Alain Abran

Work place: Department of Software Engineering and Information Technology, École de Technologie Supérieure, 1100, rue Notre-Dame Ouest, Montréal, Québec, Canada

E-mail: alain.abran@etsmtl.ca

Website:

Research Interests: Software Engineering

Biography

Alain Abran, PhD, is a Professor at École de technologie supérieure, Université du Québec, Canada. He is also Chairman of the Common Software Measurement International Consortium. He was the international secretary for ISO/IEC JTC1 SC7. Dr. Abran has over 20 years of industry experience in information systems development and software engineering.

Author Articles
Duration Estimation Models for Open Source Software Projects

By Donatien Koulla Moulla Alain Abran Kolyang

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijitcs.2021.01.01, Pub. Date: 8 Feb. 2021

For software organizations that rely on Open Source Software (OSS) to develop customer solutions and products, it is essential to accurately estimate how long it will take to deliver the expected functionalities. While OSS is supported by government policies around the world, most of the research on software project estimation has focused on conventional projects with commercial licenses. OSS effort estimation is challenging since OSS participants do not record effort data in OSS repositories. However, OSS data repositories contain dates of the participants’ contributions and these can be used for duration estimation. This study analyses historical data on WordPress and Swift projects to estimate OSS project duration using either commits or lines of code (LOC) as the independent variable. This study proposes first an improved classification of contributors based on the number of active days for each contributor in the development period of a release. For the WordPress and Swift OSS projects environments the results indicate that duration estimation models using the number of commits as the independent variable perform better than those using LOC. The estimation model for full-time contributors gives an estimate of the total duration, while the models with part-time and occasional contributors lead to better estimates of projects duration with both for the commits data and the lines of data.

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Enterprise Architecture Measurement: An Extended Systematic Mapping Study

By Ammar Abdallah Alain Abran

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijitcs.2019.09.02, Pub. Date: 8 Sep. 2019

A systematic mapping study (SMS) of proposed EA measurement solutions was undertaken to provide an in-depth understanding of the claimed achievements and limitations in evidence-based research of enterprise architecture (EA). This SMS reports on 22 primary studies on EA measurement solutions published up to the end of 2018. The primary studies were analyzed thematically and classified according to ten (10) mapping questions including, but not limited to, positioning of EA measurement solutions within EA schools of thought, analysis of consistency-inconsistency of the terms used by authors in EA measurement research, and an analysis of the references to the ISO 15939 measurement information model. Some key findings reveal that the current research on EA measurement solutions is focused on the “enterprise IT architecting” school of thought, does not use rigorous terminology as found in science and engineering, and shows limited adoption of knowledge from other disciplines. The paper concludes with new perspectives for future research avenues in EA measurement. 

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A Semantic Metadata Enrichment Software Ecosystem based on Metadata and Affinity Models

By Ronald Brisebois Alain Abran Apollinaire Nadembega

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijitcs.2017.08.01, Pub. Date: 8 Aug. 2017

Information systems need to be more flexible and to allow users to find content related to their context and interests. Metadata harvesting and metadata enrichments could represent a way to help users to find content and events according to their interests. However, metadata are underused and represents an interoperability challenge. This paper presents a new framework, called SMESE, and the implementation of its prototypes that consists of its semantic metadata model, a mapping ontology model and a user interest affinity model. This proposed framework makes these models interoperable with existing metadata models. 
SMESE also proposes a decision support process supporting the activation and deactivation of software features related to metadata. To consider context variability into account in modeling context-aware properties, SMESE makes use of an autonomous process that exploits context information to adapt software behavior using an enhanced metadata framework. When the user chooses preferences in terms of system behavior, the semantic weight of each feature is computed. This weight quantifies the importance of the feature for the user according to their interests.
This paper also proposed a semantic metadata analysis ecosystem to support data harvesting according to a metadata model and a mapping ontology model. Data harvesting is coupled with internal and external enrichments. The initial SMESE prototype represents more than 400 millions of relationships (triplets). To conclude, this paper also presents the design and implementation of different prototypes of SMESE applied to digital ecosystems.

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