Application Lifecycle Management Research Articles

Interdisciplinary system lifecycle management – a systematic literature review

AbstractThe increasing proportion of software in technical products means that both the products and the associated development processes are becoming more complex. An integration of the existing lifecycle considerations Application Lifecycle Management and Product Lifecycle Management into an interdisciplinary System Lifecycle Management promises to make the complexity manageable. To obtain an overview of the current benefits, challenges, requirements, approaches and open research gaps in the context of an ALM-PLM integration, this contribution presents the results of a Systematic Literature Review.

Digital Twins in Software Engineering—A Systematic Literature Review and Vision

Digital twins are a powerful consequence of digital transformation. In fact, they have been applied to many industries to enhance operations, predict needs, improve decision making, or optimize performance, even though the definition of digital twins is still evolving. However, their impact on the software industry is still limited. Thus, this work aims to analyze the current adoption of digital twins in the software industry as a potential path to integrate them into application lifecycle management. To achieve this objective, first, the significant characteristics of current digital twins are analyzed in their application to manufacturing to understand how the knowledge and the lessons learned can be transferred to the software industry. Second, a systematic literature review was conducted on Scopus, the Web of Science, and the ScienceDirect database. The literature review revealed 93 documents after data screening and cleaning 251 initial documents. Our main findings are that digital twins are already influencing and will significantly affect the software industry, revolutionizing various aspects of the software development lifecycle. This study tackles what identifies a digital twin in the software industry, the specific domains and areas where they can be applied in the software lifecycle, and the proposed approaches explored to build digital twins for developing, deploying, and maintaining software systems. Finally, this study proposes some guidelines for building digital twins in the context of application lifecycle management. Determining an appropriate roadmap shortly is essential to achieve a widespread applicability to building suitable digital twins and preparing organizations for the software industry.

Edge, Fog, and Cloud Against Disease: The Potential of High-Performance Cloud Computing for Pharma Drug Discovery.

The high-performance computing (HPC) platform for large-scale drug discovery simulation demands significant investment in speciality hardware, maintenance, resource management, and running costs. The rapid growth in computing hardware has made it possible to provide cost-effective, robust, secure, and scalable alternatives to the on-premise (on-prem) HPC via Cloud, Fog, and Edge computing. It has enabled recent state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools for drug discovery, such as BERT, BARD, AlphaFold2, and GPT. This chapter attempts to overview types of software architectures for developing scientific software or application with deployment agnostic (on-prem to cloud and hybrid) use cases. Furthermore, the chapter aims to outline howthe innovation is disrupting the orthodox mindset of monolithic software running on on-prem HPCand provide the paradigm shift landscape tomicroservices driven application programming (API) and message parsing interface (MPI)-based scientific computing across the distributed, high-available infrastructure. This is coupledwith agileDevOps, and good coding practices, low code and no-code application development frameworks for cost-efficient, secure, automated, and robust scientific application life cycle management.

Azure DevOps The Next Era of Application Lifecycle Management

The software development, testing, and deployment process is a series of actions that are carried out in order to achieve a particular result. highly manual process, resulting in a significant number of code errors and bugs. Development and operations (Support) teams can often be out of sync, slowing software delivery and disappointing business stakeholders. DevOps creates efficiency across all tasks involved in software development, deployment, and maintenance. Connecting development with operations leads to increased visibility, more accurate requirements, improved communication, and faster time to Industry. Azure DevOps supports a joint culture and set of multiple steps and processes that bring together the development team, managers, and contributors to build software quickly. It allows the software industry to improve software at a faster pace than they can with traditional software development approaches. Compared with ADO Server, ADO Services offers the following added benefits: • Easy for server management. • Fastest access to greatest features. • Improved faster connectivity for remote users. • A transition from capital expenditures (like servers) to operational expenditures (subscriptions). DevOps is becoming a software industry standard for multiple businesses. According to a report issued by Capgemini, 61% of businesses either adopted DevOps or planned to do so during 2018. Statistics like this demonstrate that DevOps is a necessary part of your business plan if you expect to respond quickly to the market's demands, improve your business’s time-to-market, and keep your software solutions updated regularly. DevOps creates efficiency across all tasks involved in software development, deployment, and maintenance. Connecting development with operations leads to increased visibility, more accurate requirements, improved communication, and faster time to Industry.

