A WEB 2.0 CASE TOOL SUPPORTING PACKAGED SOFTWARE

IMPLEMENTATION

Harris Wu and Georges Arnaout

Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, U.S.A.

Keywords: Packaged Software Implementation, Web 2.0, Wiki, case-based reasoning.

Abstract: Companies increasingly rely on implementing packaged software instead of developing custom solutions.

Packaged software implementation (PSI) is the process to solve business problems by customizing and

integrating an off-the-shelf software package. However, there has been a lack of CASE (Computer Aided

Software Engineering) tools to support PSI. This paper presents a Web 2.0 based tool that supports case-

based reasoning in PSI. The tool helps users explore past design cases, find a similar case, and reuse the

design for that case in new problem situations. Our belief is that by utilizing the social power of a large

group of users, better designs can be achieved at lower risks and lower costs.

1 INTRODUCTION

One of the trends in information systems

development is the increasing use of off-the-shelf

software packages. The worldwide ERP (Enterprise

Resource Planning) software market is expected to

grow from $28.8 billion in 2006 to $47.7 billion by

2011, according to AMR Research. Many other

software packages such as scientific and engineering

packages also have billion-dollar markets.

Two key issues in packaged software

implementations (PSI) are: 1) design exploration:

how to arrive at a good design by exploring

alternatives; and 2) reuse: how to save the cost and

decrease the risks by reusing existing designs. In

fact, packaged software implementations frequently

practice case-based reasoning: explore the past

implementation cases, find a similar case, and reuse

the design for that case. As the same software

package is being deployed in many implementations,

there is a huge potential for designs to be shared,

explored and reused across different

implementations. However, there has been a lack of

CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering)

tools that support design sharing, exploration and

reuse.

Our fundamental belief is that by utilizing the

collective power of a software community, better

designs can be achieved at a lower cost. To explore

the potential of the collective power, we are

developing and evaluating a Web 2.0 CASE tool that

supports collaboration, exploration and reuse in a

packaged software implementation community. The

tool allows the community to collaboratively create,

evolve and classify a repository of cases. The tool

allows users to explore the complex design space

along multiple perspectives. The tool allows users to

collaboratively recommend existing designs to new

business requirements.

In the following sections we will first discuss the

unique challenges in packaged software

implementations, and how case-based reasoning as a

design methodology may help address these

challenges. Then we discuss how Web 2.0 can be

applied towards cased-based reasoning. We present

a Web 2.0 CASE tool that is being developed to

support packaged software implementations. We

report the deployment of the prototype in the

community of an open-source software package.

2 CASE-BASED REASONING IN

PSI

PSI is different from ground-up software

development in many ways:

 There is no design of a complete system.

Instead, PSI focuses on pieces of customization

and integration.

343

Wu H. and Arnaout G. (2008).

A WEB 2.0 CASE TOOL SUPPORTING PACKAGED SOFTWARE IMPLEMENTATION.

In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - ISAS, pages 343-346

DOI: 10.5220/0001715103430346

 SciTePress

 Packaged software customers share similar

customization, integration, enhancement, and

upgrade needs.

 Instead of the traditional top-down design

paradigm, PSI starts from gap analysis to

package customization and integration. A

significant portion of PSI is matching problems

to existing solutions.

 Packaged software implementations often

involve external consultants, who bring “the

best practice” from implementations for other

customers. The ability to leverage consultants’

past experience is important to a successful PSI.

 Packaged software implementations usually are

joint efforts by several organizations: business

users and technical personnel from the customer

(the client company), functional and technical

consultants from the implementation

consultancy, and the software vendor. Inter-

organizational collaboration is far more

challenging than intra-company collaboration in

tradition software development.

 Due to the proprietary nature of packaged

software, PSI typically does not use mainstream

IDE (Integrated development environment)

tools. The availability and applicability of

CASE (computer aided software engineering)

tools is very limited.

 Due to the limitations and the rigidity of the

software package, certain seemingly-simple

business requirements may be cost prohibitive

or infeasible. As PSI often involves contracts

within a fixed price range, lowering the risk is

given top consideration among the design

choices. Exploring the technical limitations and

possible risk areas occurs as early as in pre-sales

and contract negotiation.

