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Moving mission-oriented enterprise applications to cloud environments is a major IT strategic task and requires a systematic approach. The foci of this paper are to review and examine existing cloud migration approaches from the process... more
Moving mission-oriented enterprise applications to cloud environments is a major IT strategic task and requires a systematic approach. The foci of this paper are to review and examine existing cloud migration approaches from the process models perspective. To this aim, an evaluation framework is proposed and used to analyse and compare existing approaches for highlighting their features, similarities, and key differences. The survey distills the state of the art in cloud migration research and makes a rich inventory of important activities, recommendations, techniques, and concerns that are commonly involved in the migration process in one place. This enables academia and practitioners in the cloud computing community to get an overarching view of the cloud migration process. Furthermore, the survey identifies a number challenges that have not been yet addressed by existing approaches, developing opportunities for further research endeavors.
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Blockchain has received expanding interest from various domains. Institutions, enterprises, governments, and agencies are interested in Blockchain’s potential to augment their software systems. The unique requirements and characteristics... more
Blockchain has received expanding interest from various domains. Institutions, enterprises, governments, and agencies are interested in Blockchain’s potential to augment their software systems. The unique requirements and characteristics of Blockchain platforms raise new challenges involving extensive enhancement to conventional software development processes to meet the needs of these domains. Software engineering approaches supporting Blockchain-oriented developments have been slow to materialize, despite proposals in the literature, and they have yet to be objectively analyzed. A critical appraisal of these innovations is crucial to identify their respective strengths and weaknesses. We present an analytical evaluation of several prominent Blockchain-oriented methods through a comprehensive, criteria-based evaluation framework. The results can be used for comparing, adapting, and developing a new generation of Blockchain-oriented software development processes and innovations.
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Abstract The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is meant to facilitate system development by using models for representing both the¿ problem¿ and its¿ solution¿. In its ideal form, software development based on MDA would follow a development... more
Abstract The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is meant to facilitate system development by using models for representing both the¿ problem¿ and its¿ solution¿. In its ideal form, software development based on MDA would follow a development process that begins by producing models of the problem domain at a high level of abstraction, and then proceeds by gradually and automatically transforming them into executable code with the help of tools. However, MDA-based development has encountered several setbacks, the mitigation of ...
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Research Interests: IEEE and IEEE Systems
Internet of Things based systems (IoT systems for short) are becoming increasingly popular across different industrial domains and their development is rapidly increasing to provide value-added services to end-users and citizens. Little... more
Internet of Things based systems (IoT systems for short) are becoming increasingly popular across different industrial domains and their development is rapidly increasing to provide value-added services to end-users and citizens. Little research to date uncovers the core development process lifecycle needed for IoT systems, and thus software engineers find themselves unprepared and unfamiliar with this new genre of system development. To ameliorate this gap, we conducted a mixed quantitative and qualitative research study where we derived a conceptual process framework from the extant literature on IoT, that identifies 27 key tasks for incorporating into development processes for IoT systems. The framework was then validated by means of a survey of 127 IoT systems practitioners developers from 35 countries across 6 continents with 15 different industry backgrounds. Our research provides an understanding of the most important development process tasks and informs both software engine...
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Moving existing legacy systems to cloud platforms is a difficult and high cost process that may involve technical and non-technical resources and challenges. There is evidence that the lack of understanding and preparedness of cloud... more
Moving existing legacy systems to cloud platforms is a difficult and high cost process that may involve technical and non-technical resources and challenges. There is evidence that the lack of understanding and preparedness of cloud computing migration underpin many migration failures in achieving organisations goals. The main goal of this article is to identify the most important challenging activities for moving legacy systems to cloud platforms from a perspective of reengineering process. Through a combination of a bottom-up and a top-down analysis, a set of common activities is derived from the extant cloud computing literature. These are expressed as a model and are validated using a population of 104 shortlisted and randomly selected domain experts from different industry sectors. We used a Web-based survey questionnaire to collect data and analysed them using SPSS Sample T-Test. The results of this study highlight the most important and critical challenges that should be addr...
