International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering

Context: Processes are central to the operation of many systems or organizations. Process-centric systems, ranging from enterprise workflow systems to open distributed service compositions, have significantly increased in number and complexity.

Objective: Designers of process-centric systems can benefit from process abstractions (including patterns) capturing and allowing the reuse of designs for frequent operational problems. Existing process patterns detection techniques have efficiency problems and difficulties to identify partial and inexact pattern instances.

Method: We propose a process pattern detection technique based on a family of subgraph matching algorithms. The algorithms implement surjective graph morphism detection and a mechanism to incorporate semantic similarity computation for types and attributes of process graph elements.

Results: Efficiency is addressed using simplified data structures, reducing the search space and its exploration. Match accuracy and time-complexity are demonstrated in an experimental study.

Conclusions: Using process patterns allows business and technical processes to be provided as sharable service resources. Patterns can help to manage processes as configurable resources where a pattern can define a family of concrete customizable processes.

Runtime adaptive systems are able to dynamically transform their internal structure, and hence their behavior, in response to internal or external changes. Such transformations provide the basis for new functionalities or improvements of the non-functional properties that match operational requirements and standards. Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) has introduced several models and mechanisms for variability modeling and management. Dynamic software product lines (DSPL) engineering exploits the knowledge acquired in SPLE to develop systems that can be context-aware, post-deployment reconfigurable, or runtime adaptive. This paper focuses on DSPL engineering approaches for developing runtime adaptive systems and proposes a framework for classifying and comparing these approaches from two distinct perspectives: adaptation properties and adaptation realization. These two perspectives are linked together by a series of guidelines that help to select a suitable adaptation realization approach based on desired adaptation types.

The worldwide mobile software market has grown dramatically since feature phones became popular in the early 1990s. In practice, mobile usability — which can be defined for a resource-constrained device in two ways, namely, User eXperience (UX) and User Interface (UI) — has been regarded as the key to gaining superiority in terms of both market share and customer loyalty. Unfortunately, de facto standards for software design and the development process, such as Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Rational Unified Process (RUP), do not seem to promote mobile usability in a systematic manner in practice. This paper proposes a systematic and generalizable approach to modeling and evaluating the properties of mobile usability, herein treating it as a first-class software quality from the perspective of software engineering. We devise a UX evaluation framework for mobile usability, which we call UX Evaluation Framework (UEF) throughout this paper. A UX is specified by inter-scene interactions between users and terminals of software products using Extended Menu Navigation Viewpoints (EMNVs); then, a model checker, NuSMV, is adopted to observe whether the EMNV model meets a set of given UX properties. Importantly, the analysis and design of RUP is extended to support the co-design of UX and UI so that major roles, activities and artifacts in the UX and UI can be explicitly monitored and controlled by stakeholders. Through case studies, we demonstrate that UEF works properly to treat software products that prioritize mobile usability. Consequently, UEF plays a key role in filling the gap between two research disciplines to address usability: software engineering and human–computer interactions.

This paper provides a comparison between methods used to represent unary, binary and n-ary relations in the relational database (RDB) and object-oriented database (OODB) models and the association-oriented database (AODB) model proposed in terms of their unambiguity. We have elaborated upon the RDB, OODB and AODB models perceived from the perspective of the categories applied to define them. What has been discussed is a number of solutions assuming the form of schemes for the AODB model. We substantiate that those solutions have unequivocally met the conditions of relations of any chosen arity and multiplicity, at the same time keeping the notation concise, unambiguous and considerably expressive.

Dependability on XML has increased tremendously over the years. As such the need for efficient query processing technique is certainly important. Despite the fact that these techniques are able to process queries with various edge combinations, they still suffer from processing overheads by buffering large amount of intermediate results particularly for parent–child (P–C) edges. Therefore, in this paper, we propose architecture named ReLaQ, which comprises of two components, ReLab${}^{+}$ (node annotator) and QTwig (query processor) for efficient XML query processing. QTwig improves retrieval time by incorporating a pruning technique that avoids accessing irrelevant data during query processing. Experimental results indicated that ReLaQ superseded TwigStack for both path and twig queries using both regular- and skewed-structured datasets. In addition, this is also proven by means of correctness analysis of ReLaQ.