Markus Helfert

Antti Knutas, Victoria Palacin, Giovanni Maccani et al.

Civic grassroots have proven their ability to create useful and scalable software that addresses pressing social needs. Although software engineering plays a fundamental role in the process of creating civic technology, academic literature that analyses the software development processes of civic tech grassroots is scarce. This paper aims to advance the understanding of how civic grassroots tackle the different activities in their software development processes. In this study, we followed the formation of two projects in a civic tech group (Code for Ireland) seeking to understand how their development processes evolved over time, and how the group carried out their work in creating new technology. Our preliminary findings show that such groups are capable of setting up systematic software engineering processes that address software specification, development, validation, and evolution. While they were able to deliver software according to self-specified quality standards, the group has challenges in requirements specification, stakeholder engagement, and reorienting from development to product delivery. Software engineering methods and tools can effectively support the future of civic technologies and potentially improve their management, quality, and durability.

Thanh Thoa Pham Thi, Markus Helfert

The composition of web services is a promising approach enabling flexible and loose integration of business applications. Numerous approaches related to web services composition have been developed usually following three main phases: the service discovery is based on the semantic description of advertised services, i.e. the functionality of the service, meanwhile the service selection is based on non- functional quality dimensions of service, and finally the service composition aims to support an underlying process. Most of those approaches explore techniques of static or dynamic design for an optimal service composition. One important aspect so far is mostly neglected, focusing on the output produced of composite web services. In this paper, in contrast to many prominent approaches we introduce a data quality perspective on web services. Based on a data quality management approach, we propose a framework for analyzing data produced by the composite service execution. Utilising process information together with data in service logs, our approach allows identifying problems in service composition and execution. Analyzing the service execution history our approach helps to improve common approaches of service selection and composition.

Thanh Thoa Pham Thi, Markus Helfert

Quality is a multidimensional concept that has different meanings in different contexts and perspectives. In the domain of Information system, quality is often understood as the result of an IS development process and as the quality of an IS product. Many models and frameworks have been proposed for evaluating IS quality. However, as yet there is not a commonly accepted framework or standard of IS quality. Typically, researchers propose a set of characteristics, so-called quality factors contributing to the quality of IS. Different stakeholders perspectives are resulting in multiple definitions of quality factors of IS. For instance, some approaches are based on the IS delivery process for the selection of quality factors; while some other approaches do not clearly explain the rationale of their selection. Moreover, often relations or impacts among selected quality factors are not taken into account. Quality aspects of information are frequently considered isolated from IS quality. The impact of IS quality on information quality seems to be neglected in most approaches. Our research aims to incorporate these levels, by which we propose an IS quality framework based on IS architecture. Considering user and IS developers perspectives, different quality factors are identified for various abstraction levels. Besides, the presentation on impacts among different quality factors helps to retrieve the root cause of IS defects. Thus, our framework provides a systematic view on quality of information and IS.

Thanh Thoa Pham Thi, Markus Helfert

The manufacture of an information product (IP) is akin to the manufacture of a physical product. Current approaches to model such information manufacturing systems (IMS), lack the ability to systematically represent the dynamic changes involved in manufacturing (or creating) an IP. They also have limitations to consistently include aspects of process and information management at an organizational level. This paper aims to address these limitations and presents a modelling approach, the IASDO model. Our work also represents a framework to evaluate the quality of the meta-models for IMS modelling which enable us to compare the IASDO model with current approaches.

Thanh Thoa Pham Thi, Thang Le Dinh, Markus Helfert et al.

Despite the dominance of the service sector in the last decades, there is still a need for a strong foundation on service design and innovation. Little attention has paid on service modelling, particularly in the collaboration context. Collaboration is considered as one of solutions for surviving or sustaining the business in the high competitive atmosphere. Collaborative services require various service providers working together according to agreements between them, along with service consumers, in order to co-produce services. In this paper, we address crucial issues in collaborative services such as collaboration levels, sharing data and processes due to business inter-dependencies between service stakeholders. Afterward, we propose a model for Collaborative Service Modelling, which is able to cover identified issues. We also apply our proposed model to modelling an example of healthcare services in order to illustrate the relevance of our modelling approach to the matter in hand.

Thanh Thoa Pham Thi, Markus Helfert

Rules based approaches for data quality solutions often use business rules or integrity rules for data monitoring purpose. Integrity rules are constraints on data derived from business rules into a formal form in order to allow computerization. One of challenges of these approaches is rules discovering, which is usually manually made by business experts or system analysts based on experiences. In this paper, we present our rule-based approach for data quality analyzing, in which we discuss a comprehensive method for discovering dynamic integrity rules.

Thanh Thoa Pham Thi, Markus Helfert, Fakir Hossain et al.

Discovering business rules from business process models are of advantage to ensure the compliance of business processes with business rules. Furthermore it provides the agility of business processes in case of business rules evolution. Current approaches are limited on types of rules that can be discovered. This paper analyses the expression power of some popular business process modelling languages in embedding business rules in its presentation and provides indicators to extract various types of business rules from business process models.