Abstract Enterprise architecture is a growing trend that aims to help deal with the complexity of socio‐technical systems such as human organizations, as well as their information technology and systems areas. Nevertheless, the contribution of enterprise architecture to the field of software engineering remains unclear. The purpose of this systematic literature review is to see how enterprise architecture is used in software development and maintenance practice. To this end, we first carried out a search in the SCOPUS database and then organized the papers according to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge to determine what areas of software engineering are covered by each research study. To understand how enterprise architecture is used, we established a classification based on ISO 42010 and TOGAF. From the systematic literature review, we noticed that the early stages of development are the most impacted by the enterprise architecture. On the other hand, we observed that enterprise architecture is of assistance in the areas of engineering management, engineering processes, and engineering models and methods; these tasks are carried out by teams or managers using different, often agile, development methods or standards. In turn, we found that the most common categories are architecture descriptions; these are often used to facilitate communication and information‐sharing between different stakeholders, in addition to frameworks, which will help to establish common practices in the organization related to the joint use of enterprise architecture and software development.

Enterprise architecture has become an important driver to facilitate digital transformation in companies, since it allows to manage IT and business in a holistic and integrated manner by establishing connections among technology concerns and strategical/motivational ones. Enterprise architecture modelling is critical to accurately represent business and their IT assets in combination. This modelling is important when companies start to manage their enterprise architecture, but also when it is remodelled so that the enterprise architecture is realigned in a changing world. Enterprise architecture is commonly modelled by few experts in a manual way, which is error-prone and time-consuming and makes continuous realignment difficult. In contrast, other enterprise architecture modelling proposal automatically analyses some artefacts like source code, databases, services, etc. Previous automated modelling proposals focus on the analysis of individual artefacts with isolated transformations toward ArchiMate or other enterprise architecture notations and/or frameworks. We propose the usage of Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM) to represent all the intermediate information retrieved from information systems' artefacts, which is then transformed into ArchiMate models. Thus, the core contribution of this paper is the model transformation between KDM and ArchiMate metamodels. The main implication of this proposal is that ArchiMate models are automatically generated from a common knowledge repository. Thereby, the relationships between different-nature artefacts can be exploited to get more complete and accurate enterprise architecture representations.

Abstract In the context of digital transformation, companies are increasingly forced to develop, manage and continually align IT and business. Companies have found in Enterprise Architecture (EA) a valuable tool to represent and manage IT and business in a holistic way by establishing connections among technology concerns and business/strategical/motivational ones. EA modelling is one of the most critical tasks in this context to represent accurate models that make the difference in the decision‐making and governance processes of the company. In most of the cases, EA models are manually defined by experts which is usually error‐prone and time‐consuming. Thus, the constant business and IT realignment through manual modelling becomes complex and expensive. This research presents ArchiRev, an extensible reverse engineering method that automate the extraction of EA models (using ArchiMate language) by analysing different information systems artefacts. This proposal has been validated through an industrial case study in the context of a C#‐based system of an Italian ship refurbishment company. The study has demonstrated the effectiveness (based in the opinion of some business experts) and efficiency of the method. The main implication is that EA modelling can be accelerated, whereas subjectivity and errors introduced by experts might be reduced.

Abstract Global software development (GSD) has become a rising software development model in the last few years. Although much research has been performed in terms of GSD management, GSD governance research is scarce at the present time and presents multiple challenges that need to be addressed. In this paper, a systematic mapping study has been conducted, the aim of which was to discover the main issues dealt with in GSD governance literature, as well as to point out the particular research gaps that are still present in this domain. This allowed us to find out new challenges to be addressed, along with possible solutions to these. The results reveal a lack of research in key aspects such as tools, culture, people, and information, all of which provides a great opportunity for future approaches while also highlighting new opportunities in GSD governance research.

Business process modeling is recognized as a key part of the business process lifecycle. It is during this stage that a conceptual model is produced by collecting business process requirements and representing them with a specific business process notation. While there has been much research into process modeling techniques, little has taken place with regard to the characteristics that should be considered for an effective assessment of the models' quality. This paper presents a synthesis of quality characteristics for business process models, based on a systematic review of the relevant literature. It then goes on to describe a reference model for the quality assessment of business process models, and to relate the aforementioned quality characteristics to existing relevant process model measures. These relations may help organizations to guide the improvement of their business process models according to their chosen quality characteristics.

