A business application automates a collection of business processes. A business process describes how a set of logically related tasks are executed, ordered and managed by following business rules to achieve business objectives. An “online book purchase” business process contains several tasks such as buying a book, ordering a book, and sending out promotions. In this ever changing business environment, both of business applications and business processes are modified to accommodate changed business requirements and improve the performance of the organization. These continuous modifications introduce problems in the following two aspects: 1) Business process definitions are rarely updated to reflect the current business processes deployed in business applications. 2) Business processes may be cloned (e.g., copied and slightly modified) to handle special circumstances or promotions. Identifying these clones and removing them help improve the efficiency of an organization. However, business processes are defined with textual languages that cannot be automatically understood. To maintain business process definitions up to date, we present our techniques that automatically recover business processes from UIs of business applications and identify clones in the recovered business processes. We leverage UI design patterns, which present the best practices of UI designs, to capture business processes from UIs. To refine the recovered business processes and mark the functionally equivalent tasks, we use existing code clone detection tools, such as CCFinder and CloneDR, to detect clones in business applications, and lift clones from code level to business process level. The effectiveness of our techniques is demonstrated through a case study on 15 large open source business applications. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2008-10-28 11:06:31.41

Today, in the era of mobile technology boom, more and more companies equip their employees working in the field (salesmen, insurance agents, service workers etc.) with mobile applications in order to improve the efficiency of their work. On the market, there exist several universal applications which, however, require using some middleware, or they cannot be sufficiently modified to the customer specific needs. In this case comes the development of custom mobile application. The aim of this work is to analyze the requirements for such applications and based on this analysis propose a set of reusable components that will facilitate the development of these native applications on the Android platform. This work will also include a pilot application demonstrating the use of individual components on the sample data. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Thesis (M. Com.) --University of Limpopo, 2018 / The purpose of this study was to investigate the efficiency and effectiveness of e-business applications when used for the creation and delivering of value propositions that the target markets that businesses desire to achieve in the Limpopo Province. The study had three objectives. (1) To identify the e-business applications that can be used in the development of new value propositions for businesses (2) To identify the benefits that the use of e-business applications offers to businesses (3) To determine the relationship between the use of e-business applications and the operational performance of the value propositions. The study was quantitative in nature. Exploratory and descriptive research were utilised to the use of e-business applications by businesses. A sample size of 330 businesses was used. The questionnaire was based on a thorough theoretical basis and a pilot study was conducted to improve the validity. The Cronbach alpha test was conducted to ascertain the reliability of the research instrument. Data was collected through the use of self-administered questionnaires in a survey. SPSS was used for data analysis. The results indicate the e-business applications, the benefits of e-business and the relationship between the e-business applications and operational performance of value propositions. Recommendations to businesses utilise e-business applications so that they are able to create and deliver value propositions in an efficient and effective manner are made.

This master thesis deals with the design, programming, implementation and presentation of on-line business applications for IBM's On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) system called Customer Information Control System (CICS). According to the book “Designing and Programming CICS Applications” ([HOR00]) published by John Horswill we explain two out of many feasible procedures to present the functionality of CICS resp. CICS business applications.

