Ontology-driven unified governance in software engineering: The PoolParty case study

Abstract

Collaborative software engineering environments have transformed the nature of workflows typically undertaken during the design of software artifacts. However, they do not provide the mechanism needed to integrate software requirements and implementation issues for unified governance in the engineering process. In this paper we present an ontology-driven approach that exploits the Design Intent Ontology (DIO) for aligning requirements specification with the issues raised during software development and software maintenance. Our methodology has been applied in an industrial setting for the PoolParty Thesaurus server. We integrate the requirements specified and issues raised by Pool- Party customers and developers, and provide a graph search powered, unified governance dashboard implementation over the annotated and integrated datasets. Our evaluation shows an impressive 50% increase in efficiency when searching over datasets semantically annotated with DIO as compared to searching over Confluence and JIRA.