Papers by Antonio Ruiz Cortés
2021 Second International Conference on Information Systems and Software Technologies (ICI2ST), 2021
The Software Engineering (SE) research continues to gain strength and interest for researchers co... more The Software Engineering (SE) research continues to gain strength and interest for researchers considering the need to apply rigor and scientific validity to research results. Objective: Establishing an overview of the topic through a classification scheme of publications and structure the field of interest. Method: We conducted a Systematic Mapping Study, including articles published until 2019, that report at least one study of empirical strategies in SE. Results: 80 initial sets of studies were selected and analyzed, identifying: i) empirical strategy type used and ii) Software Engineering hypotheses types used. Also, 20 papers of the set of studies for mapping were selected and analyzed, identifying 17 empirical strategies and 11 main characteristics to address the empirical research inception in SE. Conclusions: We corroborate that the selection of an empirical strategy in Software Engineering research depends on the nature and scope of the research and on the resources that the researcher has at that moment, in addition to the degree of scientific and methodological knowledge that he has to carry out an empirical study. It is necessary to continue studying in-depth the behavior and nature of the empirical strategies in Software Engineering research that allows strengthening the scientific taxonomy in SE, besides walking towards the automation of the experimental process.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2002
The semantic Web will bring meaning to the Internet, making it possible for web agents to underst... more The semantic Web will bring meaning to the Internet, making it possible for web agents to understand the information it contains. However, current trends seem to suggest that it is not likely to be adopted in the forthcoming years. In this sense, meaningful information extraction from the web becomes a handicap for web agents. In this article, we present a framework for automatic extraction of semantically-meaningful information from the current web. Separating the extraction process from the business logic of an agent enhances modularity, adaptability, and maintainability. Our approach is novel in that it combines different technologies to extract information, surf the web and automatically adapt to some changes.
Fourth International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering Workshops, 2003. Proceedings.
The procurement of web services (WSP) shifts the focus of architects and integrators from functio... more The procurement of web services (WSP) shifts the focus of architects and integrators from functional to quality-ofservice (QoS) aspects. A number of platforms have been proposed as supporting infrastructures to assist WSP activities. Notwithstanding, there is a lack of consensus on (i) what expressiveness degree in QoS specifications should be offered, and (ii) what activities should be supported by these platforms. This paper attempts to provide an answer to both questions, thus it motivates and presents a classification framework for WSP platforms. This framework is used to compare several existing platforms and to identify some key properties and deficiencies, which might be considered as a research agenda for the future.
Proceedings IEEE Joint International Conference on Requirements Engineering
In this paper we present a lightweight approach for the automatic verification of requirements. T... more In this paper we present a lightweight approach for the automatic verification of requirements. This approach is not based on natural language parsing techniques but on the representation of requirements in XML. In our approach, XSLT stylesheets are used not only to automatically generate requirements documents, but also to provide verification-oriented heuristics as well as to measure the quality of requirements using some verification-oriented metrics. These ideas have been implemented in REM, an experimental XML-based requirements management tool also described in this paper. Requirements Quality Assurance <<subprocess>> Requirements Engineering <<process>> Requirements Negotiation <<subprocess>> Requirements Management <<subprocess>> Requirements Validation Requirements Verification Requirements Analysis Requirements Elicitation <<subprocess>>
In this paper, we present an approach for the automatic verification of software requirements spe... more In this paper, we present an approach for the automatic verification of software requirements specifications. This approach is based on the representation of software requirements in XML and the usage of the XSLT language not only to automatically generate requirements documents, but also to verify some desired quality properties and to automatically compute some metrics. These ideas have been implemented in REM, an experimental requirements management tool that is also described in this paper.
In the automated analysis feature models (AAFM), many operations have been defined to extract rel... more In the automated analysis feature models (AAFM), many operations have been defined to extract relevant informa- tion to be used on decision making. Most of the proposals rely on logics to give solution to different operations. This extraction of knowledge using logics is known as deductive reasoning. One of the most useful operations are explana- tions that provide the reasons why some other operations find no solution. However, explanations does not use de- ductive but abductive reasoning, a kind of reasoning that allows to obtain conjectures why things happen. As a first contribution we differentiate between deductive and abduc- tive reasoning and show how this difference affect to AAFM. Secondly, we broaden the concept of explanations relying on abductive reasoning, applying them even when we ob- tain a positive response from other operations. Lastly, we propose a catalog of operations that use abduction to pro- vide useful information.
