Contributions in Merlin

Successful software products frequently evolve into software product lines, whether intentionally or not. In such cases, product managers have to be involved in creating and specifying the commonality and variability of the evolving software product line in order to continuously assure a winning business case. In this paper we introduce feature unweaving, a novel approach that allows a product manager to efficiently evolve an integrated graphical requirements model into a product line model: when he or she has identified variable elements, feature unweaving automatically extracts these elements and refactors them into a feature, using an aspect-oriented approach. Feature unweaving significantly reduces the required effort for variability specification, both on a clerical and intellectual level. Furthermore, variability constraints can be added to capture more knowledge about the features and their interdependencies. We evaluate and validate our approach with two case studies.

In this paper we address the democratic deficit that emerges when private corporations engage with public policy, either by providing citizenship rights and global public goods (corporate citizenship) or by influencing the political system and lobbying for their economic interests (strategic corporate political activities). This democratic deficit is significant, especially when multinational corporations operate in locations where national governance mechanisms are weak or even fail, where the rule of law is absent and there is a lack of democratic control. This may lead to a decline in the social acceptance of the business firm and its corporate political activities and, thus, to a loss of corporate legitimacy. Under these conditions corporations may compensate the emerging democratic deficit and reestablish their legitimacy by internalizing democratic mechanisms within their organizations, in particular in their corporate governance structures and procedures. We analyze the available corporate governance models with the help of a typology and discuss the possible contributions of a new form of democratic corporate governance.

The Semantic Web today is mainly a read-only Web of Data. Many of the data sets that contribute to the Semantic Web are not stored as native RDF, but generated on demand via wrappers. Despite the fact that user contribution is the key success factor in the Web 2.0, current wrapper approaches and standardization efforts still focus on read-only data access. In this paper, we argue that the Semantic Web should learn from the evolution of the Web 2.0 and consider write-enabled semantic data wrappers.

The Human Choice and Computers (HCC) conferences organized by the IFIP Technical Committee 9 (TC9) have been important fora for discussing the impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on society, ranging from the way ICT affect our lives at home and at the workplace to the impact that they have in institutions and communities. These conferences have permitted scholars and practitioners to discuss technology from a social perspective: once we understand that artefacts are not neutral, it becomes necessary to explore their economic, political, cultural, and social implications. In this introduction we recount briefly the history of the HCC conferences, in order to contextualise the contribution made by the HCC9 and the papers published in this book, a topic discussed in section 2.

Updating the requirements specification during software evolution is a manual and expensive task. Therefore, software engineers usually choose to apply modifications directly to the code and leave the requirements unchanged. This leads to the loss of the knowledge contained in the requirements documents and thus limits the evolvability of a software system. In this paper, we propose to employ the co-evolution of the code and its test suite to preserve or restore the alignment between implementation and requirements: when a change has been applied to the code, subsequent changes in the test suite as well as failing tests are analyzed and used to automatically generate hints about the affected requirements and how they should be changed. These hints support the engineer in maintaining the requirements specification and thus ease the further evolution of the software system.

We discuss various views and conceptual frameworks put forward in the discussion of ICT and sustainable development: An optimistic and a pessimistic view of ICT with regard to sustainability, the three-pillar approach to sustainable development, the three-level approach to ICT impacts, the claim of human, social and ecological compatibility of ICT and the plain use of ICT for development. We show that each of these approaches has its problems and limitations and conclude with formulating the challenges of finding an analytical approach which will effectively support decision-makers in using ICT in the service of sustainable development.

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