Abstract: The aim of this research is to evaluate the effectiveness of software quality assurance approaches of Sri Lankan offshore software development organizations, and to propose a framework which could be used across all offshore software development organizations.
An empirical study was conducted using derived framework from popular software quality evaluation models. The research instrument employed was a questionnaire survey among thirty seven Sri Lankan registered offshore software development organizations.
The findings demonstrate a positive view of Effectiveness of Software Quality Assurance – the stronger predictors of Stability, Installability, Correctness, Testability and Changeability. The present study’s recommendations indicate a need for much emphasis on software quality assurance for the Sri Lankan offshore software development organizations.
Abstract: Knowledge plays an important role to the success of any organization. Software development organizations are highly knowledge-intensive organizations especially in their requirement elicitation process (REP). There are several problems regarding communicating and using the knowledge in REP such as misunderstanding, being out of scope, conflicting information and changes of requirements. All of these problems occurred in transmitting the requirements knowledge during REP. Several researches have been done in REP in order to solve the problem towards requirements. Knowledge Audit (KA) approaches were proposed in order to solve managing knowledge in human resources, financial and manufacturing. There is lack of study applying the KA in requirements elicitation process. Therefore, this paper proposes a KA model for REP in supporting to acquire good requirements.
Abstract: Robots are booming as an essential substituent in the field of inspection. In hazardous environments like nuclear waste disposal, robots are really a necessitate one. In a view to meet such demands, this paper presents the seven degree of freedom articulated inspection robot. To design such a robot the kinematic analysis of seven Degree of freedom robot which can inspect the hazardous nuclear waste storage tanks is done. The effective utilization of universal joints for arms and screw jack mechanisms at the base gives the higher order of degree of freedom to the newly designed robot. The analytical method of deriving the manipulator forward as well as inverse kinematics is explained elaborately using the Denavit-Hartenberg Approach for the purpose of calculating the robot joints, links and end-effector parameters. The comparison of the geometric and the analytical approach is stated. The self-developed kinematic model gives the accurate positions of the end effector. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) is developed in Visual Basic language for the manipulation of kinematic results easily. This software gives the expected position of the end-effector accurately at short time compared to manual manipulations.
Abstract: Information Technology (IT) is being used by almost all organizations throughout the world. However its success at supporting and improving business is debatable. There is always the risk of IT project failure and studies have proven that a large number of IT projects indeed do fail. There are many components that further the success of IT projects; these have been studied in previous studies. Studies have found the most necessary components for success in software development projects, executive information systems etc. In this study previous literatures that have looked into these success promoting factors have been critically reviewed and analyzed. 15 Critical Success Factors (CSF) of IT projects were enlisted and examined. These factors can be applied to all IT projects and is not specific to a particular type of IT/IS project. A hypothesis was also generated after the evaluation of the factors.
Abstract: This paper explain about prototype of a business directory for micro-scale businesses, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), the third phase of the research. The third phase is the phase of software development based on the model of SME business directory that had been developed, to create prototype software SME business directory. In the fourth phase, namely the implementation, these units have been developed are tested to obtain input from potential users. The fifth phase is the testing phase to determine the strengths and weaknesses of software has been developed. The result of this phase is the software in the form of on-line (web based) and multimedia-based. Business Directory, if implemented will facilitate and optimize the access of SMEs to ease supplier access to marketing. Business Directory will be equipped with the power of geocoding, so each location can be easily viewed SMEs on the map. The map will be constructed by using the functionality of a web-based Google Maps API. The information presented in the form of multimedia that can be more interesting and interactive. Methodology used to achieve the goal: observation, interviews, modeling and classifying business directory for SMEs.
Abstract: This paper gives a consideration of the achievement of productive level parallel programming skills, based on the data of the graduation studies in the Polytechnic University of Japan. The data show that most students can achieve only parallel programming skills during the graduation study (about 600 to 700 hours), if the programming environment is limited to GPGPUs. However, the data also show that it is a very high level task that a student achieves productive level parallel programming skills during only the graduation study. In addition, it shows that the parallel programming environments for GPGPU, such as CUDA and OpenCL, may be more suitable for parallel computing education than other environments such as MPI on a cluster system and Cell.B.E. These results must be useful for the areas of not only software developments, but also hardware product developments using computer technologies.
Abstract: Defect prevention is the most vital but habitually
neglected facet of software quality assurance in any project. If
functional at all stages of software development, it can condense the
time, overheads and wherewithal entailed to engineer a high quality
product. The key challenge of an IT industry is to engineer a
software product with minimum post deployment defects.
