11 research outputs found

    Requirements Elicitation With Focus Groups: Lessons Learnt

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    Research efforts and challenges in crowd-based requirements engineering: A review

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    Eliciting software system development requirements is a challenging task as the information is from various resources. The most constructive resource is the stakeholders of the system to be developed. It is critical yet time-consuming to capture essential requirements to realize a reliable and workable software system. The crowd-based Requirements Engineering (crowd-based RE) approach adapts the crowdsourcing technique to access an extensive range of stakeholders and save time, especially for the generic type system with no clear stakeholder. This paper presents current research efforts and challenges in crowd-based RE. A systematic literature review method is adopted to explore literature based on two specific research questions. The first question aimed at identifying research efforts on crowd-based RE, and the second question focused on the main challenges discovered in pursuing crowd-based RE. The findings from the literature review show that many efforts have been made to explore and further improve crowd-based RE. This paper provides a foundation to pursue research in improving crowdsourcing techniques for the benefit of requirements engineering

    Users' voice and service selection: An empirical study

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    © 2014 IEEE. Service Oriented software development saves time by reusing existing services and integrates them to create a new system. But selecting a service that satisfies the requirements of all concerned stakeholders is a challenging task. The situation has been exacerbated within the past few years with huge number of services available that offer similar functionalities where the analysts require additional information for making better decision for service selection. User feedback analysis has recently gained a lot of attention for its potential benefits in various areas of requirements engineering. The aim of this research is to evaluate the impact of feedback provided by the end users of the services, on the decision making process for the service selection. In this paper we present an empirical study that utilizes user feedback analysis for selection of a service among 92 available services with similar functionalities. The results show that in scenarios with significant number of services, it is helpful for analysts to consider additional information to select optimally best matched service to the requirements

    Social Computing for Software Engineering: a Mapping Study.

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    There is a continual growth in the use of social computing within a breadth of business domains; such as marketing, public engagement and innovation management. Software engineering research, like other similar disciplines, has re- cently started to harness the power of social computing throughout the various development phases; from requirements elicitation to validation and maintenance and for the various methods of development and structures of development teams. However, despite this increasing effort, we still lack a clear picture of the current status of this research. To address that lack of knowledge, we conduct a systematic mapping study on the utilisation of social computing for software engineering. This will inform researchers and practitioners about the current status and progress of the field including the areas of current focus and the geographical and chronological distribution of the research. We do the mapping across a diversity of dimensions including the activities of software engineering, the types of research, the characteristics of social computing and the demographic attributes of the published work. Our study results show a growing interest in the field, mainly in academia, and a general trend toward developing designated social com- puting platforms and utilising them in mainly four software engineering areas; management, coding, requirements engineering, and maintenance and enhancement

    Designing for experience - a requirements framework for enrolment based and public facing e-government services

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    User-centricity is a pre-requisite for a truly transformational e-government strategy. This goes beyond visual design and appeal, and ties down to a rudimentary measure of how far people are willing to go to enrol for and use e-government services. Enrolment can have a serious impact on the success of online government services. Different services require different levels of identity assurance, and different enrolment processes are put in place to deliver them. But from the citizen's perspective these processes often require a disproportionate amount of effort, producing hurdles that affect user acceptance and ultimately service adoption. When enrolling to high-effort services is not mandatory, take-up is low; when it is compulsory, it causes resentment, and neither is desirable. Despite existing work on the impact of security and identity processes on end users there has been little work on how these contributions could be operationalised and adopted by practitioners and policy makers as part of the requirements development process. Research in HCI provides techniques to help practitioners design systems that are within general human capabilities, however such techniques are too generic to approximate use-time behaviour across user groups and within different contexts of use. This thesis proposes Calibrated Personas, a user modelling technique that accumulates knowledge on user behaviour to model and fine-tune tolerance levels for workload and its impact on e-government service adoption (1) across user groups, (2) e-service types and (3) contexts of use. A user group calibration protocol was devised to facilitate data collection and model generation for user behaviour in enrolment-specific use cases. These models are in turn used to approximate user reactions towards design alternatives, reducing the gap between design-time knowledge (upon which decisions are made) and use-time knowledge. To facilitate this activity this work presents Sentire ('to listen'), a requirements and design framework that combines industry-strength practices with user feedback simulations (referred to as UX-analytics). These simulations in turn inform the requirements development process with actionable feedback as part of an iterative design process. This thesis considers tool support for Sentire as central to the investigation in order to facilitate adoption by practitioners and to encourage knowledge sharing and re-use within the e-government domain. For this reason, an online collaborative computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tool was developed and evaluated throughout the various real-world interventions carried out for this thesis. Sentire was applied to two new national e-services and also in the evaluation of an existing one. User-studies and expert evaluation were instrumental to the evolution and validation of the main contributions and deliverables arising from this thesis

    Social Networks and Collaborative Filtering for Large-Scale Requirements Elicitation

