Abstract

In developing countries, normally, different e-government applications do not exchange data each other, affecting the quality of service provided to citizens and the transparency. This situation has motived us to focus on the development of applications in such domain and, more specifically, on the interoperability among these applications. The interoperability has been implemented in e-government context of multiple countries through the Service-Oriented Computing (SOC). In addition to the interoperability, SOC provides considerable benefits. However, developing a service-based e-government application (SBeA) is a complex challenge and requires a software engineering method to manage its development process. The potential method should take into account not only design, construction, and maintenance of SBeA, but also it should consider the context in which it will be used (i.e, developing countries). In fact, in these countries, the scarcity of economic resources and qualified professionals can impose constraints to carry out e-government projects. Thus, the adopted methods have to maintain the costs low and to consider aspects related to long-term sustainability of the applications from the beginning. These issues suggest the adoption of Agile Methods (AMs) that have been proved to offer benefits in different projects in developing countries. However, they do not include SOC characteristics. Therefore, we have proposed Tape Mbo'e (TME), that is an extension of the agile method "OpenUP" to support the construction and the maintenance of SBeA in developing countries. TME has been used in five case studies, which embraced both academia and public organizations in Paraguay. It is important to remark that it was the first application of this type of evaluation in the public sector in Paraguay. A full validation of TME requires a long-term study, including its applications in a consistent number of e-government projects. This is out of the scope, and the possibility, of the current thesis. Nevertheless, the initial results of the different case studies indicate the feasibility and simplicity of TME when it is applied in this context.