When describing Web services, one of the obvious aspects that needs representing is Quality of Service ” (QoS), the capability of a Web service to meet an acceptable level of service as per factors such as availability and accessibility. However too much of a focus on developing functional QoS ontologies has led to an over-emphasis on representing solely QoS metrics and units of measurement. For instance, what does round trip time actually mean? Is the round trip time of every data item measured? Is it an average, or is every nth item measured? Is it the actual time that is important or just the % of items that are beyond a certain range? Arguably existing QoS ontologies cannot readily answer many of these design questions because these questions have less to do with evaluating QoS and more to do with representing “what is quality? ” Therefore, there is an unmet need for Web services ontologies that are designed at a higher level encompassing domain independent concepts, and generally applicable beyond QoS evaluations. The MOQ set of ontologies designed from the premise that quality is “conformance to requirements ” aims to fill this need. Comprised of ontologies of requirement, measurement, traceability, and quality management systems, MOQ can be extended to encompass QoS metrics and measurement units or be designed to interoperate with existing QoS ontology. Either way MOQ use promises to ensure that ambiguity in QoS evaluations is minimized.

Usability capability models are used for assessing the ability of development organisations to develop usable products. We have identified quality criteria for usability capability models and analysed the strengths and weaknesses of the existing models. The analysis reveals that there are differences both in the quality of the structure of the models and in the extent that they cover phenomena related to user-centred design. Our conclusion is that process assessment approach forms a good basis for a usability capability model. However, the existing models should be extended with new organisation and business related processes. In addition, also non-process perspectives as skills, resources, technology, and culture in user-centred design should be covered.

Abstract: Many organisations are currently forced to collaborate with others in renewing their products and processes to stay competitive, to enter new or to retain their current markets, or to get easy access to new knowledge. Management of collaboration between two or more organisations is, however, still not well understood, given that about half of the collaborative endeavours fail. A methodology to support management of collaboration is still lacking. To build such a methodology, knowledge is needed on the process of collaboration. Much research has been devoted, however, to understanding the relationships between initial conditions and outcomes of a collaboration initiative. The results of this research are sometimes contradicting or not very well comparable because of differences in conceptualisation or ignorance of moderating factors. Moreover, a good design of initial conditions is necessary, but not sufficient. Conditions change during the process of collaboration. We need knowledge on the dynamics of the collaboration process to understand why and how conditions change and how they can be influenced. In this paper an approach will be presented that can support the gradual building of knowledge on the process of collaboration. The approach, which resulted from the Esprit IV project 23286 FREE (Fast Reactive Extended Enterprise), can be viewed as a first step towards building a methodology to support management of collaboration. The concept of infrastructures for collaboration will be introduced stressing the integral nature of management of collaboration.

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We introduce electronic process guides, and discuss their role in software engineering projects. We then present existing methods for constructing electronic process guides by defining a set of common processes for a company. Different approaches from the software engineering and management science are presented. We then go on to propose a new way of dealing with process description in software engineering: using process workshops as a tool to reach consensus on work practice. The main reason for this is to get realistic descriptions with accurate detail as well as company commitment in an efficient manner. We describe our workshop-oriented method to define processes, which we have used in small software companies, and show examples of results.

Free and open source software has had a major impact on the computer industry since the late 1990s and has changed the way software is perceived, developed and deployed in many areas. Free and open source software, or FOSS, is typically developed in a collaborative fashion and the majority of contributors are volunteers. Even though this collaborative form of develop-ment has produced a significant body of software, the development process is often described as unstructured and unorganized. This dissertation studies the FOSS phenomenon from a quality perspective and investigates where im-provements to the development process are possible. In particular, the focus is on release management since this is concerned with the delivery of a high quality product to end-users. This research has identified considerable interest amongst the FOSS commu-nity in a novel release management strategy, time based releases. In contrast to traditional development which is feature-driven, time based releases use time rather than features as the criterion for the creation of a new release. Releases

Many organisations have seen the use of simulation evolve, often in something of a piecemeal fashion. This may lead to some deficiencies in the way that simulation is employed. Therefore, it is useful to step back and reflect upon how the application of simulation could be improved. This paper describes such a project in which a simulation strategy was devised for the British Airways Operational Research Group. The first step involved a series of interviews with the operational research analysts and their customers through which an understanding of simulation use was developed. A SWOT analysis on the findings from these interviews revealed a number of issues that needed to be resolved. Proposals for addressing these issues were developed and refined through further discussions.

abstract In today’s business environment, information technology (IT) is an indispensable tool for any corporation. One of the largest IT investments goes to software-related products and activities such as development, maintenance and enhancement. In order to reduce the cost of software activities and improve the quality of software products, eþ ectively managing the software development process is an important topic in the IT ® eld. Since the early 1990s, there has been rapidly growing interest in the capability maturity model (CMM) in software organizations. With the aid of CMM guidelines, a software organization can continually improve its software process. This research discusses the essence of CMM guidelines and surveys the IT organizations of the top 1000 business companies in Taiwan. It explores the status of software process management in these companies and compares the ® ndings with Japanese and US data reported in the literature.

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This article examines the different ways in which the quality model behind MITRE Corporation’s