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The theme of this thesis is to pave a path to vertically extract business intelligence (BI) from software code to business intelligence base, which is a tank of BI. Business intelligence is the atomic unit to build a piece of program comprehensibility in business logic point of view. It outstands because it covers all reverse engineering levels from code to specification. It refers to technologies for the localisation, extraction, analysis of business intelligence in software system. Such an approach naturally requires information transformation from software system to business intelligence base, and hence a novel set of automatic business intelligence recovery methods are needed. After a brief introduction of major issues covered by this thesis, the state of art of the area coined by the author as “business intelligence elicitation from software system”, in particular, the kinds of business intelligence that can be elicited from software system and their corresponding reverse engineering technical solutions are presented. Several new techniques are invented to pave the way towards realising this approach and make it light-weight. In particular, a programming-style-based method is proposed to partition a source program into business intelligence oriented program modules; concept recovery rules are defined to recover business intelligence concepts from the names embedded in a program module; formal concept analysis is built to model the recovered business intelligence and present business logic. The future research of this task is viewed as “automating business intelligence accumulation in Web” which is defined to bridge work in this thesis to nowadays Web computing trends. A prototype tool for recovering business intelligence from a Web-based mobile retailing system is then presented, followed by case study giving evaluation on the approach in different aspects. Finally, conclusions are drawn. Original contributions of this research work to the field of software reverse engineering are made explicit and future opportunities are explored.

The systematic interaction of software developers with the business domain experts that are usually no software developers is crucial to software system maintenance and creation and has surfaced as the big challenge of modern software engineering. Existing frameworks promoting the typical programming languages with artificial syntax are suitable to be processed by computers but do not cater to domain experts, who are used to documents written in natural language as a means of interaction. Other frameworks that claim to be fully automated, such as those using natural language processing, are too imprecise to handle the typical requirements documents written in heterogeneous natural language flavours. In this thesis, a framework is proposed that can support the specification of business rules that is, on the one hand, understandable for nonprogrammers and on the other hand semantically founded, which enables computer processability. This is achieved by the novel language Adaptive Business Process and Rule Integration Language (APRIL). Specifications in APRIL can be written in a style close to natural language and are thus suitable for humans, which was empirically evaluated with a representative group of test persons. A useful and uncommon feature of APRIL is the ability to define reusable abstract mixfix operators as sentence patterns, that can mimic natural language. The semantic underpinning of the mixfix operators is achieved by customizable atomic formulas, allowing to tailor APRIL to specific domains. Atomic formulas are underpinned by a denotational semantics, which is based on Tempura (executable subset of Interval Temporal Logic (ITL)) to describe behaviour and the Object Constraint Language (OCL) to describe invariants and pre- and postconditions. APRIL statements can be used as the basis for automatically generating test code for software systems. An additional aspect of enhancing the quality of specification documents comes with a novel formal method technique (ISEPI) applicable to behavioural business rules semantically based on Propositional Interval Temporal Logic (PITL) and complying with the newly discovered 2-to-1 property. This work discovers how the ISE subset of ISEPI can be used to express complex behavioural business rules in a more concise and understandable way. The evaluation of ISE is done by an example specification taken from the car industry describing system behaviour, using the tools MONA and PITL2MONA. Finally, a methodology is presented that helps to guide a continuous transformation starting from purely natural language business rule specification to the APRIL specification which can then be transformed to test code. The methodologies, language concepts, algorithms, tools and techniques devised in this work are part of the APRIL-framework.

Many studies have recognised the importance of a variety of factors in the internationalisation of firms. Only a few, however, have attempted to integrate these factors into a comprehensive framework. In this study, taking the network approach as its main analytical foundation, an integrative theoretical framework is developed and tested empirically to assess the impact of a wide range of factors on the internationalisation of firms. The internationalisation phenomenon is examined in a more comprehensive manner than in many previous studies, as a two-sided process of both inward and outward international operations. Using logistic regressions in the analysis of empirical evidence gathered through a national survey sample of 148 Brazilian software firms, the theoretical framework proposed in this study obtained substantial support. The findings expand previous knowledge through a comprehensive explanation that incorporates determinant factors from four distinct dimensions - contextual, organisational, network, and entrepreneurial - in examining the internationalisation of firms from emerging markets. The findings indicate that business networks are indeed strategic mechanisms for a firm in developing its internationalisation trajectory, as hypothesised. The results of this research suggest that studies based on the business-network model of internationalisation can no longer ignore the impact of other factors at the contextual, organisational, and entrepreneurial level. Incorporating these elements into research that seeks to explain the internationalisation of firms could provide a more sophisticated understanding through new insights and allow scholars to go beyond one-dimensional and static theorising.

