Special Issue on New Paradigms of Software Production and Deployment

in SN Computer Science (2022), 3(132),

Ediorial of the Special Issue on “New paradigms of software production and deployment”.

Analysing the SWECOM Standard for Designing a DevOps Education Programme

in Frontiers in Software Engineering Education. FISEE 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (2020), 12271

Developing academic education programmes for software engineers is a difficult task mainly due to three main factors: (1) ever-changing information and communication technologies produced by the industry ... [more ▼]

Developing academic education programmes for software engineers is a difficult task mainly due to three main factors: (1) ever-changing information and communication technologies produced by the industry and meant for citizens living in digital disruptions age, (2) lack of official or de-facto standards for the software engineering domain, (3) slow pace of the standardisation bodies and of the academia for deploying standard competence frameworks or education programmes. This applies more especially to DevOps which regroups a set of skills being the most demanded today by the job market. This paper is a first attempt to introduce a standard based development process to derive a DevOps education programme for graduate education. It is introduced as a generic process mainly based on the SWECOM standard. This process is applied to generate a proposal for a significant DevOps graduate academic programme definition in a comprehensive and, most importantly, in a skill oriented manner. [less ▲]

DevOps and Its Philosophy: Education Matters!

in Mazzara, Manuel; Rivera, Victor; Sadovykh, Andrey (Eds.) et al Microservices: Science and Engineering (2020)

DevOps processes comply with principles and offer practices with the main objective of efficiently supporting the evolution of IT systems. To be efficient, a DevOps process relies on a set of integrated ... [more ▼]

DevOps processes comply with principles and offer practices with the main objective of efficiently supporting the evolution of IT systems. To be efficient, a DevOps process relies on a set of integrated tools. DevOps is among the first competencies, together with agile method, required by the industry. As a new approach it is necessary to develop and offer to the academy and to the industry training programs to prepare engineers in the best possible way. In this chapter we present the main aspects of the educational effort made in recent years to educate engineers on the concepts and values of the DevOps philosophy. This includes principles, practices, tools, and architectures, primarily the microservices architectural style, which shares many aspects of DevOps approaches, especially modularity and flexibility, which enable continuous change and delivery. Two experiments have been carried out, one at the academic level as a master program course and the other as an industrial training. Based on those two, we provide a comparative analysis and some proposals in order to develop and improve DevOps education for the future. [less ▲]

DevOps and its Philosophy : Education Matters!

Report (2019)

DevOps processes comply with principles and offer practices with main objective to support efficiently the evolution of IT systems. To be efficient a DevOps process relies on a set of integrated tools ... [more ▼]

DevOps processes comply with principles and offer practices with main objective to support efficiently the evolution of IT systems. To be efficient a DevOps process relies on a set of integrated tools. DevOps is among the first competencies together with Agile method required by the industry. As a new approach it is necessary to develop and offer to the academy and to the industry training programs to prepare our engineers in the best possible way. In this chapter we present the main aspects of the educational effort made in the recent years to educate to the concepts and values of the DevOps philosophy. This includes principles, practices, tools and architectures, primarily the microservices architectural style, which shares many aspects of DevOps approaches especially the modularity and flexibility which enables continuous change and delivery. Two experiences have been made, one at academic level as a master program course and the other, as an industrial training. Based on those two experiences, we provide a comparative analysis and some proposals in order to develop and improve DevOps education for the future. [less ▲]

Design of a (yet another?) DevOps course

in Bruel, Jean-Michel; Mazzara, Manuel; Meyer, Bertrand (Eds.) Software Engineering Aspects of Continuous Development and New Paradigms of Software Production and Deployment (2019, January 19)

DevOps have received marginal attention inside the higher education level curricula despite of its boom in the industrial sector. This paper presents the design of an academic master-level course aimed at ... [more ▼]

DevOps have received marginal attention inside the higher education level curricula despite of its boom in the industrial sector. This paper presents the design of an academic master-level course aimed at DevOps. The proposed design is based on earlier experiences in teaching DevOps-related topics. The specification of the course design is provided using the SWEBOK Guide and Bloom’s taxonomy to enhance the quality of the course design specification, and ease its assessment once delivered. [less ▲]

Messir: A Text-First DSL-Based Approach for UML Requirements Engineering (Tool Demo)

in Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering SLE'18 (2018)

A Product Line of Software Engineering Project Courses

Poster (2017, November 08)

DT4BP: Dependability and Time for Business Processes

Book published by Scholars' Press (2014)

Today, numerous organisations rely on information software systems to run their businesses. The effectiveness of the information software system then, depends largely on the degree to which the ... [more ▼]

