Dieter Putz

Bio: Dieter Putz is an academic researcher from Deutsche Post. The author has contributed to research in topics: Software maintenance & IT service management. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 2 publications receiving 18 citations.

Towards an Estimation Model for Software Maintenance Costs

Abstract: Today there is no best practise method available to effectively estimate the maintenance costs of historically grown large-scale software landscapes. Most cost estimation models are either not generalizable due to highly specialized scenarios or too abstract to be implemented in practice. In this paper we introduce a multi-level approach to create transparency, estimate costs realistically based on current spending and establish a method for sustainable cost-control. At the heart of our approach is the deduction of meaningful indicators for estimating current and future maintenance efforts. We present the first version of a statistical cost estimation model being implemented at Deutsche Post MAIL as a baseline for contract negotiations with providers.

FIT for SOA? Introducing the F.I.T.-Metric to Optimize the Availability of Service Oriented Architectures

Abstract: The paradigm of service-oriented architectures (SOA) is by now accepted for application integration and in widespread use. As an underlying key-technology of cloud computing and because of unresolved issues during operation and maintenance it remains a hot topic. SOA encapsulates business functionality in services, combining aspects from both the business and infrastructure level. The reuse of services results in hidden chains of dependencies that affect governance and optimization of service-based systems. To guarantee the cost-effective availability of the whole service-based application landscape, the real criticality of each dependency has to be determined for IT Service Management (ITSM) to act accordingly. We propose the FIT-metric as a tool to characterize the stability of existing service configurations based on three components: functionality, integration and traffic. In this paper we describe the design of FIT and apply it to configurations taken from a production-strength SOA-landscape. A prototype of FIT is currently being implemented at Deutsche Post MAIL.

Software engineering economics

Abstract: This paper summarizes the current state of the art and recent trends in software engineering economics. It provides an overview of economic analysis techniques and their applicability to software engineering and management. It surveys the field of software cost estimation, including the major estimation techniques available, the state of the art in algorithmic cost models, and the outstanding research issues in software cost estimation.

Research patterns and trends in software effort estimation

Abstract: Context Software effort estimation (SEE) is most crucial activity in the field of software engineering. Vast research has been conducted in SEE resulting into a tremendous increase in literature. Thus it is of utmost importance to identify the core research areas and trends in SEE which may lead the researchers to understand and discern the research patterns in large literature dataset. Objective To identify unobserved research patterns through natural language processing from a large set of research articles on SEE published during the period 1996 to 2016. Method A generative statistical method, called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), applied on a literature dataset of 1178 articles published on SEE. Results As many as twelve core research areas and sixty research trends have been revealed; and the identified research trends have been semantically mapped to associate core research areas. Conclusions This study summarises the research trends in SEE based upon a corpus of 1178 articles. The patterns and trends identified through this research can help in finding the potential research areas.

A Social Network Approach to Provisioning and Management of Cloud Computing Services for Enterprises

Abstract: This paper proposes a social network approach to the provisioning and management of cloud computing services termed Opportunistic Cloud Computing Services (OCCS), for enterprises; and presents the research issues that need to be addressed for its implementation We hypothesise that OCCS will facilitate the adoption process of cloud computing services by enterprises OCCS deals with the concept of enterprises taking advantage of cloud computing services to meet their business needs without having to pay or paying a minimal fee for the services The OCCS network will be modelled and implemented as a social network of enterprises collaborating strategically for the provisioning and consumption of cloud computing services without entering into any business agreements We conclude that it is possible to configure current cloud service technologies and management tools for OCCS but there is a need for new approaches that view enterprises as both service providers and consumers to facilitate the easy implementation of OCCS networks Keywords-cloud service brokerage; social networking; and opportunistic cloud computing services

Optimising agile development practices for the maintenance operation: nine heuristics

Abstract: Agile methods are widely used and successful in many development situations and beginning to attract attention amongst the software maintenance community --- both researchers and practitioners. However, it should not be assumed that implementing a well-known agile method for a maintenance department is therefore a trivial endeavour - the maintenance operation differs in some, important respects from development work. Classical accounts of software maintenance emphasise more traditional software engineering processes, whereas recent research accounts of agile maintenance efforts uncritically focus on benefits. In an action research project at Aveva in Denmark we assisted with the optimisation of SCRUM, tailoring the standard process to the immediate needs of the developers. We draw on both theoretical and empirical learning to formulate seven heuristics for maintenance practitioners wishing to go agile.