Architecting e-business applications is a complex design activity. This is mainly due to the numerous architectural decisions to be made, including the selection of alternative technologies, software components, design strategies, patterns, standards, protocols, platforms, etc. Further complexities arise due to the fact that these alternatives often vary considerably in their support for different quality attributes. Moreover, there are often different groups of stakeholders involved, with each having their own quality goals and criteria. Furthermore, different architectural decisions often include interdependent alternatives, where the selection of one alternative for one particular decision impacts the selections to be made for alternatives from other different decisions. There have been several research efforts aiming at providing sufficient mechanisms and tools for facilitating the architectural evaluation and design process. These approaches, however, address architectural decisions in isolation, where they focus on evaluating a limited set of alternatives belonging to one architectural decision. This has been the primary motivation behind the development of the Architectural DEcision-Making Support (ADEMS) framework, which basically aims at supporting stakeholders and architects during the architectural decision-making process by helping them determining a suitable combination of architectural alternatives. ADEMS framework is an iterative process that leverages rigorous quantitative decision-making techniques available in the literature of Management Science, particularly Multiple Attribute Decision-Making (MADM) methods and Integer Programming (IP). Furthermore, due to the number of architectural decisions involved as well as the variety of available alternatives, the architecture design space is expected to be huge. For this purpose, a query language has been developed, known as the Architecture Query Language (AQL), to aid architects in exploring and analyzing the design space in further depth, and also in examining different ???what-if??? architectural scenarios. In addition, in order to support leveraging ADEMS framework, a support tool has been implemented for carrying out the sophisticated set of mathematical computations and comparisons of the large number of architectural combinations, which might otherwise be hard to conduct using manual techniques. The primary contribution of the tool is in its help to identify, evaluate, and rank all potential combinations of alternatives based on their satisfaction to quality preferences provided by the different stakeholders. Finally, to assess the feasibility of ADEMS, three different case studies have been conducted relating to the architectural evaluation of different e-business and enterprise applications. Results obtained for the three case studies were quite positive as they showed an acceptable accuracy level for the decisions recommended by ADEMS, and at a reasonable time and effort costs for the different system stakeholders.

To a rapidly increasing degree, traditional organizational structures evolve in large parts of the world towards online business using modern Information and Communication Technology (ICT) capabilities. For efficient applications of inter-organizational information systems, the alignment between business and ICT is a key factor. In this context, business analysis using business modelling can be regarded as a first step in designing economically sustainable e-business solutions. This thesis examines how business modeling can be used to improve e-business design. We examine how business stakeholder intentions and different objectives of business collaborations can be used to obtain an explorative business model that can be used as a basis for designing e-business solutions. The thesis proposes a set of artifacts for business modeling and e-service design. In regard to business modeling, we propose methods that consider internal aspects such as strategic intentions of actors and external aspects such as business collaborations among them. Considering stakeholder intentions, we introduce a method to design business models based on goal models. A set of templates for designing goal models and a set of transformation rules to obtain business models based on goal models are proposed. To further improve business models considering business collaborations, we suggest a classification of business transactions that considers underlying business objectives of business collaborations. Utilizing the suggested business transactions, we then propose a method to improve business modeling. Finally, we propose a method for designing e-services using business models. The methods suggested support business modelers as well as process and services designers in executing their tasks effectively. The methods have been assessed through applications in two cases.

Architecting e-business applications is a complex design activity. This is mainly due to the numerous architectural decisions to be made, including the selection of alternative technologies, software components, design strategies, patterns, standards, protocols, platforms, etc. Further complexities arise due to the fact that these alternatives often vary considerably in their support for different quality attributes. Moreover, there are often different groups of stakeholders involved, with each having their own quality goals and criteria. Furthermore, different architectural decisions often include interdependent alternatives, where the selection of one alternative for one particular decision impacts the selections to be made for alternatives from other different decisions. There have been several research efforts aiming at providing sufficient mechanisms and tools for facilitating the architectural evaluation and design process. These approaches, however, address architectural decisions in isolation, where they focus on evaluating a limited set of alternatives belonging to one architectural decision. This has been the primary motivation behind the development of the Architectural DEcision-Making Support (ADEMS) framework, which basically aims at supporting stakeholders and architects during the architectural decision-making process by helping them determining a suitable combination of architectural alternatives. ADEMS framework is an iterative process that leverages rigorous quantitative decision-making techniques available in the literature of Management Science, particularly Multiple Attribute Decision-Making (MADM) methods and Integer Programming (IP). Furthermore, due to the number of architectural decisions involved as well as the variety of available alternatives, the architecture design space is expected to be huge. For this purpose, a query language has been developed, known as the Architecture Query Language (AQL), to aid architects in exploring and analyzing the design space in further depth, and also in examining different ???what-if??? architectural scenarios. In addition, in order to support leveraging ADEMS framework, a support tool has been implemented for carrying out the sophisticated set of mathematical computations and comparisons of the large number of architectural combinations, which might otherwise be hard to conduct using manual techniques. The primary contribution of the tool is in its help to identify, evaluate, and rank all potential combinations of alternatives based on their satisfaction to quality preferences provided by the different stakeholders. Finally, to assess the feasibility of ADEMS, three different case studies have been conducted relating to the architectural evaluation of different e-business and enterprise applications. Results obtained for the three case studies were quite positive as they showed an acceptable accuracy level for the decisions recommended by ADEMS, and at a reasonable time and effort costs for the different system stakeholders.

