SEM 2013 Abstracts

Full Papers Short Papers
Full Papers
Paper Nr: 1
Title:

Extracting Services from Legacy for Service-Oriented Business Processes: Challenges and Issues
Authors:

Youcef Baghdadi and Ricardo Pérez-Castillo
Abstract: Non-agile enterprises slowly adapts to changing business requirements, which could be harmful and affects their competitiveness. Their business processes are rigid and could not respond to the changes. One of the solutions is to use a service-oriented business modeling by stressing out role of SOA and Web services. In this modeling, business processes are represented by specialized services having separated concerns. These are (i) controller service, (ii) state service, and (iii) worker services. This solution requires an approach to: (1) map the existing services of the organization or its partners, or (2) reverse engineering techniques to provide business objects, represented in the information system, as a set of common, consistent service providers.
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Paper Nr: 3
Title:

From Functional Test Scripts to Performance Test Scripts for Web Systems
Authors:

Federico Toledo Rodríguez, Matías Reina, Fabián Baptista, Macario Polo Usaola and Beatriz Pérez Lamancha
Abstract: When modernizing systems the software is migrated from one platform to another. There are big risks concerning the performance the system should have in the new platform. A new system cannot take more time to perform the same operations than the previous one as the users will refuse it. Therefore, the preventive performance test is crucial to guarantee the success of the modernization project. However, the automation tasks for performance testing are too demanding, in terms of time and effort, as the tools work at a communication protocol level. Though not free, the functional testing automation is easier to accomplish than the performance testing automation as the tools work at a graphic user interface level; the tools are therefore more intuitive and they have to handle less variables and technical issues. In this article we present a tool that we developed for industrial usage to automatically generate performance tests scripts from automated functional tests. The tool has been used in several projects in the industry, achieving important effort savings and improving flexibility.
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Paper Nr: 4
Title:

Towards Effective and Efficient High Order Mutation
Authors:

Pedro Reales Mateo and Macario Polo Usaola
Abstract: Mutation testing is a very effective testing technique. However, it remains very expensive. Several techniques to reduce costs have been proposed, One of them is High Order Mutation. This technique can reduce the costs of mutation testing with a decrement of the effectiveness. This paper proposes and evaluates a novel type of mutation, mutants-integration mutation that improves the effectiveness of High Order Mutation keeping its advantages. The result obtained in the experimentation leads one to think that using the new proposed type of mutation improves test cases generations when high order mutation is applied.
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Paper Nr: 6
Title:

Investigating the Applicability of Lehman’s Laws of Software Evolution using Metrics: An Empirical Study on Open Source Software
Authors:

Nicholas Drouin and Mourad Badri
Abstract: This paper aims at investigating empirically the applicability of Lehman’s laws of software evolution using software metrics. We used a synthetic metric (Quality Assurance Indicator - Qi), which captures in an integrated way different object-oriented software attributes. We wanted to investigate if the Qi metric can be used to support the applicability of Lehman’s laws of software evolution. We focused on the laws related with continuing change, increasing complexity, continuing growth and declining quality. We performed an empirical analysis using historical data on two open source (Java) software systems. The collected data cover a period of more than four years (fifty-two versions) for the first system and more than seven years (thirty-one versions) for the second one. Empirical results provide evidence that the considered Lehman’s laws are supported by the collected data and the Qi metric.
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Paper Nr: 7
Title:

Software Architecture Reconstruction through Clustering: Finding the Right Similarity Factors
Authors:

Ioana Sora
Abstract: Clustering is very often used for the purpose of automatic softwarearchitecture reconstruction. This work investigates the importance of taking into account different factors for the similarity metric, besides the traditional factorbased on direct coupling/cohesion: indirect coupling as computed from the topology of the dependency graph, and global architectural layering resulting from theorientation of dependencies. We experiment with using these factors, individuallyor combined, for defining the similarity metrics within a set of clustering algorithms.
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Paper Nr: 9
Title:

Impact-driven Regression Test Selection for Mainframes

Authors:

Abhishek Dharmapurikar, Benjamin J. R. Wierwille, Jayashree Ramanthan and Rajiv Ramnath
Abstract: Software testing is particularly expensive in the case of legacy systems such as mainframes. Critical to many large enterprises, these systems are perpetually in maintenance where even small changes usually lead to an end-to-end regression test. This is called the “retest-all” approach and is done to ensure confidence in the functioning of the system, but this approach is impractical primarily due to resource needs and user stories generated within the agile system that require rapid changes to the system. This research is aimed at reducing the required regression testing and its costs associated with the system. The improvements are achieved by identifying only those tests needed by assets changed and others that are ‘impacted’. The impact analysis leverages the availability of modern static code analysis tools and dedicated test environments for mainframes. By using our proposed impact technique on a real-world mainframe application, the test savings can be about 34%.
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Paper Nr: 11
Title:

Challenges of Business Process Model Improvement after Reverse Engineering
Authors:

María Fernández-Ropero, Ricardo Pérez-Castillo and Mario Piattini
Abstract: Business process models have become one of the most important assets for companies since an appropriate business process management helps companies to quickly adapt their processes to changes while their competitiveness is maintained or even improved. As a consequence, companies are currently demanding mechanisms to ensure business processes with an appropriate quality degree. These business process models can be obtained through reverse engineering from existing information systems. Unfortunately, reversed models usually have a lower quality degree and may not reflect the actual business processes exactly. This paper describes all detected challenges that should be addressed for improving quality of business processes, specially retrieved by reverse engineering (e.g., missing or non-relevant elements, fine-grained elements, etc.). This work also suggests an approach to improve business process models along three phases: repairing, refactoring and semantic improvement. In addition, some preliminary results about the refactoring stage are provided using real-life retrieved business process models.
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Paper Nr: 13
Title:

Which is the Impact of adding Traceability support over the Quality of ATL Model Transformations?
Authors:

Iván Santiago, Juan M. Vara, Valeria de Castro and Esperanza Marcos
Abstract: Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) provides a new landscape for the management of traceability, which plays a key role when dealing with software evolution. Since model transformations are the wheel that drives MDE proposals forward, traceability data can be automatically available in MDE projects. To that end, the implicit traceability relationships contained in any model transformation has to be made explicit by enriching the model transformation with traces generation capabilities. However, this refinement process implies a cost in terms of quality: enriched transformations are intuitively more complex. To back such intuition, this work presents an empirical study to assess the impact over the quality of the enrichment of ATL model transformations.
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Paper Nr: 14
Title:

An ADM-based Method for Migrating CMS-based Web Applications: Extracting ASTM Models from PHP Code
Authors:

Feliu Trias, Valeria de Castro, Marcos López-Sanz and Esperanza Marcos
Abstract: In recent years, Architecture-Driven Modernization (ADM) is gaining increasing acceptance in software reengineering processes of existing systems. It can help reduce reengineering costs by automating the activities, such as extracting models from the source code. This is specially crucial in the reengineering of CMS-based Web applications. At time of writing there are no methods that could be used in that context. Hence, we define an ADM-based method for migrating CMS-based Web applications. In the context of this method, we present in this paper the implementation of the text-to-model (M2T) transformations to extract models from PHP code. These models conform to Abstract Syntax Tree Metamodel (ASTM) a standard metamodel proposed by ADM. To implement these transformations we performed three activities: 1) definition of a PHP grammar, 2) mapping PHP grammar elements to elements of ASTM and 3) implementation of a model extractor. To show the feasibility of our approach we use a real example of PHP code from a CMS-based Web application implemented in Drupal.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 5
Title:

Enhance Your Model-driven Modernization Process with Agile Practices
Authors:

Sylvia Ilieva, Iva Krasteva, Gorka Benguria and Brian Elvesæter
Abstract: Cloud computing is currently recognized as an important platform technology that enables service clouds supporting the Software as a Service (SaaS) paradigm. This paper presents the REMICS Methodology, which combines the model-driven approach with agile practices, for the migration of legacy applications to service clouds. The paper gives an overview of the methodology and its application in one case study, the issues faced by three case study providers in applying the methodology and the results of a questionnaire of the applicability of agile practices in addressing the issues.
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Paper Nr: 8
Title:

Realization of Agile Enterprises: A Meet-in-the-Middle MDA Approach for Service-Oriented Business Processes
Authors:

Youcef Baghdadi, Naoufel Kraiem, Yassine Jamoussi and Ricardo Pérez-Castillo
Abstract: Enterprise agility is not possible if Business Processes (BPs) are rigid and cannot respond to the environmental changes. One of the solutions is to make service as part of the requirements and solution, by using services as the main building blocks at different levels of abstraction. In this approach, we model BPs by using specialized services having separated concerns. The enterprises business objects, as implemented in the information system, provide these services. This approach requires both reverse and forward engineering. The former presents the existing information systems as a set of common, consistent, sharable BOs. Whereas, the latter uses MDA to take profit of the rapid transformation of the BP models into executable by using standards such as BOs, web services and BPEL.
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Paper Nr: 10
Title:

Upgrading Unupgradable Middleware Legacy Processes: Misconceptions, Challenges, and a Roadmap
Authors:

Radhouane B. N. Jrad, M. Daud Ahmed and David Sundaram
Abstract: Middleware systems are information systems which live in the middle of business processes, enabling communication between various businesses and their heterogeneous information systems. When it comes to upgrading their legacy processes, middleware systems have their own particular requirements and complexities that standard upgrade roadmaps are incapable of fully addressing. In particular, legacy processes that cannot be upgraded using vendor or market tools due to the lack of knowledge about their mechanisms or due to their complexity represent a challenge to upgrade projects. This paper proposes a roadmap to address this challenge by offering a side-by-side approach to migrate unupgradable legacy processes in middleware systems with minimum business and financial impact.
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Paper Nr: 12
Title:

Integration Process for Multidimensional Textual Data Modeling
Authors:

Rachid Aknouche, Ounas Asfari, Fadila Bentayeb and Omar Boussaid
Abstract: In this paper, we propose an original approach for text warehousing process. It is based on a decisional architecture which combines classical data warehousing tasks and information retrieval (IR) techniques. We first propose a new ETL process, named ETL-Text, for textual data integration and then, we present a new Text Warehouse Model, denoted TWM, which takes into account both the structure and the semantics of the textual data. TWM is associated with new dimensions types including: a metadata dimension and a semantic dimension. In addition, we propose a new analysis measure based on the modeling language widely used in IR area. Moreover, our approach is based on Wikipedia as external knowledge source to extract the semantics of the textual documents. To validate our approach, we develop a prototype composed of several processing modules that illustrate the different steps of the ETL-Text. Also, we use the 20 Newsgroups corpus to perform our experimentations.
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