This effort is an analysis based on data obtained for five selected
projects from leading software companies of varying software
production competence. The main aim of this paper is to provide
information on various methods and practices supporting defect
detection and prevention leading to thriving software generation. The
defect prevention technique unearths 99% of defects. Inspection is
found to be an essential technique in generating ideal software
generation in factories through enhanced methodologies of abetted
and unaided inspection schedules. On an average 13 % to 15% of
inspection and 25% - 30% of testing out of whole project effort time
is required for 99% - 99.75% of defect elimination.
A comparison of the end results for the five selected projects
between the companies is also brought about throwing light on the
possibility of a particular company to position itself with an
appropriate complementary ratio of inspection testing.
Abstract: Since Software testing becomes an important part of
Software development in order to improve the quality of software,
many automation tools are created to help testing functionality of
software. There are a few issues about usability of these tools, one is
that the result log which is generated from tools contains useless
information that the tester cannot use result log to communicate
efficiently, or the result log needs to use a specific application to open.
This paper introduces a new method, SBTAR that improves usability
of automated test tools in a part of a result log. The practice will use
the capability of tools named as IBM Rational Robot to create a
customized function, the function would generate new format of a
result log which contains useful information faster and easier to
understand than using the original result log which was generated
from the tools. This result log also increases flexibility by Microsoft
Word or WordPad to make them readable.
Abstract: Automatic reusability appraisal is helpful in
evaluating the quality of developed or developing reusable software
components and in identification of reusable components from
existing legacy systems; that can save cost of developing the
software from scratch. But the issue of how to identify reusable
components from existing systems has remained relatively
unexplored. In this research work, structural attributes of software
components are explored using software metrics and quality of the
software is inferred by different Neural Network based approaches,
taking the metric values as input. The calculated reusability value
enables to identify a good quality code automatically. It is found that
the reusability value determined is close to the manual analysis used
to be performed by the programmers or repository managers. So, the
developed system can be used to enhance the productivity and
quality of software development.
Abstract: Business process automation is an important task in an
enterprise business environment software development. The
requirements of processing acceleration and automation level of
enterprises are inherently different from one organization to another.
We present a methodology and system for automation of business
process management system architecture by multi-agent collaboration
based on SOA. Design layer processes are modeled in semantic
markup language for web services application. At the core of our
system is considering certain types of human tasks to their further
automation across over multiple platform environments. An
improved abnormality processing with model for automation of
BPMS architecture by multi-agent collaboration based on SOA is
introduced. Validating system for efficiency of process automation,
an application for educational knowledge base instance would also be
described.
Abstract: Software development has experienced remarkable progress in the past decade. However, due to the rising complexity and magnitude of the project the development productivity has not been consistently improved. By analyzing the latest ISBSG data repository with 4106 projects, we discovered that software development productivity has actually undergone irregular variations between the years 1995 and 2005. Considering the factors significant to the productivity, we found its variations are primarily caused by the variations of average team size and the unbalanced uses of the less productive language 3GL.
Abstract: The past decade has seen enormous growth in the amount of software produced. However, given the ever increasing complexity of the software being developed and the concomitant rise in the typical project size, managers are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of issues that influence the productivity levels of the project teams involved. By analyzing the latest release of ISBSG data repository, we report on the factors found to significantly influence the productivity among which average team size and language type are the two most essential ones. Building on this we present an original model for evaluating the potential productivity during the project planning stage.
Abstract: Business Process Management (BPM) helps in optimizing the business processes inside an enterprise. But BPM architecture does not provide any help for extending the enterprise. Modern business environments and rapidly changing technologies are asking for brisk changes in the business processes. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can help in enabling the success of enterprise-wide BPM. SOA supports agility in software development that is directly related to achieve loose coupling of interacting software agents. Agility is a premium concern of the current software designing architectures. Together, BPM and SOA provide a perfect combination for enterprise computing. SOA provides the capabilities for services to be combined together and to support and create an agile, flexible enterprise. But there are still many questions to answer; BPM is better or SOA? and what is the future track of BPM and SOA? This paper tries to answer some of these important questions.
Abstract: Within the last years, several technologies have been developed to help building e-learning portals. Most of them follow approaches that deliver a vast amount of functionalities, suitable for class-like learning. The SuGI project, as part of the D-Grid (funded by the BMBF), targets on delivering a highly scalable and sustainable learning solution to provide materials (e.g. learning modules, training systems, webcasts, tutorials, etc.) containing knowledge about Grid computing to the D-Grid community. In this article, the process of the development of an e-learning portal focused on the requirements of this special user group is described. Furthermore, it deals with the conceptual and technical design of an e-learning portal, addressing the special needs of heterogeneous target groups. The main focus lies on the quality management of the software development process, Web templates for uploading new contents, the rich search and filter functionalities which will be described from a conceptual as well as a technical point of view. Specifically, it points out best practices as well as concepts to provide a sustainable solution to a relatively unknown and highly heterogeneous community.