Le développement orienté-service et le cloud computing offrent beaucoup d'opportunités au développement et au déploiement d'applications. En effet, le développement orienté-service permet de composer des fonctionnalités issues de services distribués, développés par différentes organisations. D'un autre côté, le cloud computing permet de provisionner des environnements évolutifs (en fonction du besoin en ressources) de développement et de déploiement, à la demande. Dans ce travail de recherche, nous proposons et décrivons une méthode de provisonnement automatique d'applications métier, orientées-service sur le cloud. Nous avons appelé cette méthode MADONA (Method for AutomateD prOvisioning of service-oriented busiNess Applications). MADONA couvre le cycle de vie de provisionnement d'applications et est basée sur un orchestrateur de services pour la gestion de la configuration, du déploiement, et de la composition de services métier.Dans ce travail, nous visons à réduire les connaissances techniques nécessaires au provisionnement d'applications métier. Pour ce faire, nous apportons trois contributions majeures. Premièrement, l'automatisation de ce provisionnement. En effet, les phases de MADONA sont complètement automatisées. L'utilisateur n'intervient que pour exprimer son besoin et pour utiliser l'application métier automatiquement générée (par la composition de services métier) et déployée sur une IaaS présélectionnée. Deuxièmement, l'enrichissement de la description des services par des concepts liés aux relations d'un service. En effet, les langages de description de services décrivent le plus souvent ces derniers comme des entités isolées et ne considèrent pas les relations entre services. Nous avons défini dans ce travail les relations de composition qui décrivent pour chaque service métier les services nécessaires à son bon fonctionnement, et les services avec lesquels il peut être composé.Troisièmement, nous permettons à l'utilisateur d'exprimer son besoin à un haut niveau d'abstraction des détails techniques de composition et de déploiement. Nous avons pour cela défini un vocabulaire pour formaliser ces besoins fonctionnels (en termes de mots clés décrivant les fonctionnalités désirées, ou de noms de services désirés) et non fonctionnels (en termes de coût, de préférences de déploiement (ex : localisation de déploiement), et de qualité de service). La méthode a été prototypée et testée suivant plusieurs scénarios montrant sa faisabilité / Service-oriented computing and cloud computing offer many opportunities for developing and deploying applications. In fact, service-oriented computing allows to compose several functionalities from distributed services developed by different organizations. On the other hand, cloud computing allows to provision on demand scalable development and deployment environments. In this resarch work, we propose and describe a Method for AutomateD prOvisioning of service-oriented cloud busiNess Applications (MADONA). The method covers the whole application’s lifecycle and is based on cloud orchestration tools that manage the deployment and dependencies of supplied components. This research work aims to reduce the necessary technical knowledge for provisioning service-oriented cloud applications. To this end, we bring three major contributions. Firstly, we automatise the whole application provisioning. In fact, MADONA phases are fully automated. The user intervenes only in requirement elicitation and when the application is deployed and ready to use. The business application is automatically generated (by composing business services) and deployed in an automatically preselected IaaS. Secondly, we enrich the description of services by integrating concepts describing services’ interactions. In fact, service description languages usually describe services as isolated components and does not consider the interactions between services. We define in this work, composition interactions which describe for each business service, its necessary services and the services with which it can be composed. Thirdly, we allow the user to express her requirements abstracting composition and deployment technical details. To this end, we defined a RequIrement VocAbuLary (RIVAL) to formalize user’s functional (in terms of keywords describing the desired functionalities, or names of desired services) and non-functional requirements (in terms of cost, deployment preferences (ex. preferred location), and quality of service). The method has been implemented and tested showing its faisability