As seen from above, design exploration and

reuse can significantly lower the cost, increase the

quality and reduce the risks in packaged software

implementations. Exploring and reusing past designs

as a methodology is called case-based reasoning

(CBR), defined as a problem solving approach that

solves a new problem by exploring previous

experiences, recalling a similar situation and reusing

information from that situation (Maher and Pu

1997). Despite its significant benefits, CBR is

largely under-utilized in PSI. The biggest challenge

to CBR is to build a rich, up-to-date, explorable and

reusable knowledge base of cases. Next section will

look at how social power can be utilized to build

such a knowledge base.

3 HARNESSING SOCIAL POWER

A new trend on the Web is to utilize the “free brains

and labor out there” among Internet users.

Harnessing social intelligence, i.e. utilizing

individual users’ knowledge and efforts, is one of

the core competencies of “Web 2.0” (O’Reilly,

2005). We see such phenomenon everywhere now:

collaborative spam email filtering, Wikipedia (the

largest encyclopaedia) and even CNN.com’s attempt

to create user contributed news.

The CBR process can potentially harness the

social intelligence from various participants in

packaged software implementations. Besides

documenting and contributing their unique

experiences, individuals can help improve each

others’ designs. Individuals can categorize design

cases along multiple dimensions. Their

categorizations help draw connections between a

new problem situation and existing solutions. Our

fundamental belief is that a diverse, large group of

people can do better than a small team of experts.

Documenting and collaboratively evolving the

cases can be aided by today’s Wiki (Web-based

collaborative editing) systems. Wiki can allow

customers and consultants collaboratively edit the

requirement and design documents. An existing

solution can be updated for a functional

enhancement or compatibility with a new release.

While typical project documents are archived after

the project completion, the documents in a wiki can

evolve after the software implementation goes into

production. A past design can be copied, modified

and reused in a wiki, perhaps by another team, for

another project. The ease of contribution and the

informality lead to success as in Wikipedia.

Searching for cases can be aided by social

tagging. Emerging social tagging systems such as

del.icio.us and flickr.com allow users to assign free-

formed keywords (tags) to any documents, and share

these tags. Any users can browse these tags, or

search for documents tagged with given keywords.

While traditional repositories require objects to be

labeled with metadata at the time of creation or by

privileged administrators, social tagging allows

users label objects not created or owned by them,

and share these labels. In other words, the metadata

is created by data consumers versus data producers.

The connections such drawn between objects and

concepts (tags) are often beyond what is conceived

at the time of creation or by any central indexers.

Exploration of a complex design space can be

made easier if the past design cases are categorized

along multiple perspectives, i.e. classified along

ICEIS 2008 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

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multiple facets. For example, design documents can

be categorized by software product, release,

geography, business process, technology, integration

interface, etc. Although good for casual discovery

and serendipitous reuse, tags do not support

systematic exploration as hierarchical structures do.

Some recent research allows users to collaboratively

classify documents into a predefined faceted schema

(Quintarelli et al., 2006), or automatically build a

hierarchical schema from tags (Schmitz and Patrick,

2006). Furthermore, it is possible to allow users to

edit and evolve the faceted schema in a wiki fashion

(Wu et al., 2007).

Members of a PSI community can recommend

solutions to each other’s new business problems, or

point out similar problem situations. Automatic

recommendation is also possible, just like the book

recommendations by amazon.com. For collaborative

recommendation to succeed, users need to formulate

their problems well. Categorizing both the problems

and solutions will help. In addition, it is important to

capture feedback on user- or system-provided

recommendations.

4 THE WEB 2.0 CASE TOOL

Figure 1: Major Components of the Tool.

Figure 1 shows the major components of the Web

2.0 CASE (Computer-Aided Software Engineering)

tool that we are developing. While traditional

software engineering relies on general knowledge of

a problem domain, case-based reasoning utilizes the

specific knowledge of concrete cases. The center of

the CASE tool is a repository of cases along with the

metadata on these cases. The interactive components

are Web-based and only require users to have a Web

browser. The tool is implemented on the LAMP

platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

To reduce the efforts “reinventing the wheel”,

particularly the user interface development efforts,

the tool integrates several popular open source

components (Figure 2) in addition to custom coding.

Figure 2: Integration of Open Source Components.

We choose Joomla, a popular open-source

content management system (CMS), as the container

for our CASE tool. We want to use an open source

CMS as it is appropriate for a knowledge repository

and content management. Also, popular open source

CMS tools have thousands of developers and large

numbers of extensions with rich features. For

example, Joomla has a Community Builder

extension (not included in Figure 2) that supports

user profile and reputation management, which

saves our own efforts in developing similar features.

