Keywords: Education, JavaScript, Java
Astract: In recent years, Single Page Applications (SPAs) emerged as a de-facto standard for modern, user-friendly web sites. While their advantages are manifold, SPAs massively impact the distribution of code and responsibility among an application: Where before, the web front-end of a Java application was essentially an orchestration of servlets and JavaServer Pages - driven from, and developed as part of the server - it is now an independent application in its own right. As a result of these developments, more and more developers are required to implement features to run in the browser, written in JavaScript. For companies as well as for individuals, the shift towards browser-centred engineering raises issues of developer education. Despite of their similar name and syntax, JavaScript and Java are highly different languages that require specific patterns and engineering practises. For a developer with many years of experience in Java or similar languages, learning JavaScript means more than just learning a new language: It requires a fundamental change in how to think about and approach programming problems - a so-called mind shift. The issue of knowledge transfer across programming paradigms and languages has been intensely researched in the field's transition from procedural to object-oriented programming, and diverse strategies have been proposed. The goal of this thesis is to show if, and how, existing strategies and experiences reflect in today's expert developer education, in the context of teaching JavaScript to expert Java developers. For this purpose, we conduct a qualitative content analysis of three real-world examples, each representing a popular format of eduction: (i) talks at developer-centred tech conferences, (ii) non-academic professional literature, and (iii) company-internal trainings. The on-hand thesis provides a detailed discussion of the phenomenon of (skill) transfer, which serves as the theoretical framework of our work. We present our research strategy based on Krippendorff's standard model for content analysis and discuss the results of our study on the level of individual cases as well as on an aggregate level.

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Astract: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems encompass the administration of all information about resources that are needed for companies to run their business. They support several functional areas, like accounting, manufacturing, and sales in form of modules that are integrated by a single database where all business relevant information is stored. In order to guarantee a flawless and productive use of the system, the economic phenomena underlying the business of the company have to be reflected in the user interface as well as the data structure itself. Usually ERP systems are purchased by customers from vendors in form of standard software. Such a software supports a predefined set of functionality and has to be further customized to the specific needs of an enterprise, which is not a trivial task and often leads to additional costs. Furthermore standard software only supports specific processes that are based on best-practice assumptions of the vendors. Therefore adjusting ERP systems to changed market demands is hard since they are missing a business semantic base. Changed business needs can often only be represented by drastic changes in the data structure or the code which can lead to inconsistencies. The REAlist project uses a model-driven approach to overcome the aforementioned problems with existing ERP systems and enhance their adaptability. Business needs can be represented in an easy and unambiguous way as business models. These models define the features and look of the ERP system. REAlist uses the Resource-Event-Agent (REA) ontology as a business modeling language since it was initially proposed to support the implementation of IT-Systems and is related to data modeling. REA allows the specification of events that have happened or are happening in the near future, resources affected by the events, and agents participating in the events. Furthermore, policies and commitments can be defined which are both important concepts of ERP systems. The underlying database of the REAlist project (REA DB) is based on REA and holds the business models as well as the business data. Its main part is generic, meaning that changed business needs can be applied to the ERP system without changing the data structure. Instead of using the classic class-diagram-like representation of REA, a domain specific language (REA-DSL) is used to simplify the creation of REA business models. The aim of this thesis is to undertake the first steps of the REAlist project and create a mapping from REA-DSL business models to the REA DB. Furthermore user interfaces are automatically generated based on the saved models during runtime to reduce the effort that is needed for the customization tasks in existing ERP systems.

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Astract: Special Issue on A Roadmap for Business Informatics: In this special issue of the EMISA journal we include seven papers, each based on a IEEE CBI 2013 keynote introducing a research domain in Business Informatics. Evidently, these papers are neither classical research papers nor pure surveys, since they focus to a large extent on the "future", i.e. the open research challenges (without providing a solution). In the following, we define the scope of the seven research domains and in parentheses we name the author(s) who introduce( s) the domain by a paper presented in this special issue.

Keywords: components modeling
Astract: Business document standards usually cover a hierarchical structure of thousands of elements that may be relevant in any business context (any geopolitical region, any industry, etc.). In order to use a business document standard in a specific context, user groups define so-called business document implementation guidelines based on a smaller subset consisting usually of 3 - 5% of the overall elements. When one defines a new implementation guideline for a specific business context, one has always to start from scratch, which is time-consuming and also leads to heterogeneous interpretations of the standard. It is our goal to speed up the development process and to create more homogeneous implementation guidelines by learning from existing models. If we could assign a formal context to existing implementation guidelines, we may predict the subset of a new implementation guideline for a given context. We especially consider implementation guidelines built on the top of the Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS). These guidelines consist of business context specific data building blocks which are restricted from more general, semantically interoperable Core Components. In order to share, search, and (partially) re-use context specific restrictions of Core Components it is essential not only to store the restrictions, but also a business context model where these restrictions are valid. Therefore, we develop the Enhanced UN/CEFACT Business Context Model (E-UCM) and the Business Context Ontology Model (BCOnt) for representing business context in the domain of Core Components. This thesis proposes an approach to contextualize already existing Core Components by means of our business context models. This contextual information is also used to predict a subset for to-be-developed electronic business document implementation guidelines based on existing ones. The underlying algorithms calculate degrees of business context match, detect different types of mappings between existing Core Components and generate Core Component based contents of new implementation guidelines. Our research has been conducted following the design science research process. The corresponding evaluation is interpreted as a build and evaluate loop iterated a number of times before the final approach was developed. We evaluate the business context models on the basis of 16 evaluation criteria. The feasibility of the business context aware Core Components modeling approach is demonstrated by a prototype implementation. The analysis of the calculated precision and recall rates proves that our approach holds not only in theory, but also in practice.

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Astract: The evaluation of an organization's performance may also consider the assessment of inter-organizational relationships (IORs). However, the evaluation of IORs is typically based on success factors, such as trust, which are difficult to be measured quantitatively. In this paper, we present a framework supporting inter-organizational performance evaluation which integrates (i) a bottom-up approach supporting the identification of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from business information, event logs, as well as process models, and (ii) a top-down approach for measuring business performance on the strategic level based on the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) method. In order to prove the feasibility of the framework, we present an inter-organizational performance analysis case study of a beverage manufacturing company. The case study shows that the framework enables (i) the derivation of quantifiable KPIs from operational data and (ii) the alignment of KPIs with business objectives allowing an evaluation of IORs on the strategic level.