Goal-based behavioral customization of information systems

2012

Customizing software to perfectly fit individual needs is becoming increasingly important in information systems engineering. Users want to be able to customize software behavior through reference to terms familiar to their diverse needs and experience. We present a requirements-driven approach to behavioral customization of software systems. Goal models are constructed to represent alternative behaviors that users can exhibit to achieve their goals.

2003

Abstract Software customization has been argued to benefit both the productivity of software engineers and end users. However, most customization methods rely on specialists to manually tweak individual applications for a specific user group. Existing software development methods also fail to acknowledge the importance of different kinds of user skills and preferences and how these might be incorporated into a customizable software design.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2008

Nowadays information systems have to perform in complex, heterogeneous environments, considering a variety of system users with different needs and preferences. Software engineering methodologies need to cope with the complexity of requirements specification in such scenarios, where new requirements may emerge also at run-time and the system's goals are expected to evolve to meet new stakeholder needs. Following an agent-oriented approach, we are studying methods and techniques to design adaptive and evolvable information systems able to fulfill stakeholders' objectives.

2006

Abstract→ We briefly review the history and key ideas in Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering research. We then sketch two applications of these ideas. The first involves establishing an Agent-Oriented Software Development method called Tropos which covers not only requirements but also design phases. The second addresses the design of high-variability software for applications such as home care software and business process design.

The Computer Journal, 2021

Modern software systems are continuously seeking for adaptability realizations, to generate better fit behaviours in response to domain changes. Requirements variability motivates adaptability; hence, understanding the influence of the domain changes, i.e. context variability, to requirements variability is necessary. In this paper, we propose an approach for context-based requirements variability analysis in the goal-oriented requirements modelling. We define contextual goals and contextual preferences to specify the relationships of contexts with requirements and preferences, respectively. Given a requirements problem represented through a goal model, we use the contextual goals to derive applicable solutions at a given situation. Then, from those applicable solutions, we use the contextual preferences as criteria for evaluating and selecting the ones that would best satisfy stakeholder priorities. To support our variability analysis, we develop a tool to automate the derivation and evaluation of the solutions. We further demonstrate the use of our approach in detecting modelling errors and validating the impact of prioritizations, leading to improvements in the requirements specifications. Our approach broadens the scope of requirements variability by weaving context variability with both stakeholder goals and preferences, in order to sufficiently represent the adaptability needs of software systems where contextual changes are commonplace.

2009

Abstract The analysis of stakeholder requirements is a critical aspect of software engineering. A common way of specifying stakeholder requirements is in terms of a hierarchy of goals whose AND/OR decomposition captures a family of software solutions that comply with the goals. In this paper, we extend this goal modeling framework to include the specification of optional user requirements and user preferences, aggregated together into weighted formulae to be optimized.

2014 IEEE Eighth International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS), 2014

Creating and reasoning with goal models is useful for capturing, understanding, and communicating about requirements in the early stages of information system (re)development. However, the utility of goal models is greatly enhanced when an awareness of system intentions can feed into other stages in the requirements analysis process (e.g. requirements elaboration, validation, planning), and can be used as part of the entire system life cycle (e.g., architecture, process design, coding, testing, monitoring, adaptation, and evolution). In order to understand the progress that has been made in integrating goal models with downstream system development, we ask: what approaches exist which map/integrate/transform goal-oriented languages to other software artifacts or languages? To answer this question, we conduct a systematic survey, producing a roadmap of work summarizing 174 publications. Results include a categorization of the "why?" and "how?" for each approach. Findings show that there are a wide variety of proposals with many proposed sources and targets, covering multiple paradigms, motivated by a variety of purposes. We conclude that although much work has been done in this area, the work is fragmented and is often still in a proposal stage.

Researchers in cross-cultural pedagogy often invoke the work of Hofstede (1980; 1986) and Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov (2010) to explain variation in classroom behavioral norms across countries (e.g. Cronjé, 2011; Li & Guo, 2012; Tananuraksakul, 2013). Although Hofstede's model of culture was developed from IBM employee surveys to facilitate cross-cultural management, Hofstede explicitly suggests that his findings can be generalized to student and teacher behavior in the classroom. The present study tests this suggestion by administering an online survey to university students (n=625) in the following countries: USA (n=181), South Africa (n=l03), China (n=64), Turkey, (n=60), Russia, (n=59), Finland (n=58), Vietnam (n=52), and France (n=48). Although the number of countries included in this study is too low to produce globally generalizable results, a statistical comparison of national means on each item fails to support Hofstede's predictions about how national culture manifests in the classroom for these particular countries. Instead, provisional support is found for the creation of a new set of cultural dimensions for the specific purpose of studying classroom culture, with three such dimensions emerging from a principal components analysis of the present data set. The examination of national differences on individual items in this survey can also be useful for travelling instructors of English-speaking university classrooms.

Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais

Literature and the Work of Universality, 2024

That the Anthropocene needs a world literature seems axiomatic. This, however, is based on a certain iteration of the Anthropocene and, equally, a certain iteration of world literature. In this paper, we first review criticisms levelled at such dominant conceptualizationscriticisms about how the universalizing human experience misses crucial particulars of experiences, perspectives and, importantly, injustice. Yet even these critiques of the "worlding" previously enacted by world literature and the Anthropocene together tend to institute other kinds of worlding; they introduce new blind spots. This much becomes clear when the world literature project (in both its conventional iterations and its new Anthropocene variants) is viewed from the Chinese perspective. In the second half of this chapter, we discuss an ongoing recent project to investigate "Anthropocene fiction" in China. The complexity of China's historical position in a world ecology has implications for studying and understanding its Anthropocene fictionand hence for studying and understanding Anthropocene literature as world literature. China's Anthropocene fiction should therefore be undertaken as a reading not from below, but from beside.