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Moving mission-oriented enterprise applications to cloud environments is a major IT strategic task and requires a systematic approach. The foci of this paper are to review and examine existing cloud migration approaches from the process... more
Moving mission-oriented enterprise applications to cloud environments is a major IT strategic task and requires a systematic approach. The foci of this paper are to review and examine existing cloud migration approaches from the process models perspective. To this aim, an evaluation framework is proposed and used to analyse and compare existing approaches for highlighting their features, similarities, and key differences. The survey distills the state of the art in cloud migration research and makes a rich inventory of important activities, recommendations, techniques, and concerns that are commonly involved in the migration process in one place. This enables academia and practitioners in the cloud computing community to get an overarching view of the cloud migration process. Furthermore, the survey identifies a number challenges that have not been yet addressed by existing approaches, developing opportunities for further research endeavors.
Situational method engineering uses a repository of reusable method fragments that are derived from existing software development methodologies and industrial best practices to simplify the construction of any project-specific software... more
Situational method engineering uses a repository of reusable method fragments that are derived from existing software development methodologies and industrial best practices to simplify the construction of any project-specific software development methodology aligned with specific characteristics of a project at hand. In this respect, OPEN is a well-established, standardized and popular approach for situational method engineering. It has a large repository of reusable method fragments called OPF that method engineers can select and assemble them according to the requirements of a project to construct a new project-specific software development methodology. In this position paper, we present the basic concepts and foundations of OPEN and argue for an urgent need for new extensions to OPEN and its repository in support of service-oriented software development practices. Keywords: OPEN Process Framework, OPF Repository, OPEN Meta-Model, Situational Method Engineering, Method Fragments,...
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Service-orientation is a promising paradigm that enables the engineering of large-scale distributed software systems using rigorous software development processes. The existing problem is that every service-oriented software development... more
Service-orientation is a promising paradigm that enables the engineering of large-scale distributed software systems using rigorous software development processes. The existing problem is that every service-oriented software development project often requires a customized development process that provides specific service-oriented software engineering tasks in support of requirements unique to that project. To resolve this problem and allow situational method engineering, we have defined a set of method fragments in support of the engineering of the project-specific service-oriented software development processes. We have derived the proposed method fragments from the recurring features of eleven prominent service-oriented software development methodologies using a systematic mining approach. We have added these new fragments to the repository of OPEN Process Framework to make them available to software engineers as reusable fragments using this well-known method repository. Keyword...
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Internet of Things platforms are key enablers for smart city initiatives, targeting the improvement of citizens quality of life and economic growth. As IoT platforms are dynamic, proactive, and heterogeneous socio-technical artefacts,... more
Internet of Things platforms are key enablers for smart city initiatives, targeting the improvement of citizens quality of life and economic growth. As IoT platforms are dynamic, proactive, and heterogeneous socio-technical artefacts, systematic approaches are required for their development. Limited surveys have exclusively explored how IoT platforms are developed and maintained from the perspective of information system development process lifecycle. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of 63 approaches. This is accomplished by proposing an evaluation framework as a cornerstone to highlight the characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses of these approaches. The survey results not only provide insights of empirical findings, recommendations, and mechanisms for the development of quality aware IoT platforms, but also identify important issues and gaps that need to be addressed.
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There is incremental growth in adopting self-reconfigurable robots in automating manufacturing conventional product lines. Using this class of robots adapting themselves with ever-changing environmental conditions has been acclaimed as a... more
There is incremental growth in adopting self-reconfigurable robots in automating manufacturing conventional product lines. Using this class of robots adapting themselves with ever-changing environmental conditions has been acclaimed as a promising way of reducing energy consumption and environmental impact and thus enabling green manufacturing. Whilst the majority of existing research focuses on highlighting the efficacy of self-reconfigurable robots in energy reduction with technical driven solutions, the research on exploring the salient factors in design and development self-reconfigurable robots that directly enable or hinder green manufacturing is non-extant. This interdisciplinary research contributes to the nascent body of the knowledge by empirical investigation of design-time, run-time, and hardware aspects which should be contingently balanced when developing green-aware self-reconfigurable robots. Keywords Green manufacturing, self-reconfigurable robots, robot design, gre...