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    Within the field of software engineering, requirements elicitation is the activity in which stakeholder needs are understood. In large-scale software projects, requirements elicitation tends to be beset by three problems: information overload, inadequate stakeholder input, and biased prioritisation of requirements. The work described in this thesis addresses these problems using social networks and collaborative filtering. The work has developed StakeNet, a novel method that uses social networks to identify and prioritise stakeholders. Using StakeNet, the requirements engineer asks an initial list of stakeholders to recommend other stakeholders and stakeholder roles, builds a social network with stakeholders as nodes and their recommendations as links, and prioritises the stakeholders using a variety of social network measures. The work has also developed StakeRare, a novel method that uses social networks and collaborative filtering to identify and prioritise requirements. Using StakeRare, the requirements engineer asks the stakeholders identified by StakeNet to rate an initial list of requirements and suggest other requirements, recommends other relevant requirements to the stakeholders using collaborative filtering, and prioritises the requirements using the ratings and the stakeholders’ priority from StakeNet. Finally, to support the methods, this work has developed StakeSource, a novel software tool that automates the manual processes in StakeNet. StakeSource collects recommendations from stakeholders, builds the social network, and prioritises the stakeholders automatically. The methods and tool have been evaluated using real large-scale software projects. The empirical evaluation of both StakeNet and StakeRare using a real large-scale software project demonstrates that the methods identify a highly complete set of stakeholders and their requirements, and prioritise the stakeholders and their requirements accurately. These methods outperform the existing methods used in the project, and require significantly less time from the stakeholders and requirements engineers. StakeSource has been evaluated with real large-scale projects by practitioners. The tool is now used in major software projects, and organisations are adopting it. The methods, tool, and evaluation described in this thesis provide evidence that social networks and collaborative filtering can effectively support requirements elicitation in large-scale software projects

    The iPad - an EFL Revolution? An exploratory study of the iPad in tertiary education in the UAE

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    This thesis is under permanent embargo as it is an earlier version of the final thesis, which is available in ORE at http://hdl.handle.net/10871/122150ABSTRACT: The iPad: an EFL classroom revolution? The motivation for this study was the 2012 launch of the iPad as the de facto delivery platform for Foundations-level students at all public universities in the UAE, the largest nationwide adoption of the device anywhere in the world. Not only was this of interest in terms of scale, it was also of interest linguistically, English being the language of instruction at all public universities, despite their student body being almost exclusively indigenous Arab nationals. It also presented the opportunity to examine the marrying of a cutting-edge emerging technology with an EFL tertiary education context, an uncommon occurrence. Though eulogised by university management and the local press as an educational revolution, for some the iPad initiative was unusual, given the speed of its roll-out, lack of piloting or teacher training, and the linguistic level of most Foundations-level students. Thus, the objective of this thesis was to examine the device in both a pedagogical and socio-cultural context, and assess whether it was the educational panacea promised, or the result of a successful marketing strategy. It was also hoped to establish the iPad’s worth in terms of educating the UAE’s youth for successful integration into the knowledge economy, a key government Vison 2021 strategy. To address these issues, the research focus was on evaluations of the iPad by Foundations teaching faculty, at both a male and female campus at one of the UAE’s public tertiary education institutions. A mixed methods approach was chosen, utilising both a questionnaire and interviews. The results revealed the iPad was regarded as a potentially useful supplementary pedagogic tool by faculty, although there were strong caveats regarding its sole use, its ability to distract, and its suitability for the level of student, as well as the larger knowledge economy. This thesis adds weight to observations already extant in the literature, but also provides new insights, such as specific iPad classroom use in terms of apps at tertiary level in an EFL context, and consequent training and support requirements. Though not a longitudinal study, it does provide a longer-term examination of the device than much of the germane literature. What the thesis further posits, is that to understand ambitious and untested educational projects like the iPad initiative in the UAE, it may be necessary to understand the larger socio-political context of the policies, rather than see such projects in a wholly educational framework

    An exploratory study of the iPad in tertiary education in the UAE

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    An earlier version of this thesis is in ORE at http://hdl.handle.net/10871/122010. It is under permanent embargoABSTRACT: The iPad: an EFL classroom revolution? The motivation for this study was the 2012 launch of the iPad as the de facto delivery platform for Foundations-level students at all public universities in the UAE, the largest nationwide adoption of the device anywhere in the world. Not only was this of interest in terms of scale, it was also of interest linguistically, English being the language of instruction at all public universities, despite their student body being almost exclusively indigenous Arab nationals. It also presented the opportunity to examine the marrying of a cutting-edge emerging technology with an EFL tertiary education context, an uncommon occurrence. Though eulogised by university management and the local press as an educational revolution, for some the iPad initiative was unusual, given the speed of its roll-out, lack of piloting or teacher training, and the linguistic level of most Foundations-level students. Thus the objective of this thesis was to examine the device in both a pedagogical and socio-cultural context, and assess whether it was the educational panacea promised, or the result of a successful marketing strategy. It was also hoped to establish the iPad’s worth in terms of educating the UAE’s youth for successful integration into the knowledge economy, a key government Vison 2021 strategy. To address these issues, the research focus was on evaluations of the iPad by Foundations teaching faculty, at both a male and female campus at one of the UAE’s public tertiary education institutions. A mixed methods approach was chosen, utilising both a questionnaire and interviews. The results revealed the iPad was regarded as a potentially useful supplementary pedagogic tool by faculty, although there were strong caveats regarding its sole use, its ability to distract, and its suitability for the level of student, as well as the larger knowledge economy. This thesis adds weight to observations already extant in the literature, but also provides new insights, such as specific iPad classroom use in terms of apps at tertiary level in an EFL context, and consequent training and support requirements. Though not a longitudinal study, it does provide a longer-term examination of the device than much of the germane literature. What the thesis further posits, is that to understand ambitious and untested educational projects like the iPad initiative in the UAE, it may be necessary to understand the larger socio-political context of the policies, rather than see such projects in a wholly educational framework

    The Whitworthian 2008-2009

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    The Whitworthian student newspaper, September 2008-May 2009.https://digitalcommons.whitworth.edu/whitworthian/1093/thumbnail.jp
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