Boundary resource management in innovation ecosystems: The case of e-commerce

Major challenges in contemporary information systems development demand new development approaches, such as innovation ecosystems, consisting of a focal innovation platform surrounded by independent developers. The attraction of third-party developers and the amplification of generativity in extension development call for sophisticated boundary resources. As demarcation points between an innovation platform and external developers, boundary resources entail a strategic value and need to be managed carefully. However, existing research does not provide an approach for the holistic management of boundary resources from design to retirement. We apply a design science research approach consisting of two design cycles involving a literature review identifying 26 application lifecycles and the analysis of eight innovation platforms in e-commerce. We evaluated the model for boundary resource management in interviews with nine domain experts. We develop an integrated boundary resource management lifecycle as a specialization of application lifecycle management for the holistic management of boundary resources in innovation ecosystems addressing third-party developers. The boundary resource management lifecycle consists of four layers: boundary resource governance, continuous communication, technical boundary resources, and supplementary boundary resources. It decouples technical and supplementary boundary resources while emphasizing their intertwined nature for ecosystem participants. Owners of innovation platforms can instantiate the reference procedure model for attracting developers.

MORPHEMIC - Optimization of the Deployment and Life-cycle Management of Data-intensive Applications in the Cloud Computing Continuum

In their Cloud strategy companies are choosing more and more multi-cloud computing giving them the opportunity to distribute its assets, redundancies, software, applications, and anything it deems worthy not only on one Cloud-hosting environment, but rather across several. The model of using multiple Cloud services to host the business's functions and features has a list of advantages that can provide security, flexibility, cost-effectiveness and more to increase business's efficiency and ensure it stays up and running 24 hours a day. The paper presents the MORPHEMIC H2020 project and its unique way of adapting and optimising Cloud computing applications. The Morphemic project covers several features from modelling cross-cloud applications, continuous and autonomous optimization and deployment and providing access to several cloud capabilities for data intensive applications. The outcome of the project will be implemented in the form of an open-source platform covering all the data intensive applications deployment phases starting from modelling, through profiling, optimization, runtime reconfiguration and monitoring.

Concept and implementation path for model-based impact analysis in product development

Engineers must evaluate the effects of changes in requirements during product design. Due to strongly linked design, production, and operation networks, these effects have tremendous consequences in cross-company engineering change and configuration management. Implications for development effort, the degree of fulfillment of requirements, functional costs, and follow-up costs in product variants and each system lifecycle stage (e.g., production, validation, and maintenance) must be assessed. Today, this is done without sufficient ICT (information and communication technology) support. In the German research project ImPaKT, reliable answers are to be inferred as to how technical and organizational changes to a partial model affect a complex, interdisciplinary overall system in an ICT-supported way. Therefore, a reference architecture is created using a Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) approach and a common parameter space. Adapted by corporate networks with their heterogeneous product and application lifecycle management (PLM/ALM) landscapes, homogeneous MBSE networks are created. The ImPaKT technology alliance is convergently developing existing ICT base technologies to enable engineering change management, linking isolated solutions and creating standards for handling changes to develop products faster and cost-efficiently and reduce risks.

Master's Degree in Health Data Science: Implementation and Assessment After Five Years.

Health data science is an emerging discipline that bridges computer science, statistics and health domain knowledge. This consists of taking advantage of the large volume of data, often complex, to extract information to improve decision-making. We have created a Master's degree in Health Data Science to meet the growing need for data scientists in companies and institutions. The training offers, over two years, courses covering computer science, mathematics and statistics, health and biology. With more than 60 professors and lecturers, a total of 835 hours of classes (not including the mandatory 5 months of internship per year), this curriculum has enrolled a total of 53 students today. The feedback from the students and alumni allowed us identifying new needs in terms of training, which may help us to adapt the program for the coming academic years. In particular, we will offer an additional module covering data management, from the edition of the clinical report form to the implementation of a data warehouse with an ETL process. Git and application lifecycle management will be included in programming courses or multidisciplinary projects.

