Traceability Engineering Lab
This section reflects some of the research ideas I have been pursuing, and I am currently working on.
I am the thesis advisor of various students, a full list with the details can be found here. Major project participation in national and international contexts is presented at the bottom of this page.
Traceability for high quality software development
Current traceability research is focused much on the techniques, methods, and tools to generate and automate trace links between requirements and code, than on the exploitation and use of traceability. Given the lack of tool support, engineers have to come up with ad-hoc traceability methods to exploit trace-links in practice. The main objective of this pillar is to investigate the main use of trace links in the Software Development Lifecycle by analysing different use cases that practitioners can perform with trace links between requirements and software code. The core product of this pillar is the traceability value framework to showcase the possible applications, benefits, and impact analysis of trace links to guide engineers for high quality software development in the context of the Agile/DevOps Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
Traceability for alignment of large-scale heterogeneous systems
Healthcare and governmental organisations are confronted to handle large-scale heterogeneous systems. For instance, the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs has tried for some time to improve their use of data in policy development and inform the policy developers better, so their business and IT are better aligned. The problem lays at finding the right place(s) in the process of policy development to add, what they call “data, information and IT relevance”. For healthcare organisations, management of heterogeneous systems and software poses big challenges that also involve ethical issues. There is no organisation and IT architecture maturity model specifically for health care organizations that covers all areas and subsystems. Despite maturity models are extensively used in other fields, most of those models are not fit to guide incremental improvements in large-scale systems maturity. One of the big challenges (which is also present in governmental organisations) is the design of domain specific solutions that are also restricted by contextual requirements from the country or culture.
Traceability management
Organisations (especially financial organisations) and multi-service providers confront the challenge to improve the customer satisfaction and customer experience. Improving software and systems (business processes, organisational goals, etc.,) architectural components based on actual customer journeys require dedicated engineering artefacts for supporting architecture configuration based on contextual aspects. On the other hand, satisfaction and customer experience is largely defined according to organisational decisions. Well known examples include substituting a software product, updating software, changing the way software components are integrated with each other, etc., customer journeys are eventually eroded by the lack of proper impact analysis before to carry out architectural and infrastructure changes.
Despite traces between customer journeys and software or systems architecture are tacit knowledge, it is difficult to exploit these links for further impact analysis and software or systems evolution. The main challenges to confront are: (i) there are vast amounts of data coming from customers’ devices (IoT), and the variety of services to be provided demand the management and maintenance of traces for large-scale systems; and (ii) impact analysis and traceability management takes significant time and effort for architects and engineers. Automating the software architecture based on customer journey input prepare organisations for the ‘era’ of IoT.
Major project participation
| # | Project title and details | Country | Funding (local or European) | Main role | Year |
| 1 | Can virtual reality systems help us to design software as we talk? Automating the task of requirements specification. | Switzerland | Local: Digitization Initiative of Zurich Universities (DIZH) | Principal Investigator | 2020-2021 |
| 2 | ARIES: Exploiting User Journeys for Supporting Mobility as a Service Platforms. | Switzerland | Local: Innosuisse | Research Advisor | 2021-2022 |
| DevOps for Complex Cyber-physical Systems | Switzerland | H2020 | Research Advisor | 2021-2023 | |
| 3 | USO project: Gepersonaliseerd online oefenmateriaal voor statistiek. Research collaboration with the Freudenthal Institute and the Biology Department. | Netherlands | Local: Utrecht University | Project definition and of exploitation plans | 2017-2018 |
