International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering

Managing maintenance requests in information systems from stakeholders has been relatively neglected by academic researchers. This study proposes Enhancive Request Management (ERM), a method of managing enhancive requests from multiple stakeholders. The proposed method, based on hermeneutics, includes request formation, feedback, and conflict resolution processes. The request formation process is designed to handle the maintenance requests. The feedback process controls the changes of request formation results. And the conflict resolution process deals with diverse opinions. Besides, this work introduces a blog-based tool to support ERM. Two companies have tried this tool and provided some usage opinions. The empirical data reveals that the ERM methodology can improve request management works.

In web service times, the techniques for composing services are based on service reuse and automatic integration. A new web service will be generated by composing some existing web services. These web services cooperate with each other to provide a new more complex function. It is necessary and very important to test the interaction behavior between any two web services during composition. In this paper, a kind of enhanced hierarchical color petri-net (or EH-CPN) is introduced to generate test cases for testing the interaction, where EH-CPN is transformed from OWL-S document, and both control flow and data flow information in EH-CPN are analyzed and used to generate an executable test sequence, and further test cases are created by combining the test sequence and test data in an XML file.

This paper describes the design of a decision support system for shill detection in online auctions. To assist decision making, each bidder is associated with a type of certification, namely shill, shill suspect, or trusted bidder, at the end of each auction's bidding cycle. The certification level is determined on the basis of a bidder's bidding behaviors including shilling behaviors and normal bidding behaviors, and thus fraudulent bidders can be identified. In this paper, we focus on representing knowledge about bidders from different aspects in online auctions, and reasoning on bidders' trustworthiness under uncertainties using Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we provide a case study using real auction data from eBay. The analysis results show that our approach can be used to detect shills effectively and efficiently. By applying Dempster–Shafer theory to combine multiple sources of evidence for shill detection, the proposed approach can significantly reduce the number of false positive results in comparison to approaches using a single source of evidence.

Rule-based systems are typically tested using a set of inputs which will produce known outputs. However, one does not know how thoroughly the software has been exercised. Traditional test-coverage metrics do not account for the dynamic data-driven flow of control in rule-based systems. Our literature review found that there has been little prior work on coverage metrics for rule-based systems. This paper proposes test-coverage metrics for rule-based systems derived from metrics defined by prior work, and presents an industrial scale case study.

We conducted a case study to evaluate the practicality and usefulness of the proposed metrics. The case study applied the metrics to a system for computational fluid-dynamics models based on a rule-based application framework. These models were tested using a regression-test suite. The data-flow structure built by the application framework, along with the regression-test suite, provided case-study data. The test suite was evaluated against three kinds of coverage. The measurements indicated that complete coverage was not achieved, even at the lowest level definition. Lists of rules not covered provided insight into how to improve the test suite. The case study illustrated that structural coverage measures can be utilized to measure the completeness of rule-based system testing.

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) plays a significant role in the specification of business processes. To ascertain the validity of BPMN models, a disciplined approach to analyze their behavior is of particular interest to the field of business process management. This paper advocates a semantics-preserving method for transforming BPMN models into New Symbolic Model Verifier (NuSMV) language as a means to verify the models. A subset of BPMN is specified rigorously in the form of a mathematical model. With this foundation in place, the translation for the subset of BPMN notational elements is then driven by a set of formally defined rules. The practicality of our approach is exemplified using an on-line flight reservation service.

Aspect interactions and conflicts are an important issue for AOSD. Aspectual conflicts are difficult to manage and, specifically semantic ones remain an open issue for AOSD. In this work, we present a simple mechanism for handling semantic conflicts at the granularity of aspect and advice in the resource awareness domain. We also analyze the impact of such coordination mechanism on some important properties of software (some of the so called ilities). We found that aspects can effectively be coordinated and remain independent, improving their reusability, modularity and evolvability.