Concepts such as price, performance, time to completion (availability), probability of failure and nonrepudiation are key to developing a comparison service in order to establish Service Level Agreements (SLA) or design better mechanisms to improve performance in Cloud Computing Systems (CCS). This work presents our design of a performance analysis platform that includes an infrastructure, a framework for performance measurement and tools to facilitate the design, validation, and comparison of performance models and algorithms for CCS. The purpose of the platform is to help establish attribute-performance relationships relating to specific applications with relatively well-known demands on systems in order to be able to determine how comparison services may be formulated.

Cloud Computing is an emerging technology for processing and storing very large amounts of data. Sometimes, anomalies and defects affect a part of the Cloud infrastructure, resulting in degradation in Cloud performance. This work uses the Taguchi method for the design of experiments to present a methodology for identifying the relationships between the various configuration parameters that affect the quality of Cloud Computing applications performance. This paper is based on a proposed performance measurement framework for Cloud Computing systems, which integrates software quality concepts from ISO 25010 and other international standards.

Measuring the performance of cloud computing-based applications using ISO quality characteristics is a complex activity for various reasons, among them the complexity of the typical cloud computing infrastructure on which an application operates. To address this issue, the authors use Bautista's proposed performance measurement framework [1] on log data from an actual data centre to map and statistically analyze one of the ISO quality characteristics: time behavior. This empirical case study was conducted on an industry private cloud. The results of the study demonstrate that it is possible to use the proposed performance measurement framework in a cloud computing context. They also show that the framework holds great promise for expanding the experimentation to other ISO quality characteristics, larger volumes of data, and other statistical techniques that could be used to analyze performance.

We share our experience over the last 10 years for finding, deploying and evaluating software engineering (SE) technologies in an undergraduate program at the ÉTS in Montreal, Canada. We identify challenges and propose strategies to integrate technologies into an SE curriculum. We demonstrate how technologies are integrated throughout our program, and provide details of the integration in two specific courses.

Business process models have proved to be useful for requirements elicitation. Since software development depends on the quality of the requirements specifications, generating high-quality business process models is therefore critical. A key factor for achieving this is the expressiveness in terms of completeness and clarity of the modeling notation for the domain being modeled. The Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) representation model is frequently used for assessing the expressiveness of business process modeling notations. This article presents some propositions to adapt the BWW representation model to allow its application to the software requirements elicitation domain. These propositions are based on the analysis of the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) and the Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK). The propositions are validated next by experts in business process modeling and software requirements elicitation. The results show that the BWW representation model requires to be specialized by including concepts specific to software requirements elicitation.

ISO 14143-1 specifies that a functional size measurement (FSM) method must provide measurement procedures to quantify the functional user requirements (FURs) of software. Such quantitative information, functional size, is typically used, for instance, in software estimation. One of the international standards for FSM is the COSMIC FSM method — ISO 19761 — which was designed to be applied both to the business application (BA) software domain and to the real-time software domain. A recurrent problem in FSM is the availability and quality of the inputs required for measurement purposes; that is, well documented FURs. Business process (BP) models, as they are commonly used to gather requirements from the early stages of a project, could be a valuable source of information for FSM. In a previous article, the feasibility of such an approach for the BA domain was analyzed using the Qualigram BP modeling notation. This paper complements that work by: (1) analyzing the use of BPMN for FSM in the BA domain; (2) presenting notation-independent guidelines for the BA domain; and (3) analyzing the possibility of using BP models to perform FSM in the real-time domain. The measurement results obtained from BP models are compared with those of previous FSM case studies.

Evidence shows that proposals for new modeling notations emerge and evolution of current ones are becoming more complex, often in an attempt to satisfy the many different modeling perspectives required by each stakeholder. This paper presents a method to identify the specific notation construct requirements, at multiple levels of abstraction, which satisfy the needs of a stakeholder when performing a specific task. Initially the focus is on two different stakeholders: software engineers (SE) and business analysts(BA), and one specific software engineering activity: requirements eliciting and analysis. The specific body of knowledge of the two stakeholders (Software Engineering Book of Knowledge (SWEBOK) for the SE, and Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK) for the BA) are used to identify each stakeholder specific notation construct requirements, at multiple levels of abstraction, in order to propose a simplification of their notation and constructs set. This paper presents solution avenues to simplify business process modeling notations by identifying the specific constructs preferred by different stakeholders.

We address the assessment and improvement of the software maintenance function by proposing a maturity model for daily software maintenance activities: the Software Maintenance Maturity Model (SMmm). The software maintenance function suffers from a scarcity of management models to facilitate its evaluation, management, and continuous improvement. The SMmm addresses the unique activities of software maintenance while preserving a structure similar to that of the Capability Maturity Model integration (CMMi). It is designed to be used as a complement to that model. The SMmm is based on practitioners' experience, international standards, and the seminal literature on software maintenance. We present the model's purpose, scope, foundation, and architecture, followed by its initial validation. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

During 1997, a large Information System (IS) Division of a Canadian phone company implemented formal process assurance in its Quality Assurance group. The status report presents a new perspective on the measurement of process assurance and the lessons learned after one year of assessing the individual conformance of software development projects to the corporate software development process (CSDP) of the organization. The status report presents the assurance process overview, goals. Benefits and scope, as well as the 1997 results overview, followed by the lessons learned for the 1998 audit program.