Nowadays there are sound Model-Driven Development (MDD) methods that deal with functional requirements, but in general, usability is not considered from the early stages of the development. Analysts... Show More

Nowadays there are sound Model-Driven Development (MDD) methods that deal with functional requirements, but in general, usability is not considered from the early stages of the development. Analysts that work with MDD implement usability features manually once the code has been generated. This manual implementation contradicts the MDD paradigm and it may involve much rework. This paper proposes a method to elicit usability requirements at early stages of the software development process such a way non-experts at usability can use it. The approach consists of organizing several interface design guidelines and usability guidelines in a tree structure. These guidelines are shown to the analyst through questions that she/he must ask to the end-user. Answers to these questions mark the path throughout the tree structure. At the end of the process, the paper gathers all the answers of the end-user to obtain the set of usability requirements. If it represents usability requirements according to the conceptual models that compose the framework of a MDD method, these requirements can be the input for next steps of the software development process. The approach is validated with a laboratory demonstration.

Understanding people's goals is a challenging issue that is met in many different areas such as security, sales, information retrieval, etc. Intention Mining aims at uncovering intentions from... Show More

Understanding people's goals is a challenging issue that is met in many different areas such as security, sales, information retrieval, etc. Intention Mining aims at uncovering intentions from observations of actual activities. While most Intention Mining techniques proposed so far focus on mining individual intentions to analyze web engine queries, this paper proposes a generic technique to mine intentions from activity traces. The proposed technique relies on supervised learning and generates intentional models specified with the Map formalism. The originality of the contribution lies in the demonstration that it is actually possible to reverse engineer the underlying intentional plans built by people when in action, and specify them in models e.g. with intentions at different levels, dependencies, links with other concepts, etc. After an introduction on intention mining, the paper presents the Supervised Map Miner Method and reports two controlled experiments that were undertaken to evaluate precision, recall and F-Score. The results are promising since the authors were able to find the intentions underlying the activities as well as the corresponding map process model with satisfying accuracy, efficiency and performance.

As modern organizations increasingly need to operate in uncertain and fast-paced business environments, pressures increase on information systems (IS) to support these enterprises in a dynamically... Show More

As modern organizations increasingly need to operate in uncertain and fast-paced business environments, pressures increase on information systems (IS) to support these enterprises in a dynamically changing world. Consequently, systems need to deliver results given incompletely known and constantly changing requirements and contexts and other uncertainties. Their development is no longer a progression from clear and stable requirements to solutions meeting them. Rather, it is a continuous process involving multiple iterations of analysis and exploration, design, and development taking into consideration changing organizational needs, available resources, and feedback from previous iterations. Since current modeling and analysis notations generally assume stable and predictable settings for IS development, this paper explores the difficulties in applying several such techniques for modeling continuously evolving systems in uncertain and rapidly changing socio-technical domains and identifies requirements for a comprehensive modeling notation suitable for these environments. Business intelligence capability implementation in enterprises is used as an illustration.

This paper proposes representations for micro-business requirements patterns with associated software components. The patterns must be comprehensible enough for micro-business owners without... Show More

This paper proposes representations for micro-business requirements patterns with associated software components. The patterns must be comprehensible enough for micro-business owners without technical backgrounds but at the same time be technical enough for the software developers who use them during the design and development of software. Both objectives are somewhat conflicting and trade-offs have to be made regarding their representations. The pattern representations use a combination of tables, business process models, goal graphs, labels, and UML component diagrams. First, the paper provides an example of a micro-business requirements pattern in the form of an inventory pattern and applies it in a real-world micro-business case, a clothes retail store. Through the example, it shows how the pattern is instantiated and associated with software components. Then, it shows how the patterns are applied in industrial practice, including the software development companies currently adapting and applying them, accompanied by observable strengths and weaknesses.

This paper proposes models for managing documents in a web engineering context. First, it proposes a document model to better manage multilingual composite documents. The approach, inspired by the... Show More

This paper proposes models for managing documents in a web engineering context. First, it proposes a document model to better manage multilingual composite documents. The approach, inspired by the FRBR report, is to group all versions, translations, formats, etc. of a document in a unique document tree, putting document data and metadata at the same level. Then it proposes a model for prototyping applications, using a combination of class-based inheritance and prototype programming principles. This model applies to document models, documents views and actions. Finally, it proposes a metadata management model, laying foundations for easier integration and management of information in web applications. The proposed models are implemented in the framework Sydonie and several applications are built with the model and framework.