyo
Collaboration by use of common artifacts is at the core of e-science. A recent enabling technology is the Grid, which ties together heterogeneous computation and data resources through the use of middleware, linking the techniques and resources to infer higher-level knowledge. This article presents results from research and development of Grid technology for semantic interoperability between scientific artifacts on the web. The research employs the 'industry-as-laboratory' approach to software development. This means development of theory and models through successive implementations, their deployment in pilot studies and subsequent evaluation studies. The research is exemplified through the case of the OSCAR project,...
17.
An open source collaboration infrastructure for Calibre - Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen; Boldyreff, Cornelia
The study of Free and Open Source (Libre) software and the benefits provided by its processes and products to collaborative software development has been somewhat ad hoc. Each project wishing to use tools and techniques drawn from Libre software conducts its own research, thus duplicating effort, consequently there is a lack of established community practice on which new projects can draw. Long-standing intuitive theories of Libre development lack empirical validation. The long-term goal is to provide a resource to guide the evolution of Libre-software projects, from inception to maturity. The CALIBRE project is a co-ordination action aiming to address these...
18.
Software, architecture, and participatory design - Rank, Stephen; O'Coill, Carl; Boldyreff, Cornelia; Doughty, Mark
Much work in software architecture has been inspired by work in physical architecture, in particular Alexander's work on `design patterns'. By contrast, Alexander's work is little-used in town planning and architecture. In this paper, we examine some of the reasons that this is so, describe some parallels and differences between the fields of physical and software architecture, and identify areas in which future collaboration may be fruitful. The notion of `participatory design' is important in software engineering and in urban regeneration, but the participatory mechanisms in each field are quite different.
20.
Using open source tools to support collaboration within CALIBRE - Adams, Paul; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen; Boldyreff, Cornelia
Abstract – This paper describes the deployment of Plone, an
Open-Source content management system, to support the
activities of CALIBRE, an EU-funded coordination action
integrating research into Libre software. The criteria by
which Plone was selected are described, and the goodness of
fit to these criteria is analysed.
As a coordination action, CALIBRE involves 12 partners
with different requirements and characteristics. The
CALIBRE Working Environment (CWE) must therefore
support a variety of users with different levels of technical expertise and expectations.
Implementation of the support infrastructure for CALIBRE
is ongoing, and has provided some interesting insights into the benefits of the use of libre software. Although Plone has not been explicitly...
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