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Many scientific and practical areas have shown increasing interest in reaping the benefits of blockchain technology to empower software systems. However, the unique characteristics and requirements associated with Blockchain Based... more
Many scientific and practical areas have shown increasing interest in reaping the benefits of blockchain technology to empower software systems. However, the unique characteristics and requirements associated with Blockchain Based Software (BBS) systems raise new challenges across the development lifecycle that entail an extensive improvement of conventional software engineering. This article presents a systematic literature review of the state-of-the-art in BBS engineering research from a software engineering perspective. We characterize BBS engineering from the theoretical foundations, processes, models, and roles and discuss a rich repertoire of key development activities, principles, challenges, and techniques. The focus and depth of this survey not only gives software engineering practitioners and researchers a consolidated body of knowledge about current BBS development but also underpins a starting point for further research in this field.
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Objective. We propose an approach to reason about goals, obstacles, and to select suitable big data solution architecture that satisfy quality goal preferences and constraints of stakeholders at the presence of the decision outcome... more
Objective. We propose an approach to reason about goals, obstacles, and to select suitable big data solution architecture that satisfy quality goal preferences and constraints of stakeholders at the presence of the decision outcome uncertainty. The approach will highlight situations that may impede the goals. They will be assessed and resolved to generate complete requirements of an architectural solution. Method. The approach employs goal-oriented modelling to identify obstacles causing quality goal failure and their corresponding resolution tactics. It combines fuzzy logic to explore uncertainties in solution architectures and to find an optimal set of architectural decisions for the big data enablement process of manufacturing systems. Result. The approach brings two innovations to the state of the art of big data analytics platform adoption in manufacturing systems. Firstly, A systematic goal-oriented modelling for exploring goals and obstacles in integrating manufacturing syste...
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Many organisations are currently moving their legacy systems to the cloud as it offers reduced cost, improved operational efficiency, on-demand, and pay-as-you-go service models. While any cloud migration scenario to make legacies... more
Many organisations are currently moving their legacy systems to the cloud as it offers reduced cost, improved operational efficiency, on-demand, and pay-as-you-go service models. While any cloud migration scenario to make legacies cloud-enabled may have their own characteristics, there is no universally superior or applicable method for all scenarios. In situations like this, designing customisable methods that fit characteristics of migration scenarios would be pivotal for successful adoption of cloud computing. The literature review reveals that issues surrounding method tailoring for the cloud migration have so far been missing and this is despite the call made by previous researches to adopt a tailoring perspective to the cloud enablement. To effectively address this shortcoming, this study applied the idea of situational method engineering to develop a framework which facilitates the design and maintenance of bespoke cloud migration methods. The paper demonstrates the applicabi...
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Context. The reengineering process of large data-intensive legacy software applications (“legacy applications” for brevity) to cloud platforms involves different interrelated activities. These activities are related to planning,... more
Context. The reengineering process of large data-intensive legacy software applications (“legacy applications” for brevity) to cloud platforms involves different interrelated activities. These activities are related to planning, architecture design, re-hosting/lift-shift, code refactoring, and other related ones. In this regard, the cloud computing literature has seen the emergence of different methods with a disparate point of view of the same underlying legacy application reengineering process to cloud platforms. As such, the effective interoperability and tailoring of these methods become problematic due to the lack of integrated and consistent standard models.
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Many organisations are currently moving their legacy systems to the cloud as it offers reduced cost, improved operational efficiency, on-demand, and pay-as-you-go service models. While any cloud migration scenario to make legacies... more
Many organisations are currently moving their legacy systems to the cloud as it offers reduced cost, improved operational efficiency, on-demand, and pay-as-you-go service models. While any cloud migration scenario to make legacies cloud-enabled may have their own characteristics, there is no universally superior or applicable method for all scenarios. In situations like this, designing customisable methods that fit characteristics of migration scenarios would be pivotal for successful adoption of cloud computing. The literature review reveals that issues surrounding method tailoring for the cloud migration have so far been missing and this is despite the call made by previous researches to adopt a tailoring perspective to the cloud enablement. To effectively address this shortcoming, this study applied the idea of situational method engineering to develop a framework which facilitates the design and maintenance of bespoke cloud migration methods. The paper demonstrates the applicabi...