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Carleton University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-72). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

El objetivo general de la investigación fue analizar como la implementación del software SAP B1 influyó en la reducción de costos operativos de importación de la empresa Comercial Colride S.A.C. en el año 2017. Para la investigación se utilizó el método deductivo-explicativo, sobre una muestra conformada por quince trabajadores del área de importaciones de la empresa Comercial Colride S.A.C. The general objective of the research was to analyze how the implementation of SAP B1 software influenced the reduction of import operational costs of Comercial Colride S.A.C. in the year 2017. For the investigation the deductive-explanatory method was used, on a sample conformed by fifteen workers of the area of imports of the company Comercial Colride S.A.C.

Companies working on safety-critical projects must adhere to strict rules imposed by the domain, especially when human safety is involved. These projects need to be compliant to standard norms and regulations. Thus, all the process steps must be clearly documented in order to be verifiable for compliance in a later stage by an auditor. Nevertheless, documentation often comes in the form of manually written textual documents in different formats. Moreover, the project members use diverse proprietary tools. This makes it difficult for auditors to understand how the actual project was conducted. My research addresses the project mining problem by exploiting logs from project-generated artifacts, which come from software repositories used by the project team.

Este Estudo envolve um dos setores da indústria brasileira mais afetados pela carência na gestão empresarial que é o das Micro e Pequenas Empresas (MPE), haja vista que este é composto por organizações com configurações enxutas, usualmente focadas em sua atividade-fim, e não em sua administração. Neste cenário, se dá especial destaque ao setor de Tecnologia da Informação, mais especificamente no negócio de software, que se destaca dentre as demais atividades do setor por seu crescimento. O Estudo também descreve a busca para entender esta dificuldade de gerenciamento e propor soluções adequadas à gestão dos Recursos Humanos das organizações, apresentando um modelo de gestão, que relaciona a estratégia com as competências da organização e, por conseqüência, trabalha as competências funcionais e individuais da mesma. Além disso, aborda a gestão organizacional e a possibilidade de articular de maneira sistemática a relação entre as dimensões organizacional, funcional e individual das competências de uma empresa. Apresenta o objetivo de aplicar uma metodologia para a implementação do mapeamento de competências organizacionais, funcionais e individuais para uma pequena empresa do setor de software com base em seus referenciais estratégicos. Esta pesquisa se fundamenta então em um estudo de caso exploratório realizado em uma pequena empresa de software e tem como foco o mapeamento de competências, apresentando contribuições gerenciais, ao trazer elementos para discussão e evidenciar oportunidades de mudança; contribuições setoriais, ao apresentar fatores que influenciam este mercado e que compõem seu processo estratégico, além de apresentar uma pesquisa bibliográfica focada no setor; contribuições teóricas, ao pesquisar o mapeamento de competências numa abordagem orientada para a Gestão Organizacional, que conta atualmente com poucos e restritos estudos; e contribuições metodológicas, ao apresentar um modelo distinto dos demais encontrados na literatura sobre mapeamento de competências em nível organizacional, funcional e individual. / This Study involves one of the most affected sectors in the Brazilian industry by the lack of business management, which is the Micro and Small Business (MSB), considering that it is composed of organizations with lean settings, usually focused on their target activity, and not on their management. In this scenario, it is given special spotlight to the Information Technology field, more specifically to the software business, which stands out among the other industry activities for its growth. The study also describes the quest to understand this managing difficulty and suggest adequate solutions to Human Resources Management inside organizations, showing a management model that links the strategy to the organizational competences and, consequently, works its functional and individual competences. Moreover, it approaches the organizational management and the ability to articulate in a systematic way the relation between the organizational, functional and individual dimensions of the company’s competence. It also presents the goal of applying a methodology for the implementation of organizational, functional and individual competences’ mapping for a small business in the software industry based on its strategic benchmarks. This research is based upon an exploratory case study conducted in a small software company and it focuses the competences’ mapping, presenting management contributions, where they provide elements for discussion and highlight opportunities to change; industry contributions, introducing factors that influence this market and make up its strategic process, besides presenting a literature search focused on the sector; theoretical contributions, searching for the competences’ mapping in an Organizational Management’s approach, which currently has few and limited studies; and methodological contributions, offering a distinct model from the others found in the literature of competences’ mapping at the organizational, functional and individual levels.

The monitoring of project-oriented business processes is difficult because their state is fragmented and represented by the progress of different documents and artifacts being worked on. This observation holds in particular for software development projects in which various developers work on different parts of the software concurrently. Prior contributions in this area have proposed a plethora of techniques to analyze and visualize the current state of the software artifact as a product. It is surprising that these techniques are missing to provide insights into what types of work are conducted at different stages of the project and how they are dependent upon another. In this paper, we address this research gap and present a technique for mining the software process including dependencies between artifacts. Our evaluation of various open-source projects demonstrates the applicability of our technique.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Mississippi State University. Department of Management. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.