Emergence as Competitive Advantage - Engineering Tomorrow’s Enterprise Software Systems

Abstract: Companies rely heavily on complex software systems and tightly integrated supply-chains to serve their customers in increasingly fast changing markets. To gain competitive advantage in such a setting, companies must adapt their processes, products and inter-organizational relationships quickly to changing environments. In the future, enterprise software systems must be explicitly designed for flexibly switching intensive interorganizational relationships and for rapidly implementing changes in requirements or context while retaining existing functionality and user acceptance. In this position paper we introduce the notion of emergence in enterprise software systems as a guiding principle. Emergent Enterprise Software Systems (EESS) will be capable of reacting to changes in the environment by adapting their behavior and exposing new functionality. The consequent challenges we face when designing, building and operating EESS are discussed. 1 ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE BEYOND DESIGN-TIME ADAPTABILITY Companies rely heavily on large-scale enterprise software systems tailored to support their specific business processes. To meet rapidly changing expectations of customers and partners, processes and business relationships have to be changed at an increasing speed (Buchmann et al., 2010). Enterprise software systems today, however, still lack the level of flexibility needed in both intraand interorganizational process adaptation. With regard to cross-organizational interoperability, they are often designed in a company-centric way with implicitly shared semantics and models (Blair et al., 2011; Freudenreich et al., 2012). When implementing changed requirements or allowing third parties to extend today’s systems this is rarely achievable in business real-time. Once designed and implemented using a vast variety of modular but specialized building blocks, today’s enterprise software systems remain rather static. Altering single subsystems in isolation may even have unintended implications for the system as a whole often forcing a redesign of the system landscape. This dramatically limits a company’s flexibility to react to changing market situations and gain competitive advantage. We introduce the notion of emergence to evolve software beyond design-time adaptability. In nature, emergence refers to the development of order and/or new behavior in response to changes in the environment based on local perception. In emergent software we expect the system to exhibit new behavior in response to changes of the environment. Emergent Enterprise Software Systems (EESS) must combine existing software paradigms (e.g., service-orientation) with reactive behavior (e.g., complex event processing) and self-x behavior (i.e., self-awareness and selforganization) into stable and reliable software systems. Furthermore, they have to take into account constraints of the business domain. Project EMERGENT is a joint research project between academia and industry aiming at engineering EESS. As part of the government funded research 181 Frischbier S., Gesmann M., Mayer D., Roth A. and Webel C. (2012). Emergence as Competitive Advantage Engineering Tomorrow’s Enterprise Software Systems. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 181-186 DOI: 10.5220/0003970501810186 Copyright c SciTePress cluster Software Cluster – Innovation for the Digital Enterprise it brings together vendors and users of enterprise software with academic researchers. The contributions of this position paper are threefold: i) we illustrate the shortcomings of today’s enterprise software with an example based on our industrial partners’ experience in §2; ii) we sketch out our vision of EESS in §3 and; iii) we discuss key challenges regarding their design, development and operation in §4 to be met in future work in our project (§5). Due to the expertise of the partners involved, this paper focuses on aspects of EESS related to architecture, business process modeling (BPM) and governance. 2 THE NEED FOR EMERGENCE We illustrate the problems enterprise software vendors and users face today using a motivating scenario from the area of logistics. It involves the roles of online retailers, global parcel service providers and local retailers. We show that: i) fostering interorganizational cooperation in this setting is not feasible with today’s enterprise software; ii) business models and software architectures have to be synchronized to support end-to-end processes; iii) this leads to challenging requirements for tomorrow’s enterprise software systems. Metropolitan areas are the centers of our modern society as an ever increasing proportion of the world’s population lives in an urban region. Public administration and enterprises have to react to new challenges like rising traffic, awareness for energy consumption or increased needs for transparency. In such a setting information needs to be efficiently and securely shared between all stakeholders and to be adhoc combined in innovative ways. Processes and supporting IT services need to allow citizens or companies to consume them easily and to build new valueadded services on top of existing ones. Fostering inter-organizational cooperation. In our scenario we assume an Urban Management Platform (UMP). Among many services for citizens, local companies, online retailers and local administration, an UMP provides services for urban logistics. This is depicted in Figure 1: End customers (citizen network) in urban regions can rely on a large number of local retailers with delivery services (e.g., for short distance delivery of food or flowers). These local urban logistics providers act efficiently and customer-centrally by getting short-run orders and delivering immediately. Pure inter-city logistics service providers in turn are essential for online retailers as they are highly efficient in distributing goods over long distances. Factory GIS Services Urban Management Platform Innovative