Other popular CMS we have considered include

Drupal, Plone and Zope, which are almost equally

good. We choose Joomla as its community seems to

be most vibrant. Joomla won the best CMS award by

PacktPub.com in 2007.

Mantis, MediaWiki and phpBB are the best-of-

breed open source tools in their respective arenas:

issue tracking, wiki, and discussion forum. Issue

tracking/resolution tools are used in about every

packaged software implementation, for testing, go-

live preparation and post-live maintenance. Wikis

and discussion forums are increasingly used in PSI,

particularly the implementations of open source

software. By integrating Joomla with these tools, the

knowledge and experience embedded in the

discussions and issue resolutions can be utilized as

“cases” to support problem solving in the future. It is

worth noting that there already exist Joomla

extensions that integrate Joomla with Mantis,

MediaWiki and phpBB. Similarly, the existing

Docman extension provides a number of file

management features such as uploads/downloads,

search, category management and access control.

Files, Joomla content items, discussion threads,

issues and resolutions are all considered as

knowledge cases in the repository.

The Docbook:Collab component allows

collaborative editing, document assembly and also

import/export of Joomla content to XML and

various other formats. Import/export is important to

integrating the front-end with back-end techniques

that further manipulate the user-contributed content.

Joomla!

phpBB

(Discussion Forum)

Mantis

(Issue Tracking)

MediaWiki

(Collaborative Editing)

Joomenco

(Classification, Tagging

and Recommendation)

DocBook::Collab

(Content Assembly)

Docman

(Document Management)

A WEB 2.0 CASE TOOL SUPPORTING PACKAGED SOFTWARE IMPLEMENTATION

345

We are adding more features to make it usable for

modular document collaboration and case

encapsulation. We are also fixing this component for

browsers other than FireFox/Mozilla as it was

originally limited to.

We created the Joomenco component to allow

users to explore the case repository using a faceted

classification (Hearst, 2006). Furthermore,

Joomenco allows users to collaboratively build the

faceted schema and classify documents into this

schema, in addition to tagging documents with free-

form keywords. We also allow users to recommend

a solution to a problem, essentially by tagging the

document containing the problem situation with a

link to the relevant solution.

In addition to development and integration of the

aforementioned user interface components, we are

developing server-side features such as automatic

classification and recommendation. At this stage we

are experimenting with different underlying

algorithms.

5 PROTOTYPE DEPLOYMENT

AND EVALUATION

A preliminary prototype of the tool has been

deployed at the community of PostBooks, a full-

fledged open-source ERP software package. In

addition to the major components discussed above, a

bridge is added between Joomla and Sourceforge so

that issues and discussions can be transferred

seamlessly between them.

Figure 3: Joomla-based Interface of the Prototype.

After the deployment of the prototype, the user

participation has seen a significant increase.

PostBooks ranked as #10 on Sourceforge.net in

December 2007, up from around #60 prior to the

deployment of the tool. User participation increased,

likely because now they see the benefit of utilizing

the case repository to find solutions, and therefore

they are more motivated to contributing problem

descriptions and solutions. As one developer noted,

“we didn't tell people to do this, they're just doing

it.” We will survey users on whether and how much

the system has saved their efforts or improved

quality of their implementations.

As formative evaluation, the deployment has

suggested priorities in developing and improving the

tool. For example, we are repackaging the Joomenco

component (to remove custom code dependencies),

and plan to release the component soon to the open

source community. We are adding feedback

mechanisms to various components of the tool, to

capture what users have considered to be useful or

not useful. We are working on algorithms that

provide real-time recommendations to user-entered

problem situations. We are also improving the

access control of the tool to address confidentiality,

privacy, and security issues.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project is supported in part by the United States

National Science Foundation, Award No. 0725277.

REFERENCES

Hearst, M.A., Clustering versus Faceted Categories for

Information Exploration. Communications of the

ACM, 2006( 49(4)).

Maher, M. L and Pu, P. Issues and Applications of Case-

Based Reasoning in Design. Lawrence Erlbaum

Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 1997

O'Reilly, What is Web 2.0, September 30, 2005.

Quintarelli, E., L. Rosati, and Resmini, A. Facetag:

Integrating Bottom-up and Top-down Classification in

a Social Tagging System. 2006.

Schmitz and Patrick, Inducing Ontology from Flickr Tags.

Workshop in Collaborative Web Tagging, 2006.

Wu, H., Zubair, M. and Maly, K. “Collaborative

Classification of Growing Collections with Evolving

Facets,” ACM Hypertext and Hypermedia Conf. 2007.

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