Enhancing Win-Win to Automate the Detection of Conflicts in Quality Requirements
Jisbd, 2002
Una Aproximación al Desarrollo de Software Basada en el Prototipado Arquitectónico
Apoyo a la Decisión en Ingeniería del Software / Decision Support in Software Engineering, 2001
Resumen La obtención, evaluación y selección de alternativas durante la fase de diseño de cualqui... more Resumen La obtención, evaluación y selección de alternativas durante la fase de diseño de cualquier sistema informático son problemas muy conocidos pero, no por ello, menos complejos. Habitualmente, a la hora de realizar este tipo de tareas hemos seguido técnicas ad-hoc, que varían de un proyecto a otro según las necesidades. Por otro lado, la necesidad de obtener un producto final de calidad requiere un gran esfuerzo, por lo que la posibilidad de automatizar estos procesos es de máximo interés. Basándonos en los resultados positivos obtenidos referentes a la fase de elicitación de requisitos de calidad, en este trabajo, quizás un poco prematuramente, presentamos unos esquemas o aproximaciones a una fase de diseño que también sea sensible a la calidad mediante la búsqueda de la mejor alternativa, con vistas a una futura automatización de su gestión.
Implementing Automatic Quality Verification of Requirements with XML and XSLT
ABSTRACT
Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science, 2013
Identifying which part of a local system should be migrated to a public Cloud environment is ofte... more Identifying which part of a local system should be migrated to a public Cloud environment is often a difficult and error prone process. With the significant (and increasing) number of commercial Cloud providers, choosing a provider whose capability best meets requirements is also often difficult. Most Cloud service providers offer large amounts of configurable resources, which can be combined in a number of different ways. In the case of small and medium companies, finding a suitable configuration with the minimum cost is often an essential requirement to migrate, or even to initiate the decision process for migration. We interpret this need as a problem associated with variability management and analysis. Variability techniques and models deal with large configuration spaces, and have been proposed previously to support configuration processes in industrial cases. Furthermore, this is a mature field which has a large catalog of analysis operations to extract valuable information in an automated way. Some of these operations can be used and tailored for Cloud environments. We focus in this work on Amazon Cloud services, primarily due to the large number of possible configurations available by this service provider and its popularity. Our approach can also be adapted to other providers offering similar capabilities.
Mass Customisation along Lifecycle of Autonomic Homes
Autonomic homes adapt themselves to give the user the best possible experience of the services th... more Autonomic homes adapt themselves to give the user the best possible experience of the services they provide. They dynamically adapt its behavior at run-time in response to changing conditions in end-user needs and the surrounding environment devices. From the development point of view, producing and maintaining a large amount of autonomic homes need an affordable solution such as dynamic soft-ware product lines (DSPL). DSPL produce a set of products that share features and have the ability of reconfiguring at runtime. Since users maintain and modify their preferences in opportunistic and improvisational ways, an autonomic home must evolve in time according to user expectations. Current DSPL architectures implement the ability of recon-figuring a product but ignore user preferences. We present an extension to our DSPL architecture to incorporate user preferences so user customisation of autonomic homes is not limited to installation time but all along the lifetime.
Análisis en líneas de productos: avances, desafíos y lecciones aprendidas
Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos, 2009
The present invention relates to a connection terminal for connecting branch conduits to electric... more The present invention relates to a connection terminal for connecting branch conduits to electric mains, preferably a ground lead. The connection terminal includes clamping elements which may be applied around the electric main, a contact element for establishing an electric contact between the electric main and the branch conduit, and a clamping device for clamping the clamping elements to each other and to the electric main in a safe position. The contact element includes an opening for inserting the branch conduit and a spring element having spring devices which are deformable by the branch conduit during insertion and which retain the position of the branch conduit as well as establish an electric contact between the contact element and branch conduit.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011
The widespread use of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is beginning to create problems derive... more The widespread use of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is beginning to create problems derived from the governance of said structures. To date there is not a single effective solution to solve all existing challenges to govern this type of infrastructure. This paper describes the problems encountered when designing a SOA governance solution in a real e-Government scenario. More specifically, we focus on problems related to specification and automated analysis of government policies. We propose a novel SOA governance specification model as a solution to these problems. We have named this model WS-Governance. In order to ease its adoption by SOA practitioners it: i) shares WS-Policy guidelines and is compatible with it, ii) has XML serialization as well as a plain-text one and iii) has a CSP based semantics that provides a precise description as well as facilitating the automation of some editing and WS-Governance related activities such as consistency checking.