Les systèmes d'information d'entreprise actuels s'articulent autour d'applications centrales lourdes, qui ne fournissent pas l'agilité nécessaire pour survivre dans un environnement économique hautement concurrentiel. De nombreux acteurs (unités commerciales, individus, équipes et communautés) doivent introduire leurs propres applications pour pallier à ces limitations, avec pour résultat un système d'information fragmenté, incohérent et impossible à gouverner. Cette étude propose un paradigme d'architecture d'entreprise alternatif, qui s'appuie sur une décomposition plus fine du système d'information et une distribution différente des responsabilités. Il permet à tout acteur de contribuer au système d'information en introduisant des fragments, privés ou partagés avec d'autres acteurs, qui peuvent ensuite être composés pour former des applications dédiées à un profil. Les récents mécanismes de l'informatique sociale sont proposés pour gérer les volumes potentiels importants de fragments émergeant de la communauté d'employés. L'objectif des systèmes d'informations sociaux est à la fois d'améliorer la cohérence et la gouvernabilité du système d'information de l'entreprise et d'exploiter l'intelligence et l'énergie collective de l'entreprise à des fins d'agilité métier maximale. / Present enterprise information systems are centered on heavy corporate applications, which cannot and indeed do not provide the agility required to survive in todays' competitive business landscape. Actors (business units, individuals, teams and communities) must introduce their own applications to work around these limitations, resulting in a fragmented, inconsistent and ungovernable information system. This thesis proposes an alternative enterprise architecture paradigm based upon a finer-grained decomposition of information systems and a different distribution of responsibilities. It empowers all actors to contribute fragments to the information system, private or shared with other actors, which can then be composed to form profile-specific applications. Consumer-space social mechanisms are proposed to manage the potentially huge resulting numbers of fragments emerging from the employee community. The aim of social information systems is both to improve the overall consistency and governability of the enterprise information system and to leverage the collective intelligence and energy of the corporation towards maximum business agility.

With the widespread use of the Internet and its associated technologies, enterprises have to evolve in the way they are conducting business. 'e-business applications' refer to a new class of distributed applications that involves the Internet as a communication platform. Each e-business application supports the full automation of business processes that can span across multiple enterprises. For a given application domain that involves e-business application development, a number of design decisions that best fullfil stakeholders requirements have to be made. One important issue is the reuse of functionality which exists within legacy systems that can belong to one or more enterprises within the same domain. Most existing design approaches are inadequate in supporting the exploration of all design combinations. Moreover, there is little work on how to identify the best design decisions systematically for a given application domain. In this thesis we present a pattern-based approach that addresses the architectural design of e-business applications. We identify a number of architectural patterns whose instantiation on a given design problem correspond to different architectural design alternatives. We also identify models that enable the estimation of quality attributes for such alternatives. Then we investigate and utilise methods to select the best pattern for a given design problem. We also describe the process of generating the alternative architectures, estimating their qualities, and then ranking them with respect to any quality attribute or a combination of quality attributes. We validate this approach on a real life case study in the area of capital markets. The case study concerns realistic e-business applications that rely on existing legacy applications. The validation exercise has produced predictions which have been compared with actual design decisions that have been made. The thesis also proposes a framework for the systematic identification of architectural patterns. An additional set of architectural patterns and their impact on the case study are discussed. The main contribution of this thesis is in the identification of patterns and quality attributes models for the architectural design of e-business applications that aid in the systematic selection of the most appropriate architectural pattern for a given problem context.