RSTrace+: Reviewer suggestion using software artifact traceability graphs

Various types of artifacts (requirements, source code, test cases, documents, etc.) are produced throughout the lifecycle of a software. These artifacts are connected with each other via traceability links that are stored in modern application lifecycle management repositories. Throughout the lifecycle of a software, various types of changes can arise in any one of these artifacts. It is important to review such changes to minimize their potential negative impacts. To make sure the review is conducted properly, the reviewer(s) should be chosen appropriately. We previously introduced a novel approach, named RSTrace, to automatically recommend reviewers that are best suited based on their familiarity with a given artifact. In this study, we introduce an advanced version of RSTrace, named RSTrace+ that accounts for recency information of traceability links including practical tool support for GitHub. In this study, we conducted a series of experiments on finding the appropriate code reviewer(s) using RSTrace+ and provided a comparison with the other code reviewer recommendation approaches. We had initially tested RSTrace+ on an open source project (Qt 3D Studio) and achieved a top-3 accuracy of 0.89 with an MRR (mean reciprocal ranking) of 0.81. In a further empirical evaluation of 40 open source projects, we compared RSTrace+ with Naive-Bayes, RevFinder and Profile based approach, and observed higher accuracies on the average. We confirmed that the proposed reviewer recommendation approach yields promising top-k and MRR scores on the average compared to the existing reviewer recommendation approaches. Unlike other code reviewer recommendation approaches, RSTrace+ is not limited to recommending reviewers for source code artifacts and can potentially be used for recommending reviewers for other types of artifacts. Our approach can also visualize the affected artifacts and help the developer to make assessments of the potential impacts of change to the reviewed artifact.

Developing Consumer Electronics Software Using A-SPICE: Infotainment Development Experience

This article presents one experience with the design and implementation of a consumer electronics (CE) software module using automotive software process improvement and capability determination (A-SPICE) methodology. Electronic program guide (EPG) engine software module is a very stable, configurable product that ensures high performance and satisfies different television standards. It is designed to operate on a wide range of hardware platforms, especially in automotive multimedia systems. Since the EPG engine had to be integrated into the automotive infotainment system, that module was developed in compliance with the Hersteller Initiative Software-Manufacturer's software initiative metrics and A-SPICE standard. Application lifecycle management tool was used in the development process for project management and for generating data for analysis purposes. The software itself was tested during the whole project lifecycle using several static and dynamic code analysis methods. Difficulties concerning testing procedures, code quality, and complying with A-SPICE standard were detected and resolved. Since the CEs software development is not that strict as automotive one, this article points out the advantages of introducing the A-SPICE methodology in the CE field.

On Extending ETSI MEC to Support LoRa for Efficient IoT Application Deployment at the Edge

The Internet of Things (IoT) undergoes a rapid transformation this last decade, thanks to the appearance of low-power wide area network technologies, such as LoRa/LoRaWAN, SigFox, and narrowband IoT, which allow reducing the deployment cost of sensors and other IoT devices. Many emerging services such as smart city, Industry 4.0, and autonomous driving are based on IoT devices and applications to collect and analyze data and control end devices (i.e., actuators). Among these services, several IoT applications, such as data analytics, need to be deployed at the edge to either reduce the latency to access data or treat the high amount of generated data locally. However, in the context of LoRa/LoRaWAN, most of the current IoT service deployments run the applications at a central cloud to ease the integration with existing software as a service (SaaS) platforms, without exploiting the benefits of edge computing. In this article, we propose a new framework that leverages the ETSI multi-access edge computing (MEC) model to deploy LoRabased IoT applications at the edge. In particular, the proposed model takes advantage of the ETSI MEC features, such as dynamic deployment of an IoT application at the edge and application life cycle management. In addition, the proposed framework allows running an IoT application as a 5G network slice at the edge.

A model-driven engineering approach for supporting questionnaire-based gap analysis processes through application lifecycle management systems