Soft Computing, 2011
This paper performs an unprecedented comparative study of Metaheuristic optimization frameworks. ... more This paper performs an unprecedented comparative study of Metaheuristic optimization frameworks. As criteria for comparison a set of 271 features grouped in 30 characteristics and 6 areas has been selected. These features include the different metaheuristic techniques covered, mechanisms for solution encoding, constraint handling, neighborhood specification, hybridization, parallel and distributed computation, software engineering best practices, documentation and user interface, etc. A metric has been defined for each feature so that the scores obtained by a framework are averaged within each group of features, leading to a final average score for each framework. Out of 33 frameworks ten have been selected from the literature using well-defined filtering criteria, and the results of the comparison are analyzed with the aim of identifying improvement areas and gaps in specific frameworks and the whole set. Generally speaking, a significant lack of support has been found for hyper-heuristics, and parallel and distributed computing capabilities. It is also desirable to have a wider implementation of some Software Engineering best practices. Finally, a wider support for some metaheuristics and hybridization capabilities is needed.
Expert Systems with Applications, 2014
In service oriented scenarios, applications are created by composing atomic services and exposing... more In service oriented scenarios, applications are created by composing atomic services and exposing the resulting added value logic as a service. When several alternative service providers are available for composition, quality of service (QoS) properties such as execution time, cost, or availability are taken into account to make the choice, leading to the creation of QoS-aware composite web services. Finding the set of service providers that result in the best QoS is a NPhard optimization problem. This paper presents QoS-Gasp, a metaheuristic algorithm for performing QoS-aware web service composition at runtime. QoS-Gasp is an hybrid approach that combines GRASP with Path Relinking. For the evaluation of our approach we compared it with related metaheuristic algorithms found in the literature. Experiments show that when results must be available in seconds, QoS-Gasp improves the results of previous proposals up to 40%. Beside this, QoS-Gasp found better solutions than any of the compared techniques in a 92% of the runs when results must be available in 100ms; i.e. it provides compositions with a better QoS, implying cost savings, increased availability and reduced execution times for the end-user.
Expert Systems with Applications, 2014
A feature model is a compact representation of the products of a software product line. The autom... more A feature model is a compact representation of the products of a software product line. The automated extraction of information from feature models is a thriving topic involving numerous analysis operations, techniques and tools. Performance evaluation in this domain typically relies on the use of randomly generated feature models. However, these only provide a rough idea of the behaviour of the tools with average problems and do not reveal their real strengths and weaknesses. In this article, we propose to model the problem of finding computationally hard feature models as an optimisation problem and we solve it using a novel evolutionary algorithm for optimised feature models (ETHOM). Given a tool and an analysis operation, ETHOM generates input models of a predefined size maximising aspects such as the execution time or the memory consumption of the tool when performing the operation over the model. This allows users and developers to know the performance of tools in pessimistic cases providing a better idea of their real power and revealing performance bugs. Experiments using ETHOM successfully identified models producing much longer executions times and higher memory consumption than those obtained with randomly generated models of identical or even larger size.
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 2002
In this article, we present an approach for the automatic verification of software requirements d... more In this article, we present an approach for the automatic verification of software requirements documents. This approach is based on the representation of software requirements in XML and the usage of the XSLT language not only to automatically generate requirements documents, but also to verify some desired quality properties and to compute some metrics. These ideas have been implemented in REM, an experimental requirements management tool that is also described in this paper.
Ensuring the compliance of business processes with regulations is becoming increasingly important... more Ensuring the compliance of business processes with regulations is becoming increasingly important to organizations. In this scenario, data play an important role. Little work has been done on data checking in business pro-cesses and no standard denitions have been given to describe data-related compliance problems. The goal of this paper is three-fold: (i) to identify and organise the data-related compliance problems that may arise in a business process model and thus to introduce a common vocabulary for these problems, (ii) to analyse the capabilities of BPMN 2.0 for dening business process models with su-cient information about data to enable the checking of data-related compliance problems, and (iii) to describe the current situation of data-related compliance in terms of the existing automated support and envisage future work to deal with data-aware business process compliance checking.
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Papers by Antonio Ruiz Cortés