Name: | Description: | Size: | Format: | |
---|---|---|---|---|
2.18 MB | Adobe PDF |
Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Develop software is still a risky business. After 60 years of experience, this community
is still not able to consistently build Information Systems (IS) for organizations with predictable quality, within previously agreed budget and time constraints. Although
software is changeable we are still unable to cope with the amount and complexity of
change that organizations demand for their IS.
To improve results, developers followed two alternatives: Frameworks that increase
productivity but constrain the flexibility of possible solutions; Agile ways of developing software that keep flexibility with less upfront commitments.
With strict frameworks, specific hacks have to be put in place to get around the
framework construction options. In time this leads to inconsistent architectures that are
harder to maintain due to incomplete documentation and human resources turnover.
The main goals of this work is to create a new way to develop flexible IS for
organizations, using web technologies, in a faster, better and cheaper way that is more
suited to handle organizational change. To do so we propose an adaptive object model
that uses a new ontology for data and action with strict normalizing rules. These rules
should bound the effects of changes that can be better tested and therefore corrected.
Interfaces are built with templates of resources that can be reused and extended in a flexible way.
The “state of the world” for each IS is determined by all production and coordination
acts that agents performed over time, even those performed by external systems. When
bugs are found during maintenance, their past cascading effects can be checked through
simulation, re-running the log of transaction acts over time and checking results with previous records.
This work implements a prototype with part of the proposed system in order to have a
preliminary assessment its feasibility and limitations.
Description
Keywords
Information systems Organizational engineering Organization change Adaptive object model Enterprise ontology Normalized systems Informatics Engineering . Centro de Ciências Exatas e da Engenharia