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Software project assessments and postmortem analyses can increase the success of future projects and forthcoming project phases. However, although assessments and analyses are well-presented in the software engineering literature, they are short of descriptions to assess effort. This paper proposes a stepwise effort assessment method that strives to facilitate learning from past experiences and to increase effort estimation accuracy by exploring realized project effort. The proposed method can be used either to assess the realized project effort of a time span from project's lifecycle or as a part of the whole project postmortem analysis in producing effort information for the project iteration assessment, final report, and annual project portfolio report. In addition, the effort information increases the project team's knowledge on realized activity sets and their relationships, and the information can be utilized in estimation method and model calibration for both re-estimations and future estimations. The method was evaluated with case projects, a sample supplied by Tieto Finland Oy. Copyright© 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In early-onset familial Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathogenic mutations have been found in the amyloid precursor protein (APP) gene and in the presenilin (PS)-1 and PS-2 genes. We screened for mutations in these genes in 20 patients with familial AD from the Finnish population. In addition, we sampled 41 sporadic AD patients and 59 controls to test for mutations identified in our familial AD cases. We detected an A-to-G transition in the PS-1 gene, resulting in a glutamic acid (Glu)-to-glycine (Gly) substitution at codon 318 in 2 familial and 2 sporadic AD patients. The Glu318Gly mutation has previously been reported to cause AD. We also found the Glu318Gly mutation in 4 healthy aged controls (range, 74-87 years). We thus conclude that the mutation is most likely a rare polymorphism not related to AD.

Conformance testing has been studied extensively but the current state of the art varies very much in different software companies in the healthcare domain. In this paper we present findings of a survey of conformance testing of interface specifications in the healthcare domain. The survey was conducted among software companies and their customers, i.e. hospital districts, in Finland. The findings of the survey show that the quality of the applications should be improved, that there is a reluctance to use external interface testing services, and that software vendors do not adequately fulfill customers' requirements in relation to testing. However, conformance testing is considered to be very important and should be improved. The main contribution of this study is the analysis of the findings and we give some recommendations for healthcare organizations, software companies, and authorities to improve the conformance testing related to the interoperability of the applications.

Interoperability of software systems is a critical, ever-increasing requirement in software industry. Conformance testing is needed to assure conformance of software and interfaces to standards and other specifications. In this chapter we shortly refer to what has been done in conformance testing around the world and in Finland. Also, testability requirements for the specifications utilized in conformance testing are proposed and test-case derivation from different kinds of specifications is examined. Furthermore, we present a conformance-testing environment for the healthcare domain, developed in an OpenTE project, consisting of different service-specific and shared testing services. In our testing environment testing is performed against open interfaces, and test cases can, for example, be in XML (extensible markup language) or CDA R2 (clinical document architecture, Release 2) form.

IT service providers need a systematic problem management model to handle problems in IT services effectively. However, many IT organizations have difficulties in establishing a problem management model that is suitable for a service-oriented business. This is due to complex IT service management standards that include a large number of new concepts, which partly overlap whith those of traditional software engineering. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model which clarifies the concepts within IT service problem management, and connects these concepts to traditional software engineering tasks, such as testing and defect management. A design pattern is used to document our model. This study has been carried out in co-operation with IT companies and their customers in the electricity domain in Finland.

Business associates work in groups forming networks in order to satisfy customer requirements with best possible price-quality ratio. In order to achieve effective coupling between provided services and specialization of services coordination between partners is needed. Partners in supply chains have mutual agreements of the service level (SLA), which satisfies requirements of customers and service providers in the network. Our goal is to develop methods and tools for service-oriented software development emphasizing business aspects and quality of software structure. We design a service map for service workflow definitions, utilize Service Level Agreement (SLA) based on ITIL, and clarify protocol requirements using distributed coordination in the SOA environment. We propose a service management pattern for business process negotiations in supply chains. Different service work-flow structures are analyzed and their usability in different kind of supply chains is evaluated. We shortly validate our method with experimental results achieved in the Service-Oriented Software Engineering (SOSE) -project in co-operation with ICT companies and their customers in electricity and telecommunication domains in Finland

In this paper we describe the conformance testing model of the open interfaces developed and applied in the PlugIT project in Finland during 2003–2004. Conformance testing is needed to integrate different software products without a vast amount of extra adaptation work, and to improve software inter-operability. The model has been developed and evaluated with co-operation of several healthcare software companies and hospital districts. The clinical context management interface specification is used as an example in this paper.

The gap between business decision making and software engineering causes inefficiency and quality problems in software development. Software engineers do not understand organization's value creation objectives and their influence on software production and structure. For this reason software does not fulfill the requirements of business and software quality is inadequate too often. The objective of the authors in the service-oriented software engineering project (SOSE) is to develop methods and tools to improve quality and profitability of software development. In this paper the authors described SOSE framework and clarify with examples its phases, utility, and application in pilot projects. SOSE framework's first activity is to create a well-defined business case. Then, business processes and data concepts are identified, to meet business requirements of the business case, and modelled with informal diagrams like UML and BPML. Finally, the refinement continues with use case maps, system-level services, and business service components. It is proposed that service, process, entity, and utility components are used as design elements of the business service component. In implementation platform independent and platform specific models were utilized. This study has been carried out in cooperation with ICT companies and their customers in electricity domain in Finland.

The aim of our research is to develop a method for "requirements exploration"--gathering, structuring and describing requirements for information systems in previously weakly understood areas. In health care, information systems are usually developed for a single organization, or for information flow from one organization to another. In our case domain, multi-professional and multi-organizational home care, this approach is not very helpful. Moreover, home care takes place in "no-man's-land"; outside the organizations' infrastructure, in the customer's home, and technology is used scarcely. In this paper, we describe how information requirements were explored in this scantly understood domain by using an activity-theoretical approach. We also explain how this approach served our purposes. The method proved useful in grasping the network of activities and the information needs. The holistic nature of the method was particularly important, since technology is not the only solution to the needs we discovered.

In this paper, we compare the semantics and structure of the conceptual information presented in the Unified Modeling Language (UML), which is used in analyzing object-oriented systems, and Document Type Definitions (DTD), which define the structures of SGML and XML documents. SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) and XML (Extensible Markup Language) are international standards for specifying the notations used for defining structured documents. We present correspondence rules for generating DTDs semiautomatically from UML diagrams. The rules have been developed as a part of the analysis and design method to create the structure definition for a document. As an example, we use a patient record.

In this paper, we extend our previous work for defining interoperability for health information systems into proposed documentation levels for specifying integration, and a model for defining various interoperability aspects in collaboration between integrators, health service providers and system providers. We are using these models in defining solutions for a set of different integration needs in PlugIT project in Finland. We propose collaborative definition and clear levels of integration specifications to promote adequacy, consistency and efficiency of integration solutions and software component specifications in health information systems.