Showing papers by "Colette Rolland published in 2001"

An Assembly Process Model for Method Engineering

Abstract: The need for a better productivity of system engineering teams, as well as a better quality of products motivates the development of solutions to adapt methods to the project situation at hand. This is known as situational method engineering. In this paper we propose a generic process model to support the construction of a new method by assembling method chunks generated from different methods that are stored in a method base. The emphasis is on the guidance provided by the process model, as well as on the means underlying guidelines such as similarity measures and assembly operators. The process model is exemplified with a case study.

An Approach for Method Reengineering

Abstract: The increasing complexity of the Information Systems (IS) asks for new IS development methods constructed "on the fly" to be adapted to the specific situations of the projects at hand. Situational Method Engineering responds to this need by offering techniques to construct methods by assembling reusable method fragments stored in some method repository. For method engineering to be performed it is necessary to build method bases. In this paper we propose an approach supporting the reengineering of existing methods. The reengineering process leads to the representation of an existing method in a modular fashion i.e. as a set of reusable method chunks, easy to retrieve and to assemble one the others. Once the method chunks are stored in a method repository they can be assembled in different manners to construct new methods. The emphasis of this paper is on the guidance provided by the method reengineering process model. The approach is exemplified with the OOSE reengineering case study.

Matching ERP system functionality to customer requirements

Abstract: Although procuring enterprise resource planning systems from commercial suppliers is becoming increasingly popular in our industry, fitting those systems to customer requirements remains problematic. The authors propose an approach for matching ERP system functionality to customer requirements. The assumption made is that the ERP system postulates a set of requirements that are worth eliciting from the ERP documentation as abstractions of the ERP system functionality. Then, the requirements engineering process is a process that matches the ERP set of requirements against organisational requirements. Those requirements that match, perhaps after adaptation, identify the ERP system features and their adaptations, that must be included in the ERP installation. To facilitate the matching process, the ERP requirements and the organisational requirements are both expressed using the same representation system, that of a map. The paper presents the map representation system and the matching process. The process is illustrated by considering the Treasury module of SAP and its installation in the financial management of a cultural exchanges unit.

Requirements Engineering for COTS based Systems

Abstract: In spite of the increasing use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products for system development, there is little consideration on how to acquire requirements for COTS products, how to select COTS components and how to assemble them to comply to these requirements. The paper addresses the issue of the requirements engineering process for COTS components acquisition and assembly. It proposes an approach based on the notion of requirements maps and assembly strategies and demonstrates the approach with the selection of a CASE tool.

Crews-l'Ecritoire analysis for the implementation of a medical image database for mammography

Abstract: In this paper, we present our approach in order to implement a Medical Image Database (MIDB) for archiving mammograms and their related information in the Department of Radiology of the Necker Hospital (Paris). The aim of such a database is to help breast cancer screening in clinics, research and education. As implementation of such a MIDB requires the understanding of users' needs, we have analyzed requirements by using the Crews-l'Ecritoire (Cooperative REquirements With Scenarios) approach developed in our laboratory. This approach is based on the 'Requirement Engineering' concept. It helps understanding users' needs using a semi-automatic analysis of textual scenarios, i.e. scenarios written in natural language. This approach mixes concepts of goals and of scenarios into the notion of 'Requirement Chunk'. Authored scenarios and goal discovery are guided by rules, which lead to a structured network of scenarios. Our analysis results in 58 Requirements Chunks gathering 72 authored scenarios and 300 goals which represent MIDB services requested by radiologists in the course of their daily practice.