Abstract: Software maintenance is extremely important activity in software development life cycle. It involves a lot of human efforts, cost and time. Software maintenance may be further subdivided into different activities such as fault prediction, fault detection, fault prevention, fault correction etc. This topic has gained substantial attention due to sophisticated and complex applications, commercial hardware, clustered architecture and artificial intelligence. In this paper we surveyed the work done in the field of software maintenance. Software fault prediction has been studied in context of fault prone modules, self healing systems, developer information, maintenance models etc. Still a lot of things like modeling and weightage of impact of different kind of faults in the various types of software systems need to be explored in the field of fault severity.
Abstract: The amount and heterogeneity of data in biomedical research, notably in interdisciplinary research, requires new methods for the collection, presentation and analysis of information. Important data from laboratory experiments as well as patient trials are available but come out of distributed resources. The Charite Medical School in Berlin has established together with the German Research Foundation (DFG) a new information service center for kidney diseases and transplantation (Open European Nephrology Science Centre - OpEN.SC). The system is based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) with main and auxiliary modules arranged in four layers. To improve the reuse and efficient arrangement of the services the functionalities are described as business processes using the standardised Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).
Abstract: An application framework provides a reusable
design and implementation for a family of software systems.
Frameworks are introduced to reduce the cost of a product line
(i.e., family of products that share the common features). Software
testing is a time consuming and costly ongoing activity during the
application software development process. Generating reusable test
cases for the framework applications at the framework
development stage, and providing and using the test cases to test
part of the framework application whenever the framework is used
reduces the application development time and cost considerably.
Framework Interface Classes (FICs) are classes introduced by
the framework hooks to be implemented at the application
development stage. They can have reusable test cases generated at
the framework development stage and provided with the
framework to test the implementations of the FICs at the
application development stage. In this paper, we conduct a case
study using thirteen applications developed using three
frameworks; one domain oriented and two application oriented.
The results show that, in general, the percentage of the number of
FICs in the applications developed using domain frameworks is, on
average, greater than the percentage of the number of FICs in the
applications developed using application frameworks.
Consequently, the reduction of the application unit testing time
using the reusable test cases generated for domain frameworks is,
in general, greater than the reduction of the application unit testing
time using the reusable test cases generated for application
frameworks.
Abstract: Requirement engineering has been the subject of large
volume of researches due to the significant role it plays in the
software development life cycle. However, dynamicity of software
industry is much faster than advances in requirements engineering
approaches. Therefore, this paper aims to systematically review and
evaluate the current research in requirement engineering and identify
new research trends and direction in this field. In addition, various
research methods associated with the Evaluation-based techniques
and empirical study are highlighted for the requirements engineering
field. Finally, challenges and recommendations on future directions
research are presented based on the research team observations
during this study.
Abstract: Through inward perceptions, we intuitively expect
distributed software development to increase the risks associated with
achieving cost, schedule, and quality goals. To compound this
problem, agile software development (ASD) insists one of the main
ingredients of its success is cohesive communication attributed to
collocation of the development team. The following study identified
the degree of communication richness needed to achieve comparable
software quality (reduce pre-release defects) between distributed and
collocated teams. This paper explores the relevancy of
communication richness in various development phases and its
impact on quality. Through examination of a large distributed agile
development project, this investigation seeks to understand the levels
of communication required within each ASD phase to produce
comparable quality results achieved by collocated teams. Obviously,
a multitude of factors affects the outcome of software projects.
However, within distributed agile software development teams, the
mode of communication is one of the critical components required to
achieve team cohesiveness and effectiveness. As such, this study
constructs a distributed agile communication model (DAC-M) for
potential application to similar distributed agile development efforts
using the measurement of the suitable level of communication. The
results of the study show that less rich communication methods, in
the appropriate phase, might be satisfactory to achieve equivalent
quality in distributed ASD efforts.
Abstract: Nowaday-s, many organizations use systems that
support business process as a whole or partially. However, in some
application domains, like software development and health care
processes, a normative Process Aware System (PAS) is not suitable,
because a flexible support is needed to respond rapidly to new
process models. On the other hand, a flexible Process Aware System
may be vulnerable to undesirable and fraudulent executions, which
imposes a tradeoff between flexibility and security. In order to make
this tradeoff available, a genetic-based anomaly detection model for
logs of Process Aware Systems is presented in this paper. The
detection of an anomalous trace is based on discovering an
appropriate process model by using genetic process mining and
detecting traces that do not fit the appropriate model as anomalous
trace; therefore, when used in PAS, this model is an automated
solution that can support coexistence of flexibility and security.