Problem description
In Software-intensive Business many different artifacts along the software lifecycle are created. This covers both, business-oriented artifacts such as business models, roadmap, user stories or business process models as well as technology-oriented artifacts, such as technical architecture diagrams, class diagram or test cases is created.
Artifacts of the business domain depend on artifacts of the technology domain and vice versa. Furthermore, there are dependencies between artifacts used along the lifecycle of development, deployment and operations of software-intensive systems. Understanding and making these dependencies explicit in the entire development and management of large-scale software systems is important. However, currently there neither a classification of relevant artifacts nor an explicit description of their dependencies along the entire lifecycle available. Thus, there is no possibility to trace links between the artifacts and there are no comprehensive tools supporting navigating through different artifacts and propagating changes from one artifact to another. This leads to limiting focus on a small subset of artifacts and neglection substantial side effects between the artifacts.
Goal of the thesis
The goal of this thesis is to come up with a first conceptualization including a classification of artefacts and their dependencies in the field of Software-intensive Business. The conceptualization should formally represented by (partial) metamodels and their composition. Initial prototypical tool support for visualizing and navigating through the conceptualization should provided.
Work packages
The thesis comprises the following work packages.
- Identify artifacts: In a first step, the most relevant artifacts in Software-intensive Business need to be identified. Relevancy can be determined by a systematic literature review for identifying relevant artifacts discussed in scientific literature complemented by a web search using established search engines like google from a more practical point of view.
- Consolidate and conceptualize artifacts: Basic concepts are extracted from the artifacts. Artifacts may be described with synonyms, comparable to other artifacts, complement other artifacts or exclude other artifacts. The result of this work package is a consolidated list of conceptual descriptions of artifacts as well as a decomposition of key entities contained in the artifacts.
- Relate artifacts: The relationship between the single artifacts and their entities are identified in this work package.
- Metamodel artifacts: Based on the outcome of the previous work packages a language for modeling the artifacts is specified by a metamodel. The metamodel can be assembled by composing existing (partial) metamodels.
- Prototyping Implementation: A basic tooling for exploring and navigating through the meta-models is provided.
- Evaluation: This work package runs in parallel with all work packages introduced above. A detailed evaluation strategy needs to be specified by the student.
Skills required:
- Interdisciplinary interest in the field of Software-intensive Business
- Very good time management and self-organization skills
- Programming and software engineering skills
- Good English skills (as the language of the thesis is english)
- Ability to review and synthesize literature
Contact
This thesis is proposed as an interdisciplinary project between computer science and information systems research in cooperation with Institute of Institute for Program Structures and Data Organisation, Chair of Software Design and Quality (Prof. Dr. Ralf Reussner, Dr. Robert Heinrich) and the Institute of Information Systems and Marketing, Chair of Information Systems and Service Design (Prof. Dr. Alexander Maedche). Pls. contact Dr. Robert Heinrich (robert.heinrich@kit.edu) for further questions.
