Sebis Research News

Stanford University has invited Bernhard Waltl for a research exchange to explore synergies between law and informatics and to strengthen the  international network between sebis and Stanford's CodeX research group. 

Auch dieses Jahr fand das Forschungskolloquium Modellierung in Kooperation mit teilnehmenden Lehrstühlen aus den Hochschulen Universität Bayreuth, Universität Duisburg-Essen, FernUniversität in Hagen, HTWG Konstanz und TU München statt. Durch spannende Vorträge wurden zahlreiche Themen aus den Bereichen Enterprise Modelling und Enterprise Architecture Management seitens der teilnehmenden Lehrstühle vorgestellt und diskutiert.

Conversational interfaces recently gained a lot of attention. One of the reasons for the current hype is the fact that chatbots (one particularly popular form of conversational interfaces) nowadays can be created without any programming knowledge, thanks to different toolkits and so-called Natural Language Understanding (NLU) services. While these NLU services are already widely used in both, industry and science, so far, they have not been analysed systematically. In this paper, we present a method to evaluate the classification performance of NLU services. Moreover, we present two new corpora, one consisting of annotated questions and one consisting of annotated questions with the corresponding answers. Based on these corpora, we conduct an evaluation of some of the most popular NLU services. Thereby we want to enable both, researchers and companies to make more educated decisions about which service they should use.

Software architecture is considered as a set of architectural design decisions. The recent trends, both in research and industry, call for improved tool support for software architects and developers to manage architectural design decisions and its associated concepts. As part of our ongoing work, we propose a framework for managing architectural design decisions in large software-intensive projects. Each component within this framework addresses specific use cases including (a) extraction and classification of design decisions from issue management systems, (b) annotation of architectural elements, (c) recommendation of alternative decision options, (d) reasoning about decisions’ rationale, and (e) recommendation of experts for addressing design decisions. These components are planned to be iteratively realized and evaluated using the design science research approach. We believe that the realization of such a framework will allow an architectural knowledge management systems to integrate with the design, development, and maintenance phases to support stakeholders not only to document design decisions but also to learn from decisions made in the past projects.

Abstract: Over the past two decades, agile software development methods have been adopted by an increasing number of organizations to improve their software development processes. In contrast to traditional methods, agile methods place more emphasis on flexible processes than on detailed upfront plans and heavy documentations. Since agile methods have proved to be successful at the team level, large organizations are now aiming to scale agile methods to the enterprise level by adopting so-called scaling agile frameworks. Scaling agile methods at the enterprise level with some amount of architectural planning prevents excessive redesign efforts and functional redundancy in application architectures. An effective evolution of application architectures requires the right trade-off between emergent and intentional architectural design and a close collaboration between agile and architecture teams. Although there is a growing body of literature on scaling agile frameworks, literature documenting the deployment of architect roles in scaling agile frameworks is still scarce.

This study describes the roles of architects in scaling agile frameworks with the help of a structured literature review. We aim to provide a primary analysis of 20 identified scaling agile frameworks. Subsequently, we thoroughly describe three popular scaling agile frameworks: Scaled Agile Framework, Large Scale Scrum, and Disciplined Agile 2.0. After specifying the main concepts of scaling agile frameworks, we characterize roles of enterprise, software, solution, and information architects, as identified in four scaling agile frameworks. Finally, we provide a discussion of generalizable findings on the role of architects in scaling agile frameworks