Search results

This paper aims to prove the following hypothesis Problem Statement: HYPOTHESIS (1) User Experience collection of mobile applications can be done using the Crowdsourcing mechanism; (2) User Experience collection of mobile applications are influenced by the mindset of Crowdmembers, culture/ethnicity/social background, ease of interface use and rewards, among other factors.

The authors of this paper, did a literature review first to find if Crowdsourcing was applicable and a used method to solve problems in Software Engineering. This helped us to narrow down the application of Crowdsourcing to the Requirements Engineering-Usability (User Experience) collection. User experience collection of two Malayalam language-based mobile applications, AarogyaSetu and BevQ was done as the next step. Incorporating findings from Study I, another study using AarogyaSetu and Manglish was launched as Study II. The results from both cases were consolidated and analyzed. Significant concerns relating to expectations of Crowd members with User Experience collection were unraveled and the purpose of Study was accomplished.

(1) Crowdsourcing is and can be used in Software Engineering activities. (2) Crowd members have expectations (motivating factors) of User Interface and other elements that enable them to be an effective contributor. (3) An individual’s environment and mindset (character) are influential in him becoming a contributor in Crowdsourcing. (4) Culture and social practices of a region strongly affects the crowd-participating decision of an individual.

This is purely self-done work. The value of this research work is two-fold. Crowdsourcing is endorsed significant in Software Engineering tasks, especially in User Experience collection of mobile applications. Two, the Crowd service requesters can be careful about designing the questionnaire for Crowdsourcing. They have to be aware and prepared to meet the expectations of the Crowd. This can ensure the active participation of potential contributors. Future researchers can use the results of this work to base their research on similar purposes.

In response to the increasing number of open‐source software (OSS) project initiatives and the increasing demand of OSS products as alternative solutions by industries, it is important for particular stakeholders such as the project host/supporter project‐leading teams, and prospective customers to determine whether a project initiative is likely to be sustainable and is worth supporting. This paper aims to propose a concept of “health” indicators and an evaluation process that can help to get a status overview of OSS projects in a timely fashion and predict project survivability based on the project data available on web repositories.

For initial empirical evaluation of the concept, the indicators are applied to well‐known web‐based OSS projects (Apache Tomcat and Apache HTTP Server) and the results are compared with challenged projects (Apache Xindice and Apache Slide). The results are discussed with OSS experts to investigate the external validity of the indicators.

From a software project management point of view, a typical web‐based OSS project can be viewed as a web‐engineering process, since most OSS projects exploit the benefits of a web platform and enable the project community to collaborate using web‐based project tools and repositories such as mailing lists, bug trackers, and versioning systems (CVS/SVN) to deliver web systems and applications. These repositories can provide rich collections of process data, and artifacts which can be analyzed to better understand the project status.

The paper provides information of value about open‐source solutions.

Discusses problems related to software engineering task maintenance. Argues that since many scientists and practitioners have regarded maintenance as divorced from development, it is not properly embedded in project models. Relates four case studies. Looks at the range of maintenance tasks and strategies. Proposes a change of perspective that would make maintenance part of development. Advocates methods, tools and techniques as possible means of overcoming the problematic situation.

This paper proposes solutions to problems related to the maintenance and update of already existing e‐learning courseware.

A structured approach in form of a reference model for the re‐engineering of existing educational material is presented. In this context, concepts already established in the area of aspect‐oriented programming are applied to deal with crosscutting concerns in e‐learning material. Finally, a software product line approach is proposed for the creation of new courseware using re‐engineered components.

It turns out that some aspects of the methodology developed for aspect‐oriented programming can also be used to restructure the existing e‐learning material in such a way that maintenance is eased and redundancy is significantly reduced. In addition, software product lines for e‐learning material provide a global framework for coordinating the re‐engineering and reuse of components.

The advantage of the proposed approach is that existing e‐learning standards and systems do not have to be modified or adapted.

Usually, courseware evolves during a longer period of time and its development does not start every time from zero. There is a high incentive for re‐engineering of existing courseware, since it constitutes in many cases the competitive advantage of companies or universities. However, up to now, little attention is paid to the maintenance and the efficient update of e‐learning material which is already there.

The learning outcomes of this study include: recognizing the strategic inflexion points and related business and strategic perspectives in the life of an organization; understanding sources of sustained competitive advantage and connect it with resource-based view for internal analysis; applying dynamic capability theory to identify capabilities that help an IT company stay relevant in an IT sector characterized by VUCA (an acronym for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) environment; analyzing the multi-dimensional and multi-contextual challenge an organization faces, or is likely to face, in the foreseeable future and the possible ways it addresses or should address them; evaluating strategies adopted at various points of an organization’s journey for their effectiveness; and helping a company co-create value for its customers.

This case of Nitor Infotech Private Limited (Nitor), a mid-sized software product outsourcing company, outlines its decade-long journey, highlighting its achievements. While the company has consistently grown by leveraging its expertise in software product engineering and its domain knowledge in the healthcare segment, it entered into a stage of its life cycle where it had to develop a long-term strategy to effectively compete in the product engineering market. Nitor’s strategy was built around product engineering and outsourced product development. The two major choices for a software company were either to develop its own product and thereby own the intellectual property (IP) or to develop modules which would be part of a product that would be owned by a client. In the latter case, the IP would be held by the client. So far Nitor chose to follow the second option by developing components for its client’s products. Although this strategy allowed it to develop expertise in a particular domain, and serve different customers in a particular market, the chances of a competitor attacking its position was high. On the other hand, if it developed its own product, it can create its own brand name and can sell packaged software to several different customers. However, the challenge with the latter is that the cost of marketing could be very high. The choice for the company in the future is to decide on selecting a specific strategy to expand its international business.

