Enterprise modelling (EM) refers to the systematic elicitation and documentation of organisational phenomena from several interrelated perspectives. Widely applied in information and computer sciences to engineer enterprises and information systems, it is rarely recognised as a research method in itself, much less outside these disciplines. This paper advocates that EM is a valid research method, within and outside its traditional application domains, highlighting its efficacy in eliciting and documenting organisational phenomena. Our study supports our claims with examples from a project investigating the application of EM as a research method to examine the intricate interplay between sustainability reporting and strategic management practices. Additionally, we have consulted experts in EM, who provided their opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of EM as a research method, and helped delineate a roadmap to foster its recognition and adoption. Throughout the paper, we emphasise the potential that EM brings to structure research and the lens that its modelling constructs provide to investigate organisational motivations, structures, processes, communications, information flow, technology, and their intricate interrelations.

Information and communication technology (ICT) brings about numerous advantages across various domains of our lives. However, alongside these benefits, there is a growing awareness of its potential negative ethical, social, and environmental impacts. Consequently, stakeholders ranging from conceptual modellers to policy makers often find themselves grappling with ethical considerations stemming from ICT engineering and usage. This paper presents a review of 10 ethical reasoning methods suitable for the ICT domain. We have employed a method engineering technique to author metamodels for the methods, which were subsequently subjected to validation by experts proficient in the respective methods. Following a situational method engineering approach, we have also characterised each ethical reasoning method and validated the characterisation with the experts. This has allowed us to develop a tool that helps select the method that is most suitable for a given ethical reasoning situation. Furthermore, we deliberate on the practical application of ethical reasoning methods within conceptual modelling contexts. We are confident that we have laid the groundwork for further research into ethical reasoning of ICT, with a specific emphasis on its role during conceptual modelling.

Context: There is a lack of empirical evidence on the differences between model-driven development (MDD), where code is automatically derived from conceptual models, and traditional software development method, where code is manually written. In our previous work, we compared both methods in a baseline experiment concluding that quality of the software developed following MDD was significantly better only for more complex problems (with more function points). Quality was measured through test cases run on a functional system. Objective: This paper reports six replications of the baseline to study the impact of problem complexity on software quality in the context of MDD. Method: We conducted replications of two types: strict replications and object replications. Strict replications were similar to the baseline, whereas we used more complex experimental objects (problems) in the object replications. Results: MDD yields better quality independently of problem complexity with a moderate effect size. This effect is bigger for problems that are more complex. Conclusions: Thanks to the bigger size of the sample after aggregating replications, we discovered an effect that the baseline had not revealed due to the small sample size. The baseline results hold, which suggests that MDD yields better quality for more complex problems.

Social and environmental accounting (SEA) is becoming commonplace in organisations that want to assess and report on their business ethics and sustainability performance. While there is an abundance of methods and standards that define how to perform such practice, tool support is much more limited and does not fully match the needs of organisations. In this paper, we present a model-driven engineering approach to support SEA. We are engineering a domain-specific language that allows creating models of SEA methods and we are implementing a tool that interprets such models at runtime, effectively supporting the accounting, and providing basic model management operations. This paper presents the preliminary results and, as a running example, we use UniSAF, a SEA method to assess the sustainability of universities. The results are promising, according to two SEA experts we have consulted, and have triggered the interest of the Fair Trade Software Foundation.

gestUI is a model-driven method with tool support to define custom gestures and to include gesture-based interaction in existing user software system interfaces. So far, gestUI had been limited to the definition of the same gesture catalogue for all users of the software system. In this paper, we extend gestUI to permit individual users to define their own custom gesture catalogue and redefine some custom gestures in case of difficulty in using or remembering them. After extending gestUI, we applied technical action research from the FP7 CaaS project's Capability Design Tool with the aim of assessing its acceptance in an industrial setting. We also analysed its perceived ease-of-use and usefulness and gestUI's desirability level and user experience. The study shows that the tool can help improve the definition of custom gestures and the inclusion of gesture-based interaction in user interfaces of software systems.

The market of mobile applications is constantly changing and growing, partly due to the popularity of software that supports daily tasks and the emergence of new communication medias. Applications of this kind are typically small but require high usability interfaces, which are often based on small's sets of patterns with proven efficacy. Using patterns is one of the main principles of model-driven development, a paradigm with the potential to reduce development time and coding errors. However, there exist many challenges for improving the usability of automatically generated mobile interfaces. To face some of these challenges, this paper proposes a method to model mobile interfaces, which is part of an ongoing research project aimed at model-driven development of fully-functional mobile applications. We present the modeling constructs, which are inspired by recent studies on best practices, and evaluate the feasibility of the application of the proposal to an archetypical case.

[Context and motivation] The Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm remains an active niche in information systems engineering and research. Given their primary role, assuring the quality of models and modelling languages is crucial. In a previous literature review, we have confirmed that there exist different conceptions on model and modelling language quality. [Question/problem] Also, many approaches tackle a narrow perspective and practitioners often feel that such practices burden them with extra effort. A wider overview of the field is needed, taking into account the constraining and pressing conditions of industrial practice. [Principal ideas/results] This paper recalls the essence of, current trends and pitfalls of modelling language quality evaluation within MDE. Some of the current unsolved issues are related to a growing system complexity, evaluating the quality of a complementary set of languages, the need to bring model transformations in the picture, etc. [Contribution] Through this evaluation work, we define a research agenda that reveals the main challenges in modelling language quality evaluation in the context of MDE.

The Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) research must manage a diversity of conceptions despite the global truth about the use of conceptual models as one way for representing and managing the development of complex information systems. Due to this diversity of conceptions and the multiple MDE compliance interpretations, a pletora of definitions about quality in models are emerging, each one tackling specific dimensions involved in MDE projects. In order to explore a consensus about quality in models and model-driven contexts an identification of the previous proposals for quality in models is needed. The main contribution of this work is the identification of representative trends about quality definition in MDE, and therefore, exposing the implications of the multiple quality interpretations as consequence of the diversity in MDE compliance works.

Enterprise systems need to evolve to be adapted with changes in their context. Model-driven reengineering frameworks have been developed in order to support post-delivery life cycle activities and software system maintenance (for instance, architecture-driven modernisation is an object management group initiative). However, existing proposals are general purpose and full support for an organisational reengineering framework is still needed. This paper presents a research effort aiming at designing and developing guidelines and tools for supporting model-driven organisational improvement. We propose to support model evolution by means of two artefacts: a pattern definition metamodel and an evolution metamodel. As a proof of concept, this paper applies the proposal to support business process evolution. We illustrate an instance of these metamodels by means of a laboratory-demo. We also discuss benefits and limitations of our proposal.

Companies need to rethink business processes, infrastructures, technologies, staff, etc. according to new demands, strategic goals, and changes in their environment. Information System evolution has been supported by the reengineering process. Since the models are now part of an increasing number of engineering processes and model-driven software development is a well-established paradigm to support information systems, the reengineering process could be improved with the incorporation of the model-driven development paradigm. This paper presents a model-driven organisational reengineering framework to support organisational improvement. The main idea is to get the most out of the existing proposals in model-driven development for the reengineering process (reverse engineering, improvement processes, and forward processes). Methods, techniques, model-driven tools, and perspectives for analysing information systems at a high level of abstraction are presented as a part of this proposal. A reference framework for the reengineering process is established to provide a consistent set of concepts that support the proposed framework. An illustrative example is introduced to present the feasibility of the proposal. The example illustrates the SuperStationery Co. case in order to present a reengineering process to align an existing desk application with a web application that fulfils the strategic goals of the company. Finally, we conclude with an analysis and discussion about lessons learned and future works.

There is an open challenge in the area of model-driven requirements engineering. Model transformations that allow deriving (platform-independent) conceptual models from (computation-independent) requirements models are being proposed. However, rigorous assessments of the quality of the resulting conceptual models are needed. This paper reports a controlled experiment that compares the performance of subjects applying two different techniques for deriving object-oriented, UML-compliant conceptual models. We compare the quality of the OO-Method conceptual models obtained by applying a text-based derivation technique (which mimics what OO-Method practitioners actually do in real projects) with the quality obtained by applying a novel communication-based derivation technique (which takes as input Communication Analysis requirements models). The results show that there is an interaction between the derivation technique and the OO-Method modelling competence of the subject: the derivation technique has a significant impact on model completeness within the high-competence group. No impact has been observed on model validity. We also discuss new challenges raised by the evaluation.

Model-driven development (MDD) is a promising paradigm for enterprise information systems. However, an open research challenge is to successfully integrate requirements practices into the MDD software lifecycle, and an open industrial challenge is to provide proper tool support for the complete software lifecycle. We propose to address these challenges by integrating Communication Analysis, (a communication-oriented requirements engineering method) and the OO-Method (a model-driven object-oriented software development method with full-fledged tool support and successful industrial practice). The OO-Method conceptual model offers four complementary views of the system under construction, which cover the structural, behavioural and presentation aspects. A requirements-based derivation of the Object Model (the structural view which consists of an extended UML Class Diagram) has been defined. This paper builds upon previous work by proposing a systematic technique for deriving the Dynamic Model (the behavioural view which consists of a collection of UML State Machines), taking as input the business process models. Some derivation guidelines are described and its usage is illustrated. The technique has been used in several lab demos that prove its feasibility. Moreover, the conceptual model that results from the structural and behavioural derivation can be used to automatically generate a fully-functional software application. As an additional benefit of the approach, the derivation allows tracing back and forth the elements of the requirements model, the conceptual model, and the final code.

Software Engineering has a recurrent problem in relation to Business Process Modelling (BPM): there is no agreement with regards to business process modularity. We claim that this results from a lack of theoretical underpinnings on the matter. This paper goes deeply into this issue by unfolding the notion of modularity: modularisation has an engineering intention that depends on the field where it is applied, and it relies on information hiding and encapsulation mechanisms. Unity criteria provide guidance for encapsulation. An important contribution of the paper is to provide unity criteria for BPM. These criteria are mainly underpinned by systemic principles and Communication Theory. The resulting unity criteria allow to clearly differentiate between problem space and solution space in BPM. The argumentations are illustrated with explanatory examples and figures. Also, a historical review of unity criteria in Software Engineering and Requirements Engineering is offered.

Requirements engineering (RE) is a relatively young discipline, and still many advances have been achieved during the last decades. In particular, numerous RE methods have been proposed. However, there is a growing concern for empirical validations that assess RE proposals and statements. This paper is related to the evaluation of the quality of functional requirements specifications, focusing on completeness and granularity. To do this, several concepts related to conceptual model quality are presented; these concepts lead to the definition of metrics that allow measuring certain aspects of a requirements model quality (e.g. degree of functional encapsulations completeness with respect to a reference model, number of functional fragmentation errors). A laboratory experiment with master students has been carried out, in order to compare (using the proposed metrics) two RE approaches; namely, Use Cases and Communication Analysis. Results indicate greater quality (in terms of completeness and granularity) when communication analysis guidelines are followed. Moreover, interesting issues arise from experimental results, which invite further research.