| 4 | IDEO – Innovative services for Digital Enterprises with ORCA. Project of the Universitat Politècnica and the Generalitat Valenciana. Funding not disclosed | Spain | Local: Generalitat Valenciana | Leader of the workpackage 2: organisational modelling and requirements engineering | 2014-2017 |
| 5 | CaaS: Capability as a Service in digital enterprises. European Project FP7-ICT 2009-5. Reference: INFSO-ICT-257574 | Spain | European: FP7-ICT | Dissemination and package | 2013-2016 |
| 6 | Accelerate: A Platform for the Acceleration of go-to market in ICT industry. ITEA2 Reference: n.12014 TSI-100300 2013-249 | Spain | European: ITEA2 | Design and execution of use cases and experiments for the evaluation of GREAT Process Modeller in industry | 2013-2016 |
| 7 | GREAT Process Modeller: Global Reengineering Environment with Automatic Transformations. Project of proof of concept of the Universitat Politècnica de València. Reference: R-16265-2012. | Spain | Local: Universitat Politècnica de València | Requirements elicitation from industrial partners for the design of GREAT Process Modeller | 2013-2014 |
| 8 | ProsREQ: Requirements’ based service-oriented software systems production. Reference TIN2010-19130-C02-02, ACOMP/2011/186. Received funding: 121.121 € and 100.000 € | Spain | Local: National program for research excellence | Design and implementation of the GOBIS framework for the integration of goal and business processes in information systems. | 2010-2013 |
| 9 | ORCA: Methods for development of quality-oriented information technologies. Reference: PROMETEO/2009/015. | Spain | Local: Project of the Universitat Politècnica and the Generalitat Valenciana. | Design of a method engineering platform for metamodel alignment. | 2009-2012 |
| 10 | MORE-MOSKITT: Supporting advanced requirements modelling techniques in the MOSKITT platform. | Spain | Local: Project of the Universitat Politècnica de València and TECCON Mediterranea, S.L. | Development of a requirements modelling tool for the automatic generation of software code. | 2010-2011 |
| 11 | Industrial software production in MDA environments. | Spain | Local: Project of the Universitat Politècnica de València and CARE Technologies. | Development of modelling tools for model to model transformation from BPM to Class diagrams. | 2008-2009 |
Experience in project proposal preparation
| # | Project title and details | Country | Funding (local or European) | Main role in preparation | Year |
| 1 | Can virtual reality systems help us to design software as we talk? Automating the task of requirements specification. Received funding: 44’352.00 CHF | Switzerland | Local: Digitization Initiative of Zurich Universities (DIZH) | Project leader | 2020-2021 |
| 2 | ARIES: Exploiting User Journeys for Supporting Mobility as a Service Platforms. Received funding: 559’148.00 CHF | Switzerland | Local: Innosuisse | Project definition | 2021-2022 |
| Interscriber: Turning dialogues into actionable insights. Received funding: 428’886.06 CHF | Switzerland | Local: Innosuisse | Project leader | 2020-2022 | |
| 3 | Establishing Flexible Modelling for Agile Software Development. Collaboration with the Requirements Engineering group at the FHNW. Rejected, preparing re-submission. | Switzerland | Local: Innosuisse | Project leader and proposal writing | 2018 |
| 4 | AIDAA – Elastic Artificial Intelligence for Europe. Project proposal rejected, working on resubmission to other national and European funding programs | Switzerland | H2020 ICT-26 European | Proposal writing for the core aspects of the project | 2018 |
| 5 | DataME – A Conceptual Model-Driven Method for Big Data applications. Funding not disclosed | Spain | Local: National program for research excellence | Proposal writing and reviewing | 2016-2019 |
| 6 | USO project: Gepersonaliseerd online oefenmateriaal voor statistiek. Research collaboration with the Freudenthal Institute and the Biology Department. | Netherlands | Local: Utrecht University | Project definition and exploitation | 2017-2018 |
| 7 | IDEO – Innovative services for Digital Enterprises with ORCA. Project of the Universitat Politècnica and the Generalitat Valenciana. Funding not disclosed | Spain | Local: Generalitat Valenciana | Proposal writing and project justification | 2014-2017 |
| 8 | GREAT Process Modeller: Global Reengineering Environment with Automatic Transformations. Proof of concept project for the evaluation of the GREAT prototype in industry. GREAT is one of the tools developed in the context of my PhD thesis. Reference: R-16265-2012. Received funding: 25.532 € | Spain | Local: Universitat Politècnica de València | Project leader, proposal writing, and project justification | 2103-2014. |
| 9 | ProsREQ: Requirements’ based service-oriented software systems production. Reference TIN2010-19130-C02-02, ACOMP/2011/186. Received funding: 121.121 € and 100.000 € | Spain | Local: National program for research excellence | Proposal writing and project justification | 2010-2013 |