146,206 research outputs found
Comparative analysis of software reusability attributes in web and mobile applications
Software reuse is an important approach to software engineering, where it aims to use previous software components to create new software systems. Reusability minimizes work repetition, development time, cost, efforts, and increases systems reliability. Reusability measurements help developers to provide the right metrics for measuring the reusability attributes and to identify reusable components among the wealth of existing programs. The main problem encountered in software reuse is the proper selection of the right software component for reuse due to similarity between the desired functionality and the function of the retrieved software component. In addition, it is difficult to define the right metrics that capture important quality attributes of a given class. This research aims to identify and measure the attributes that affect the software components reusability in two open source web and mobile applications. It also aims to compare the usage rate of reusability components in these applications to decide their ability to reuse. Four attributes were selected due to their impacts on reusability namely flexibility, portability, variability and understandability. Five metrics were identified to measure these attributes based on specified formulas. The metrics are Coupling Between Object (CBO), Lack Of Cohesion (LCOM), Depth Of Inheritance (DIT), Number Of Children (NOC) and Line Of Code (LOC). The research results indicate that the same attributes and metrics are suitable for measuring the reusability components in both applications. The comparison between the two applications for reuse indicates that the web application is more difficult for reuse than the mobile application
Chatbots for learning: A review of educational chatbots for the Facebook Messenger
With the exponential growth in the mobile device market over the last decade, chatbots are becoming an increasingly popular option to interact with users, and their popularity and adoption are rapidly spreading. These mobile devices change the way we communicate and allow ever-present learning in various environments. This study examined educational chatbots for Facebook Messenger to support learning. The independent web directory was screened to assess chatbots for this study resulting in the identification of 89 unique chatbots. Each chatbot was classified by language, subject matter and developer's platform. Finally, we evaluated 47 educational chatbots using the Facebook Messenger platform based on the analytic hierarchy process against the quality attributes of teaching, humanity, affect, and accessibility. We found that educational chatbots on the Facebook Messenger platform vary from the basic level of sending personalized messages to recommending learning content. Results show that chatbots which are part of the instant messaging application are still in its early stages to become artificial intelligence teaching assistants. The findings provide tips for teachers to integrate chatbots into classroom practice and advice what types of chatbots they can try out.Web of Science151art. no. 10386
Context constraint integration and validation in dynamic web service compositions
System architectures that cross organisational boundaries are usually implemented based on Web service technologies due to their inherent interoperability benets. With increasing exibility requirements, such as on-demand service provision, a dynamic approach to service architecture focussing on composition at runtime is needed. The possibility of technical faults, but also violations of functional and semantic constraints require a comprehensive notion of context that captures composition-relevant aspects. Context-aware techniques are consequently required to support constraint validation for dynamic service composition. We present techniques to respond to problems occurring during the execution of dynamically composed Web
services implemented in WS-BPEL. A notion of context { covering physical and contractual
faults and violations { is used to safeguard composed service executions dynamically. Our aim is to present an architectural framework from an application-oriented perspective, addressing practical considerations of a technical framework
Evaluating usability of cross-platform smartphone applications
The computing power of smartphones is increasing as time goes. However, the proliferation of multiple different types of operating platforms affected interoperable smartphone applications development. Thus, the cross-platform development tools are coined. Literature showed that smartphone applications developed with the native platforms have better user experience than the cross-platform counterparts. However, comparative evaluation of usability of cross-platform applications on the deployment platforms is not studied yet. In this work, we evaluated usability of a crossword puzzle developed with PhoneGap on Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry. The evaluation was conducted focusing on the developer's adaptation effort to native platforms and the end users. Thus, we observed that usability of the cross-platform crossword puzzle is unaffected on the respective native platforms and the SDKs require only minimal configuration effort. In addition, we observed the prospect of HTML5 and related web technologies as our future work towards evaluating and enhancing usability in composing REST-based services for smartphone applications
CommuniSense: Crowdsourcing Road Hazards in Nairobi
Nairobi is one of the fastest growing metropolitan cities and a major
business and technology powerhouse in Africa. However, Nairobi currently lacks
monitoring technologies to obtain reliable data on traffic and road
infrastructure conditions. In this paper, we investigate the use of mobile
crowdsourcing as means to gather and document Nairobi's road quality
information. We first present the key findings of a city-wide road quality
survey about the perception of existing road quality conditions in Nairobi.
Based on the survey's findings, we then developed a mobile crowdsourcing
application, called CommuniSense, to collect road quality data. The application
serves as a tool for users to locate, describe, and photograph road hazards. We
tested our application through a two-week field study amongst 30 participants
to document various forms of road hazards from different areas in Nairobi. To
verify the authenticity of user-contributed reports from our field study, we
proposed to use online crowdsourcing using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to
verify whether submitted reports indeed depict road hazards. We found 92% of
user-submitted reports to match the MTurkers judgements. While our prototype
was designed and tested on a specific city, our methodology is applicable to
other developing cities.Comment: In Proceedings of 17th International Conference on Human-Computer
Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2015
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