Today, numerous organisations rely on information software systems to run their businesses. The effectiveness of the information software system then, depends largely on the degree to which the organisation’s business is accurately captured in the business model. The business model is an abstract description of the way an organisation’s functions. Thus, the more precise the business model, the more accurate the requirement definition of the information software system to be engineered. A dependable business process is one whose failures or the number of occurrences in which business process misses its goal are not unacceptably frequent or severe, from certain viewpoint. A collaborative business process is one that requires the interaction of multiple participants to attain its goal. A time-constrained business process is one that owns at least one property expressed in terms of an upper or lower time bound. This book investigates how Dependable, Collaborative and Time-constrained business processes can be described such that the resulting model captures all the relevant aspects of each dimension of interest. [less ▲]

Comparing Six Modeling Approaches

in Kienzle, Joerg (Ed.) Models in Software Engineering (2012)

DT4BP: a Business Process Modelling Language for Dependable Time-Constrained Business Processes

Doctoral thesis (2010)

Today, numerous organisations rely on information software systems to run their businesses. The effectiveness of the information software system then, depends largely on the degree to which the ... [more ▼]

Today, numerous organisations rely on information software systems to run their businesses. The effectiveness of the information software system then, depends largely on the degree to which the organisation's business is accurately captured in the business model. The business model is an abstract description of the way an organisation's functions. Thus, the more precise the business model, the more accurate the requirement definition of the information software system to be engineered.There are an abundance of tools and notations available today to support the development of many types of business process. Many of these artifacts rely on the concept of a business process to describe a business model. A business process is commonly known as a set of one or more linked procedures or activities which collectively realise a business objective or policy goal, normally within the context of an organisational structure defining functional roles and relationships". This thesis is concerned with modelling business processes as a means to accurately capture an organisation's activities and thus, the requirements of the software system that supports these activities.Among the infinite set of possible business processes, this thesis targets only those characterized by the qualities of dependability, collaboration and time. Business processes having these specific dimensions are referred to as Dependable, Collaborative and Time-Constrained (DCTC) business processes. A dependable business process is one whose failures or the number of occurrences in which business process misses its goal are not unacceptably frequent or severe (from certain viewpoint). A collaborative business process is one that requires the interaction of multiple participants to attain its goal. A time-constrained business process is one that owns at least one property expressed in terms of an upper or lower time bound. This thesis investigates how DCTC business processes can be described such that the resulting model captures all the relevant aspects of each dimension of interest. In addition, the business model must be comprehensible to the stakeholders involved not only in its definition, but also in its further use throughout the software development life cycle.A revision and analysis of notations that exist for modelling business processes conducted in this thesis have revealed that today there does not exist any modelling language that provides comprehensible, suitable and sufficiently expressive support for the characteristics of dependability, collaboration and time in an integrated manner. Hence, a significant part of this thesis is devoted to the definition of a new business process modelling language named DT4BP. The aim of this new modelling language is to be comprehensible, suitable and expressive enough to describe DCTC business processes. The definition of this new modelling language implies that a concrete syntax, an abstract syntax, a semantic domain and a semantic mapping is provided. The definition of this new modelling language is given following the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach, and in particular the metamodelling principles. Thus, meta-models and model transformations are used to precisely specify the abstract syntax and semantic mapping elements of the language definition, respectively. Since DT4BP is a textual modelling language, its concrete syntax is specified by a context-free grammar. The Coordinated Atomic Actions conceptual framework with real-time extensions (Timed-CaaFWrk) is used as the semantic domain as it covers a large part of the abstractions included in dependable collaborative time-constrained business processes. The formalisation of this semantic domain according to the metamodelling principles is also part of the material presented in this thesis. Since the business model is considered as a representation of the requirement document the software system to be developed, it is crucial to validate whether it captures the requirements as intended by the stakeholder before going further in the software development process. Hence, besides the comprehensibility, suitability and expressiveness of the modelling language with respect to the domain of interest, it is of special interest to provide a mechanism that allows modellers to ensure that the business model is correct with respect to the stakeholder's expectations. One way of achieving this goal is to provide the modelling language with an executable semantics. In this manner, any business model can be executed on sample input data, and its dynamic behaviour observed. The observation of the dynamic behaviour of the model may be considered as a simulation of the model based on the sample input data. By performing several simulations of the model, the modeller, in cooperation with the stakeholder, can judge whether the business model is correct. This thesis provides an executable semantics for Timed-CaaFWrk that, used in combination with the model transformation that defines the semantic mapping element of the language definition, allows DT4BP models to be validated by simulation. In this manner, the dynamic behaviour of a particular DT4BP model for a given sample input data can be observed by transforming it into a Timed-CaaFWrk model, which is then run thanks to the given executable semantics. [less ▲]