Gap analysis is a common approach in industry to evaluate the gaps between the implemented software processes and the requirements of process quality frameworks or standard norms. Gap analysis processes are usually executed by means of questionnaires that need to be crafted ad hoc according to specific appraisal goals. The approaches used for developing, compiling and evaluating the answers given to these questionnaires usually do not follow well-defined methodologies or processes, and lack adequate tool support. This paper aims at investigating novel approaches for the execution of questionnaire-based gap analysis (QBGA) processes in industrial practices. We propose the adoption of state-of-the-art software engineering technologies and methodologies like application lifecycle management (ALM) and model-driven engineering (MDE) to support these processes. We perform an industrial survey for understanding the main issues affecting questionnaire-based gap analysis processes in industrial practices. We exploit model-driven engineering for building an ALM-based tool that supports the QBGA process execution and allows us to overcome the emerged process issues. We implement the GADGET tool to apply the MDE approach we use for developing the ALM-based tool. The feasibility of the proposed approach has been evaluated by a case study conducted in the automotive industrial domain. Two different QBGA processes have been configured and implemented in an ALM system with the support of the GADGET tool. The resulting ALM tool was used to perform the gap analysis processes. Semi-structured interviews with the involved industrial personnel were conducted to carry out a qualitative evaluation. The case study results show that the introduction of ALM improves the quality of the questionnaire-based gap analysis processes. Moreover, the adoption of model-driven engineering approach implemented by the GADGET tool provides a viable solution for configuring application lifecycle management systems and supporting the process execution.

PLM/ALM Integration With The Asset Administration Shell

Modern product development utilizes both Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). PLM addresses the hardware lifecycle of a product, whereas ALM addresses the software lifecycle. In recent years, industry and academia have developed several PLM/ALM integration concepts to realize efficient management of the product lifecycle across all domains. However, the solutions available in practice are typically vendor-driven. Therefore, they are not generally applicable even if standards such as OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Cooperation) are applied.The consortium “Plattform Industrie 4.0” has recently introduced a standardized digital representation of an asset (e.g., a smart product): the Asset Administration Shell (AAS). The AAS has the potential to integrate PLM/ALM data sets in a single product model and hence to provide a generally applicable interface for PLM/ALM integration. However, until now there has not been a concept to prove this potential. The aim of this work is to develop such new strategies (named Plm4AAS) using AAS submodels. This article explains the semi-automatic generation of PLM/ALM submodels and how to link elements between these submodels. The AASX Package Explorer, an AAS management software tool, is used to demonstrate the results. The article finishes with a discussion about the potential of the AAS as a standardized concept for PLM/ALM integration.

An OSLC-based environment for system-level functional testing of ERTMS/ETCS controllers

Product and application life-cycle management (PLM/ALM) are the processes that govern a product and a software system, respectively, encompassing the creation, deployment and operation of a system from the beginning to the end of its life. As both PLM and ALM require cross-discipline collaboration and cooperation, tools integration and inter-operation are necessary to enable the efficient and effective usage of tool suites supporting the management of the entire system life-cycle and overcome the limitations of all-in-one solutions from one tool vendor. In this context, the Open Services for Life-cycle Collaboration (OSLC) initiative proposes a set of specifications to allow a seamless integration based on linked data. This paper describes the work performed within the ARTEMIS JU project CRYSTAL to develop an environment for the functional system-level testing of railway controllers, relying on OSLC to enable inter-operation with existing PLM/ALM tools. A concrete realization of the proposed architecture is described also discussing some design and implementation choices. A real industrial case study is used to exemplify the features and the usage of the environment in testing one of the functionalities of the Radio Block Centre, the vital core of the European Rail Traffic Management System/European Train Control System (ERTMS/ETCS) Control System.

Auction‐based serious game for bug tracking

Today, one of the challenges in software engineering is utilising application lifecycle management (ALM) tools effectively in software development. In particular, it is hard for software developers to engage with the work items that are appointed to themselves in these ALM tools. In this study, the authors have focused on bug tracking in ALM where one of the most important metrics is mean time to resolution that is the average time to fix a reported bug. To improve this metric, they developed a serious game application based on an auction-based reward mechanism. The ultimate aim of this approach is to create an incentive structure for software practitioners to find and resolved bugs that are auctioned where participants are encouraged to solve and test more bugs in less time and improve quality of software development in a competitive environment. They conduct hypothesis tests by performing a Monte Carlo simulation. The preliminary results of this research support the idea that using a gamification approach for an issue tracking system enhances the productivity and decreases mean time to resolution.