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Research around cloud computing has largely been dedicated to addressing technical aspects associated with utilizing cloud services, surveying critical success factors for the cloud adoption, and opinions about its impact on IT functions.... more
Research around cloud computing has largely been dedicated to addressing technical aspects associated with utilizing cloud services, surveying critical success factors for the cloud adoption, and opinions about its impact on IT functions. Nevertheless, the aspect of process models for the cloud migration has been slow in pace. Several methodologies have been proposed by both academia and industry for moving legacy applications to the cloud. This paper presents a criteria-based appraisal of such existing methodologies. The results of the analysis highlight the strengths and weaknesses of these methodologies and can be used by cloud service consumers for comparing and selecting the most appropriate ones that fit specific migration scenarios. The paper also suggests research opportunities to improve the status quo.
Software systems development nowadays has moved towards dynamic composition of services that run on distributed infrastructures aligned with continuous changes in the system requirements. Consequently, software developers need to tailor... more
Software systems development nowadays has moved towards dynamic composition of services that run on distributed infrastructures aligned with continuous changes in the system requirements. Consequently, software developers need to tailor project specific methodologies to fit their methodology requirements. Process patterns present a suitable solution by providing reusable method chunks of software development methodologies for constructing methodologies to fit specific requirements. In this paper, we propose a set of high-level service-oriented process patterns that can be used for constructing and enhancing situational service-oriented methodologies. We show how these patterns are used to construct a specific service-oriented methodology for the development of a sample system. Keywords. Service-Oriented Software Development Methodologies, Process Patterns, Process Meta-Model, Situational Method Engineering
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Many enterprise software systems supporting IT services are characterised by a need for a high computing capability and resource consumption (Armbrust et al. 2010; Buyya et al. 2008; Koçak et al. 2013). Cloud Computing initiatives have... more
Many enterprise software systems supporting IT services are characterised by a need for a high computing capability and resource consumption (Armbrust et al. 2010; Buyya et al. 2008; Koçak et al. 2013). Cloud Computing initiatives have received a significant attention as a viable solution to address these requirements through offering a wide range of services, which are universally accessible, acquirable and releasable in a dynamic fashion, and payable on the basis of service usage. Hence, organisations view the cloud services as an opportunity to empower their legacy systems.
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While several IoT architectures have been proposed for enabling smart city visions, not much work has been done to assess and compare these architectures. By applying our proposed evaluation framework that incorporates a variety of 33... more
While several IoT architectures have been proposed for enabling smart city visions, not much work has been done to assess and compare these architectures. By applying our proposed evaluation framework that incorporates a variety of 33 criteria, this paper presents a comparative analysis of nine existing well-known IoT architectures. The results of the analysis highlight the strengths and weaknesses of these architectures and give insight to city leaders, architects, and developers aiming at selecting the most appropriate architecture or their combination that may fit their own specific smart city development scenario. Keywords. Internet of things, IoT, smart city architecture, evaluation framework
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The compliance of IoT platforms to quality is paramount to achieve users’ satisfaction. Currently, we do not have a comprehensive set of guidelines to appraise and select the most suitable IoT platform architectures that meet relevant... more
The compliance of IoT platforms to quality is paramount to achieve users’ satisfaction. Currently, we do not have a comprehensive set of guidelines to appraise and select the most suitable IoT platform architectures that meet relevant criteria. This paper is a tentative response to this critical knowledge gap where we adopted the design science research approach to develop a novel evaluation framework. Our research, on the one hand, stimulates an unbiased competition among IoT platform providers and, on the other hand, establishes a solid foundation for IoT platform consumers to make informed decisions in this multiplicity. The application of the framework is illustrated in example scenarios. Moreover, lessons learned from applying design science research are shared.
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Situational method engineering uses a repository of reusable method fragments that are derived from existing software development methodologies and industrial best practices to simplify the construction of any project-specific software... more
Situational method engineering uses a repository of reusable method fragments that are derived from existing software development methodologies and industrial best practices to simplify the construction of any project-specific software development methodology aligned with specific characteristics of a project at hand. In this respect, OPEN is a well-established, standardized and popular approach for situational method engineering.
Abstract The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is meant to facilitate system development by using models for representing both the¿ problem¿ and its¿ solution¿. In its ideal form, software development based on MDA would follow a development... more
Abstract The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is meant to facilitate system development by using models for representing both the¿ problem¿ and its¿ solution¿. In its ideal form, software development based on MDA would follow a development process that begins by producing models of the problem domain at a high level of abstraction, and then proceeds by gradually and automatically transforming them into executable code with the help of tools.