This case is appropriate for an undergraduate and postgraduate management course in the area of strategic management. The level of difficulty can be from medium to high depending on the learning level. Knowledge of management fundamentals is not a prerequisite but is desirable for case analysis.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 11: Strategy

The purpose of this research was to evaluate whether ontology integrated in an organizational learning environment may support the automatic learning material classification in a specific knowledge area.

An ontology for recommending learning material was integrated in the organizational learning environment based on ontology. An experiment was performed with 15 experts and 84 learners. Experts and learners were asked to classify 30 learning material related to Software Engineering area. The results obtained from experts and learners were compared with the ontology results.

Among 30 learning materials evaluated, 24 learning materials got closer to the expert classification using the ontology than using the learners’ manual classification. The learners had difficulties in correctly classifying the learning materials according to the knowledge area applied.

In an autonomous collaborative environment without a tutor responsible for organizing the learning materials shared by collaborators, an ontology may be an auxiliary mechanism to support automatic learning material classification. The proposed ontology uses recommendations given by the collaborators to get the correct knowledge area classification. The correct classification may support retrieval of appropriate learning materials according to the learners’ needs.

As computer simulation increasingly supports engineering design and manufacture, the requirement for a computer software environment providing an integration platform for computational engineering software increases. The potential benefits to industry are considerable. As a first step in the long‐term development of such a system, a computer software environment has been developed for pre‐ and post‐processing for unstructured grid‐based computational simulation. Arbitrary computer application software can be integrated into the environment to provide a multi‐disciplinary engineering analysis capability within one unified computational framework. Recognising the computational demands of many application areas, the environment includes a set of parallel tools to help the user maximise the potential of high performance computers and networks. The paper will present details of the environment and include an example of, and discussion about, the integration of application software.

Software module clustering is one of the reverse engineering techniques, which is considered to be an effective technique for presenting software architecture and structural information. The objective of clustering software modules is to achieve minimum coupling among different clusters and create maximum cohesion among the modules of each cluster. Finding the best clustering is considered to be a multi-objective N-P hard optimization-problem, and for solving this problem, different meta-heuristic algorithms have been previously proposed. Achieving higher module lustering quality (MQ), obtaining higher success rate for achieving the best clustering quality and improving convergence speed are the main objectives of this study.

In this study, a method (Bölen) is proposed for clustering software modules which combines the two algorithms of shuffled frog leaping and genetic algorithm.

The results of conducted experiments using traditional data sets confirm that the proposed method outperforms the previous methods in terms of convergence speed, module clustering quality and stability of the results.

The study proposes SFLA_GA algorithm for optimizing software module clustering, implementing SFLA algorithm in a discrete form by two operators of the genetic algorithm and achieving the above-mentioned purposes in this study. The aim is to achieve higher performance of the proposed algorithm in comparison with other algorithms.

Software developers extensively use stack overflow (SO) for knowledge sharing on software development. Thus, software engineering researchers have started mining the structured/unstructured data present in certain software repositories including the Q&A software developer community SO, with the aim to improve software development. The purpose of this paper is show that how academics/practitioners can get benefit from the valuable user-generated content shared on various online social networks, specifically from Q&A community SO for software development.

A comprehensive literature review was conducted and 166 research papers on SO were categorized about software development from the inception of SO till June 2016.

Most of the studies revolve around a limited number of software development tasks; approximately 70 percent of the papers used millions of posts data, applied basic machine learning methods, and conducted investigations semi-automatically and quantitative studies. Thus, future research should focus on the overcoming existing identified challenges and gaps.

The work on SO is classified into two main categories; “SO design and usage” and “SO content applications.” These categories not only give insights to Q&A forum providers about the shortcomings in design and usage of such forums but also provide ways to overcome them in future. It also enables software developers to exploit such forums for the identified under-utilized tasks of software development.

The study is the first of its kind to explore the work on SO about software development and makes an original contribution by presenting a comprehensive review, design/usage shortcomings of Q&A sites, and future research challenges.

Requirements engineering (RE) and process improvement has been identified as one of the key factors for improving software quality. Despite this, little scholarly work has been done on developing ways to improve the RE process. The situation of RE and process improvement is even worse in small and medium enterprises that produce software. Consequently, the quality of software being produced by these companies has kept deteriorating. The purpose of this paper is to design a framework that will help small and medium software companies improve their RE processes in order to compete favorably with larger software companies, more especially in terms of software quality.

A qualitative research approach was adapted. Four software companies in Uganda were purposively selected to participate in the study. Data were collected using questionnaires. The requirements for designing the framework were gathered and refined from both primary and secondary data.

The key requirements for process improvement in small and medium software companies were identified as user involvement, use of evolutionary requirements engineering process improvement (REPI) strategy, change management, training and education, management support and commitment.

The designed framework was validated to ensure that it can be applied in RE and process improvement in small and medium software companies. Validation results show that the proposed framework is applicable and can be used to improve RE and process improvement in small and medium software companies.

The paper presents an improvement of the systematic approach to REPI by Kabaale and Nabukenya which is decomposed for easy understanding by non-technical readers and users.