Background: Measurement is a technique that is widely-used to quantify quality of process models. Evaluation of measurement results implies comparison against limit values, called thresholds. Determining thresholds is no trivial task and it requires the application of complex techniques. There are several techniques that have been published to date, proposing different approaches for threshold extraction. Two of the most prominent techniques are ROC curves and the Bender method. Although they come from different fields, both use logistic regression analysis as a discriminator function. Aim: For this reason, the main hypothesis is that thresholds obtained by both of those techniques are equally efficient in classifying the measurement results. Method: To check the hypothesis, we obtained thresholds for a group of empirically-validated measures for business process models, by applying both techniques. Then we checked the accuracy of the results. Results: The results indicate that the hypothesis should be rejected. Conclusions: ROC curves obtained more accurate thresholds for measurement evaluation.

SUMMARY Software maintenance is an important, indeed vital, activity for software companies. For many organizations, including small firms, it is also a business opportunity. In the quest to help companies of this type, for whom strengthening their maintenance process is a chief concern, we present Agile_MANTEMA. This is a methodological proposal for software maintenance, one which focuses on small companies. The methodology defines an agile maintenance strategy, setting out in detail what is to be carried out, when, how and by whom; that is to say, it seeks to give a detailed guide for the implementation of the maintenance process in these kinds of companies. Agile_MANTEMA also establishes a set of elements, such as types of maintenance, service levels and capability levels, which aim to: (i) handle the complexity that is inherent to the maintenance process and (ii) allow a small company to define its own maintenance process, taking into account its particular characteristics and needs. In an effort to improve their maintenance process, two small firms conducted an improvement project in which Agile_MANTEMA was used. The experiences reported by these companies tell us that this methodology offers a strategy that can be useful, practical and suitable for small companies as they tackle software maintenance. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper presents an empirical study analysing the relationship between a set of metrics for Fourth–Generation Languages (4GL) programs and their maintainability. An analysis has been made using historical data of several industrial projects and three different approaches: the first one relates metrics and maintainability based on techniques of descriptive statistics, and the other two are based on Data Mining techniques. A discussion on the results obtained with the three techniques is also presented, as well as a set of equations and rules for predicting the maintenance effort in this kind of programs. Finally, we have done experiments about the prediction accuracy of these methods by using new unseen data, which were not used to build the knowledge model. The results were satisfactory as the application of each technique separately provides useful perspective for the manager in order to get a complementary insight from data.

Abstract This article presents the results and lessons learned in the application of the Framework for the Modelling and Measurement of Software Processes (FMESP) in a software company dedicated to the development and maintenance of software for information systems. The aim of FMESP is to provide companies with a conceptual and technological framework for the management of their process models and measurement models in an integrated way. Modelling and measurement are two key factors to promote continuous process improvement. As a result, important benefits were obtained. The company improved the maturity of its processes which allowed it to obtain the ISO 9000 certification. From a research point of view, Action‐Research was successfully applied and as a result the framework was improved and important feedback was obtained, bringing to light new important issues which will be tacked in future work. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Different proposals exist to represent the software maintenance process. However most of them are very informal or too focussed on a specific goal. We have developed a semi-formal ontology where the main concepts, according to the literature related to software maintenance, have been described. This ontology, besides representing static aspects, also represents dynamic issues related to the management of software maintenance projects. In order to develop an ontology a suitable methodology should also be followed. REFSENO was the methodology used in this work. The ontology that this work presents is not a preliminary idea but it has already been used in software maintenance environments, such as MANTIS, which is currently working successfully.

Abstract This article explains our experience of using Action Research to develop a software maintenance methodology involving two organizations: a group of university researchers and a software services organization. The concept of ‘methodology’ comprises a wide set of elements whose identification, definition and integration is not a trivial task, due to the magnitude of the project and to the different nature of the organizations. The use of Action Research was a key factor in the progress of the research and has been essential in the adoption of the methodology within the software services organization. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The paper presents an empirical study on the correlation of simple code metrics and maintenance necessities. The goal of the work is to provide a method for the estimation of maintenance in the initial stages of outsourcing maintenance projects, when the maintenance contract is being prepared and there is very little available information on the software to be maintained. The paper shows several positive results related to the mentioned goal.

Abstract In this paper we present MANTOOL, an automatic tool for managing the software maintenance process according to MANTEMA, a rigorous methodology for maintenance. After explaining briefly the MANTEMA structure, the article explains how MANTOOL allows users to manage modification requests following the different stages of the methodology, showing it with some examples. The data saved in MANTOOL can be used to extract different kinds of reports and to do estimations of future maintenance interventions. The paper also includes some experience reports about the construction and application of MANTEMA and MANTOOL, and some reflections on the benefits of its use. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.