43 SCHIZOPHRENIA POLYGENIC RISK IS ASSOCIATED WITH BRAIN MATURATION IN TYPICALLY DEVELOPING YOUTH

Product and application life-cycle management (PLM/ALM) are the processes that govern a product and a software system, respectively, encompassing the creation, deployment and operation of a system from the beginning to the end of its life. As both PLM and ALM require cross-discipline collaboration and cooperation, tools integration and inter-operation are necessary to enable the efficient and effective usage of tool suites supporting the management of the entire system life-cycle and overcome the limitations of all-in-one solutions from one tool vendor. In this context, the Open Services for Life-cycle Collaboration (OSLC) initiative proposes a set of specifications to allow a seamless integration based on linked data. This paper describes the work performed within the ARTEMIS JU project CRYSTAL to develop an environment for the functional system-level testing of railway controllers, relying on OSLC to enable inter-operation with existing PLM/ALM tools. A concrete realization of the proposed architecture is described also discussing some design and implementation choices. A real industrial case study is used to exemplify the features and the usage of the environment in testing one of the functionalities of the Radio Block Centre, the vital core of the European Rail Traffic Management System/European Train Control System (ERTMS/ETCS) Control System.

Using tool integration for improving traceability management testing processes: An automotive industrial experience

AbstractDespite the high relevance of traceability in software processes, the activities of traceability creation and management are not always adequately supported in practice. The lack of integration between the tools adopted in the development processes is one of the main causes of such an ineffective management, where traceability relationships are still manually generated and maintained. In this paper we present an industrial experience we performed for improving the traceability management in a testing process performed in the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles company. In this context, we carried out a process for analyzing and identifying the main issues due to the ineffective traceability management and proposed a solution for addressing them. We designed and implemented a software architecture for integrating the existing application lifecycle management platform with the tools used in the process with the aim of automating the process execution and the traceability links management. The new architecture was validated by a case study that showed how the integration solution produced beneficial effects on quality attributes of the testing process.

Using the Autopilot pattern to deploy container resources at a WLCG Tier-2

Containers are becoming ubiquitous within the WLCG, with CMS announcing a requirement for its sites to provide Singularity during 2018. The ubiquity of containers means it is now possible to reify the combination of an application and its configuration into a single easy-to-deploy unit, avoiding the need to make use of a myriad of configuration management tools such as Puppet, Ansible or Salt. This allows use to be made of industry-standard devops techniques within the operations domain, such as Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD), which can lead to faster upgrades and greater system security. One interesting technique is the Autopilot pattern, which provides mechanisms for application life-cycle management which are accessible from within the container itself. Using modern service discovery techniques, each container manages its own configuration, monitors its own health, and adapts to changing requirements through the use of event triggers. In this paper, we expand on previous work to create and deploy resources to a WLCG Tier-2 via containers, and investigate the viability of using the Autopilot pattern at a WLCG site to deploy and manage computational resources.

Adopting integrated application lifecycle management within a large-scale software company: An action research approach

ContextApplication Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a paradigm for integrating and managing the various activities related to the governance, development and maintenance of software products. In the last decade, several ALM tools have been proposed to support this process, and an increasing number of companies have started to adopt ALM. ObjectiveWe aim to investigate the impact of adopting ALM in a real industrial context to understand and justify both the benefits and obstacles of applying integrated ALM. MethodAs a research methodology, we apply action research that we have carried out within HAVELSAN, a large-scale IT company. The research was carried out over a period of seven years starting in 2010 when the ALM initiative has been started in the company to increase productivity and decrease maintenance costs. ResultsThe paper presents the results of the action research that includes the application of ALM practices. The transitions among the different steps are discussed in detail, together with the identified obstacles, benefits and lessons learned. ConclusionsOur seven-year study shows that the adoption of ALM processes is not trivial and its success is related to many factors. An important conclusion is that a piecemeal solution as provided by ALM 1.0 is not feasible for the complex process and tool integration problems of large enterprises. Hence the transition to ALM 2.0 was found necessary to cope with the organizational and business needs. Although ALM 2.0 appeared to be a more mature ALM approach, there are still obstacles that need attention from both researchers and practitioners.

Revitalizing Internship Registration Portal with an Implementation of Application Lifecycle Management

Internship is an undergraduate activity for gaining working experiences. Hence, it is expected that some universities convert it as an undergraduate course. In our university, registering internship topic is automated using a web-based portal; it takes tremendous effort if done manually. Nevertheless, according to our informal survey, existing portal suffers a lot of limitation, resulting user dissatisfaction. This paper presents a further development of such portal by following phases described in Application Lifecycle Management. According to three evaluation scenarios (black-box, small-group user, and large-group user testing), proposed portal works well and fits user need.