Characterizing the contribution of quality requirements to software sustainability

Most respondents considered modifiability as relevant for addressing both technical and environmental sustainability. Functional correctness, availability, modifiability, interoperability and recoverability favor positively the endurability of software systems. This study has also identified security, satisfaction, and freedom from risk as very good contributors to social sustainability. Satisfaction was also considered by the respondents as a good contributor to economic sustainability. Background Since sustainability became a challenge in software engineering, researchers mainly from requirements engineering and software architecture communities have contributed to defining the basis of the notion of sustainability-aware software. Problem Despite these valuable efforts, the assessment and design based on the notion of sustainability as a software quality is still poorly understood. There is no consensus on which sustainability requirements should be considered. Aim and Method To fill this gap, a survey was designed with a double objective: i) determine to which extent quality requirements contribute to the sustainability of software-intensive systems; and ii) identify direct dependencies among the sustainability dimensions. The survey involved different target audiences (e.g. software architects, ICT practitioners with expertise in Sustainability). We evaluated the perceived importance/relevance of each sustainability dimension, and the perceived usefulness of exploiting a sustainability model in different software engineering activities. Result

ENGINEERING SKILLS: EMPLOYER SATISFACTION AMONG MALAYSIAN GRADUATES ENGINEER.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the employers’ satisfaction regard to the skill of engineering graduates. This study use 195 survey questionnaire distributed to the manufacturing senior manager at Melaka, Negeri Sembilan and Pulau Pinang only. Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) software version 22.0 have been used to extract the data needed from the survey. From this study, finding indicate that employer are satisfy with the skill equip to the engineering graduates and show that fundamental general skill (FGS) and engineering skills (EgS) are the most important and essential to employer satisfaction. The results from this study offer an important practical implication for engineering graduates to be success in employability. Proper skills a helpful to get employer satisfaction for employability with the necessary skill equip to engineering graduates. It is hope with this data it can be an essential reference for engineering graduates to prepare them self to enter the working environment at today challenging economic situation

Using the Work and Organizational Psychology Perspective in Research on Agile Software Development Teams

Background: The development of software has gone from more strict plan-driven projects to involve more human interaction and communication due to approaches like agile software development. With the realization of the importance of psychological aspect comes the possibility of learning from other more established research fields instead of reinventing the wheel. Objective: In the field of work and organizational psychology there is an extensive body of knowledge of work-life in many different contexts. The objective of this thesis is to show some examples of how both methods and models from psychology research can be used in software engineering and specifically to understand agile software development teams. The selected models and tools were; new aspects of work motivation in agile teams in larger organizations, statistical tests of validation (factor analysis), and using the social psychology model of group development in connection to agile teams. Method: The appended papers consist of both exploratory, correlative and validation studies. The research methods range from interviews, focus groups, and survey data as well as qualitative and quantitative interpretations. Eight companies participated consisting of two European-based and six US-based organizations, and a total of 76 people participated in the studies. The data collection procedures were also diverse ranging from recorded in-person interviews and focus groups, to online surveys and remotely recorded phone interviews. Results: The analysis included thematic ditto of interview transcripts, correlation of variables in survey data, and statistical validation tests of a survey itself. Some studies used one research methodology while other triangulate the research question in order to increase the validity of the results. The results strongly indicate that many agile maturity models need more validation, that there are work motivational aspects of employees working on agile teams in a more traditional structure, and that the group development aspect of building agile teams contributes with concrete guidance on moving teams forward. Conclusions: We conclude that there are a set of useful methods and models in work and organizational psychology that are applicable, specifically, to the agile software development context of teams, but also, more generally to a larger perspective of software engineering that involves human factors. This thesis will hopefully convince researchers and practitioners of the usefulness of adding the psychological dimension when trying to understand such social and complex systems

Actor-network procedures: Modeling multi-factor authentication, device pairing, social interactions

As computation spreads from computers to networks of computers, and migrates into cyberspace, it ceases to be globally programmable, but it remains programmable indirectly: network computations cannot be controlled, but they can be steered by local constraints on network nodes. The tasks of "programming" global behaviors through local constraints belong to the area of security. The "program particles" that assure that a system of local interactions leads towards some desired global goals are called security protocols. As computation spreads beyond cyberspace, into physical and social spaces, new security tasks and problems arise. As networks are extended by physical sensors and controllers, including the humans, and interlaced with social networks, the engineering concepts and techniques of computer security blend with the social processes of security. These new connectors for computational and social software require a new "discipline of programming" of global behaviors through local constraints. Since the new discipline seems to be emerging from a combination of established models of security protocols with older methods of procedural programming, we use the name procedures for these new connectors, that generalize protocols. In the present paper we propose actor-networks as a formal model of computation in heterogenous networks of computers, humans and their devices; and we introduce Procedure Derivation Logic (PDL) as a framework for reasoning about security in actor-networks. On the way, we survey the guiding ideas of Protocol Derivation Logic (also PDL) that evolved through our work in security in last 10 years. Both formalisms are geared towards graphic reasoning and tool support. We illustrate their workings by analysing a popular form of two-factor authentication, and a multi-channel device pairing procedure, devised for this occasion.Comment: 32 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables; journal submission; extended references, added discussio

Human motion analysis and simulation tools: a survey

Computational systems to identify objects represented in image sequences and tracking their motion in a fully automatic manner, enabling a detailed analysis of the involved motion and its simulation are extremely relevant in several fields of our society. In particular, the analysis and simulation of the human motion has a wide spectrum of relevant applications with a manifest social and economic impact. In fact, usage of human motion data is fundamental in a broad number of domains (e.g.: sports, rehabilitation, robotics, surveillance, gesture-based user interfaces, etc.). Consequently, many relevant engineering software applications have been developed with the purpose of analyzing and/or simulating the human motion. This chapter presents a detailed, broad and up to date survey on motion simulation and/or analysis software packages that have been developed either by the scientific community or commercial entities. Moreover, a main contribution of this chapter is an effective framework to classify and compare motion simulation and analysis tools