Innovative e-commerce ideas are characterised by commercial products yet unknown to the market, enabled by information technology such as the Internet and technologies on top of it. How to develop such products is hardly known. We propose an interdisciplinary approach, e3-value, to explore an innovative e-commerce idea with the aim of understanding such an idea thoroughly and evaluating it for potential profitability. Our methodology exploits a requirements engineering way of working, but employs concepts and terminology from business science, marketing and axiology. It shows how to model business requirements and improve business---IT alignment, in sophisticated multi-actor value constellations that are common in electronic commerce. In addition to the e3-value approach methodology, we also present the action research-based development of our methodology, by using one of the longitudinal projects we carried out in the field of online news article provisioning.

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Value-based requirements engineering: exploring innovative e-commerce ideas

The purpose of the architecture evaluation of a software system is to analyze the architecture to identify potential risks and to verify that the quality requirements have been addressed in the design. This survey shows the state of the research at this moment, in this domain, by presenting and discussing eight of the most representative architecture analysis methods. The selection of the studied methods tries to cover as many particular views of objective reflections as possible to be derived from the general goal. The role of the discussion is to offer guidelines related to the use of the most suitable method for an architecture assessment process. We will concentrate on discovering similarities and differences between these eight available methods by making classifications, comparisons and appropriateness studies.

/pdf/a-survey-on-software-architecture-analysis-methods-1cdft9i7h2.pdf

A survey on software architecture analysis methods

Architecting for usability: a survey

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.

Software engineering economics

http://www.few.vu.nl/~hans/publications/y2004/alma.pdf

Architecture-level modifiability analysis (ALMA)

A method for the prediction of software maintainability during software architecture design is presented. The method takes: the requirement specification; the design of the architecture; expertise from software engineers; and, possibly, historical data as input and generates a prediction of the average effort for a maintenance task. Scenarios are used by the method to concretize the maintainability requirements and to analyze the architecture for the prediction of the maintainability. The method is formulated based on extensive experience in software architecture design and detailed design and exemplified using the design of software architecture for a haemo dialysis machine. Experiments for evaluation and validation of the method are ongoing and future work.

/pdf/architecture-level-prediction-of-software-maintenance-2wty5c2kym.pdf

Architecture level prediction of software maintenance

The paper presents a method for reengineering software architectures. The method explicitly addresses the quality attributes of the software architecture. Assessment of quality attributes is performed primarily using scenarios. Design transformations are done to improve quality attributes that do not satisfy the requirements. Assessment and design transformation can be performed for several iterations until all requirements are met. To illustrate the method we use the reengineering of a prototypical measurement system into a domain-specific software architecture as an example.

/pdf/scenario-based-software-architecture-reengineering-3ymjkzhufd.pdf

Scenario-based software architecture reengineering

Cost, quality and lead-time are three main concerns in software engineering projects. The quality of developed software has traditionally been evaluated on completed systems. Evaluating the product quality at completion introduces a great risk of wasting effort on software products with inadequate system qualities. It is the objective of this thesis to define and study methods for assessment, evaluation and prediction of software systems’ modifiability characteristics based on their architecture designs. Since software architecture design is made early in the development, architecture evaluation helps detect inadequate designs and thus reduces the risk of implementing systems of insufficient quality. We present a method for architecture-level analysis of modifiability (ALMA) that analyses the modifiability potential of a software system based on its software architecture design. The method is scenario-based and either compares architecture candidates, assesses the risk associated with modifications of the architecture, or predicts the effort needed to implement anticipated modifications. The modification prediction results in three values; a prediction of the modification effort and the predicted best- and worst-case effort for the same system and change scenario profile. In this way the prediction method provides a frame-of-reference that supports the architect in the decision whether the modifiability is acceptable or not. The method is based on the experiences and results from one controlled experiment and seven case-studies, where five case studies are part of this thesis. The experiment investigates different ways to organize the scenario elicitation and finds that a group of individually prepared persons produce better profiles than individuals or unprepared groups.

Architecture-Level Modifiability Analysis

The software architecture plays an important role in achieving a modifiable system, but few methods for modifiability analysis exist. In this paper, we propose an analysis method for software architecture modifiability that has successfully been applied in several cases. The method consists of five main steps, i.e. goal selection, software architecture description, scenario elicitation, scenario evaluation and interpretation.

/pdf/analyzing-software-architectures-for-modifiability-4mnypho69m.pdf

PerOlof Bengtsson

Papers

Architecture-level modifiability analysis (ALMA)

Architecture level prediction of software maintenance

Scenario-based software architecture reengineering

Architecture-Level Modifiability Analysis

Analyzing Software Architectures for Modifiability.