Information systems development and data modeling: Conceptual and philosophical foundations

There is strong anecdotal evidence that Enterprise Architecture (EA) brings benefits to organisations and that organisations are investing significantly in EA initiatives. However, demonstrating the business value of EA has proven elusive. Many of the benefits of EA are intangible and value is achieved indirectly within business change projects. Furthermore, it is not the EA itself that provides benefits, it is the ability to provide advisory services enabled by the EA that is important. In this paper we focus on EA service capability and develop and test a new research model that explains how EA service brings benefits to organisations. Our findings highlight the importance of EA service capability and dynamic capabilities in creating benefits from EA.

Achieving benefits with enterprise architecture

Service-oriented computing (SOC) is emerging as a promising paradigm for developing distributed enterprise applications. Although some initial concepts of SOC have been investigated in the research literature, and related technologies are in the process of adoption by an increasing number of enterprises, the ability to measure the structural attributes of service-oriented designs thus predicting the quality of the final software product does not currently exist. Therefore, this paper proposes a set of metrics for quantifying the structural coupling of design artefacts in service-oriented systems. The metrics, which are validated against previously established properties of coupling, are intended to predict the quality characteristic of maintainability of service-oriented software. This is expected to benefit both research and industrial communities as existing object-oriented and procedural metrics are not readily applicable to the implementation of service-oriented systems.

Coupling Metrics for Predicting Maintainability in Service-Oriented Designs

Context: Class maintainability is the likelihood that a class can be easily modified. Before releasing an object-oriented software system, it is impossible to know with certainty when, where, how, and how often a class will be modified. At that stage, this likelihood can be estimated using the internal quality attributes of a class, which include cohesion, coupling, and size. To reduce the future class maintenance efforts and cost, developers are encouraged to carefully test and well document low maintainability classes before releasing the object-oriented system. Objective: We empirically study the relationship between internal class quality attributes (size, cohesion, and coupling) and an external quality attribute (class maintainability). Using statistical techniques, we also construct models based on the selected internal attributes to predict class maintainability. Method: We consider classes of three open-source systems. For each class, we account for two actual maintainability indicators, the number of revised lines of code and the number of revisions in which the class was involved. Using 19 internal quality measures, we empirically explore the impact of size, cohesion, and coupling on class maintainability. We also empirically investigate the abilities of the measures, considered both individually and combined, to estimate class maintainability. Statistically based prediction models are constructed and validated. Results: Our results demonstrate that classes with better qualities (i.e., higher cohesion values and lower size and coupling values) have better maintainability (i.e., are more likely to be easily modified) than those of worse qualities. Most of the considered measures are shown to be predictors of the considered maintainability indicators to some degree. The abilities of the considered internal quality measures to predict class maintainability are improved when the measures are combined using optimized multivariate statistical models. Conclusion: The prediction models can help software engineers locate classes with low maintainability. These classes must be carefully tested and well documented.

Object-oriented class maintainability prediction using internal quality attributes

IntroductionIT professionals are beset by ongoing changes in technology and business practices. Some commentators have suggested that, in order to stay competitive, IT professionals should retool themselves to gain competency in specific in-demand technical skills. This article argues that thriving in such a dynamic environment requires competency in a broad range of skills, including not only technical skills, but non-technical skills as well.Our research shows that IT departments in non-IT companies report that while both technical and non-technical skills are important, the skills most critical to retain in-house and most sought in new mid-level employees are non-technical skills such as project management, business domain knowledge and relationship skills. These skills are critical because they enable IT departments to work effectively with other departments, internal users, and external customers and suppliers. Non-technical skills leverage technical skills to augment the organization's overall effectiveness in designing and delivering solutions to meet an organization's challenges and opportunities.These findings depart from previous articles emphasizing technical skills as a basis for valuing IT workers and other research recommending business-oriented skills only for those managing IT workers, not for IT professionals themselves. Our findings lead us to the realization that in today's environment of continuous and fast-paced change, a mix of skills is essential for IT professionals.We believe that the Law of Requisite Variety can help explain the need for greater breadth of knowledge and skills among IT professionals. From cybernetics, the Law of Requisite Variety states that adapting to change requires a varied enough solution set to match the complexity of an environment. In this case, IT workers need a broad enough range of knowledge and skills to meet the demands of their increasingly dynamic and complex profession. Based on our research, we offer a framework outlining six skill categories. We believe that all six skill categories are critically important for the career development of IT professionals.

The requisite variety of skills for IT professionals

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is emerging as a promising software development paradigm based on the concept of encapsulating application logic within independent, loosely coupled, stateless services that interact via messages using standard communication protocols The design principles of SOC are yet to be well understood; therefore service-oriented systems are often developed in an ad-hoc fashion, with little support for validating the quality of the service-oriented (SO) design upon which such systems are based As such, there is a need for mechanisms supporting the measurement of internal structural quality attributes of SO designs (such as coupling and cohesion) in order to predict and enhance the quality of the final product.

Towards the definition and validation of coupling metrics for predicting maintainability in service-oriented designs

In this article the authors explore similarities and differences in skill needs of IT service providers and the firms that providers service clients. The results show that providers and clients are more similar than different with regard to desired skills. Client firms emphasize technical skills for new hires more than providers do despite saying that these are the skills they would outsource to providers. The results have implications for organizations' recruiting and retention, for individuals' career development, and for educational programs.

/pdf/the-information-technology-workforce-a-comparison-of-1seahe9ybd.pdf

The Information Technology Workforce: A Comparison of Critical Skills of Clients and Service Providers

Enterprise architecture (EA) helps an organization to develop and articulate a vision for its use of IT to support its strategic business priorities and facilitates the journey to realize this vision. We describe how EA enabled a successful billion-dollar business transformation at a leading Australian retailer and the value that EA provided. The lessons from this case are valuable for other organizations embarking on a transformation journey.

How an Australian retailer enabled business transformation through enterprise architecture

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is an emerging paradigm for developing software systems that employ services. Presently there is already much research effort in the areas of service discovery and orchestration, business process modelling, and the semantic web. While these are all important aspects for moving towards the pervasive adoption of SOC, most existing work assumes the existence of black box services, with little attention given to how such services might be developed in a systematic manner. Furthermore, a precise description of what constitutes a service-oriented system is yet to be formally defined, and the overall impact of service-orientation on the software design process is not well understood. Therefore, this work presents a formal model covering design artefacts in service-oriented systems and their structural and behavioural properties. The model promotes a better understanding of service-oriented design concepts, and in particular, enables the definition of software metrics in an unambiguous, formal manner. Defining such a model and metrics is an initial step towards deriving a comprehensive service-oriented software design methodology.

/pdf/formalising-service-oriented-design-1fot4skeo0.pdf

Formalising Service-Oriented Design

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