Investigating factors affecting software maintenance in e-commerce companies in Jordan

The most costly phase in the software life cycle is the software maintenance phase. It consumes between 40% and 90% of a software project’s budget. Software applications play an important role in e-commerce companies and the significance of software systems and their maintenance cannot be ignored. In order to improve the software maintenance process, a comprehensive understanding of the different factors involved in software maintenance in e-commerce companies is necessary. Thus, this study aims to identify and investigate the key factors that influence the software maintenance relevant to e-commerce in the country of Jordan. Furthermore, it hopes to provide a framework to address factors that affect the context described. A preliminary study was conducted in order to gain an insight into software maintenance issues faced by e-commerce companies in Jordan and also, to obtain further details of the main study requirements, such as participant numbers.This study adopted an interpretivist philosophy, qualitative approach. It was conducted in six e-commerce companies in Jordan. Each company was divided into two groups: Group A represents employees who work in software maintenance; Group B represents senior management of e-commerce companies. The total is 15 participants: 9 participants from Group A and 6 participants from Group B. Semi-structured face-to-face interviews, documents and archival records were selected as the data collection instruments for this study. Also, the qualitative data was analysed using NVivo software application. The findings of the study revealed that there is an absence of systematic approach regarding work in software maintenance in e-commerce companies in Jordan. Moreover, the study contributes to knowledge regarding the key factors that affect software maintenance activities in e-commerce companies in Jordan. Twenty-three factors were identified in the study as factors that affect software maintenance and those were classified into five main categories: human resources, organisation environment, operational environment, software characteristics and external factors. Also, the research contributes new knowledge by identifying three new factors affecting software maintenance: native language, operation users, and views of people about software maintenance jobs. Furthermore, the study developed a framework for software maintenance processes in e-commerce companies in Jordan to improve the effectiveness of maintenance work and reduce the negative impact on company operation

Modélisation de documents et recherches de points communs : propositions d'un framework de gestion de fiches d'anomalie pour faciliter les maintenances corrective et préventive

La pratique quotidienne d'une activité génère un ensemble de connaissances qui se traduisent par un savoir-faire, une maîtrise, une compétence qu'une personne acquiert au cours du temps. Pour les préserver, la capitalisation des connaissances est devenue une activité essentielle dans les entreprises. Nos travaux de recherche ont pour objectif de modéliser et mettre en œuvre un système afin d'extraire et de formaliser les connaissances issues des anomalies qui surviennent dans un contexte de production industrielle et de les intégrer dans un framework facilitant la maintenance corrective et préventive. Ce framework structure la connaissance sous la forme de groupes d'anomalies. Ces groupes peuvent être rapprochés des patterns : ils représentent un problème auquel une ou plusieurs solutions sont associées. Ils ne sont pas définis a priori, c'est l'analyse des anomalies passées qui génère des groupes pertinents, qui peuvent évoluer avec l'ajout de nouvelles anomalies. Pour identifier ces patterns, supports de la connaissance, un processus complet d'extraction et de formalisation de la connaissance est suivi, Knowledge Discovery in Databases. Ce processus a été appliqué dans des domaines très variés. Nous lui donnons ici une nouvelle dimension, le traitement d'anomalies et plus particulièrement celles qui surviennent au cours de processus de production industrielle. Les étapes génériques qui le composent, depuis la simple sélection des données jusqu'à l'interprétation des patterns qui supportent les connaissances, sont considérées pour affecter à chacune un traitement spécifique pertinent par rapport à notre contexte applicatif.The daily practice of an activity generates a set of knowledge that results in a know-how, a mastery, a skill a person gains over time. In order to take advantage of this experience, capitalization of knowledge has become an essential activity for companies. Our research work aims to model and implement such a system that extracts and formalizes knowledge from defects that occur in the context of industrial production, and to integrate it into a framework in order to facilitate corrective and preventive maintenance. This framework organizes the knowledge in the form of defects' groups. These groups can be compared to patterns: they represent a problem to which one or more solutions are related. They are not defined a priori; the analysis of past defects generates relevant groups, which may change with the addition of new defects. To identify these patterns, a complete process of knowledge extraction and formalization is adopted, Knowledge Discovery in Databases, well known in the domain of knowledge management. This process has been applied in very diversified fields. In this work, we give a new dimension to this process, the processing of defects, especially those that occur during industrial production processes. The generic steps that compose it, from the simple data selection to the interpretation of patterns that support knowledge, are considered. A specific processing, relevant to our applicative context, is assigned to each of these steps

Modélisation de documents et recherche de points communs - Proposition d'un framework de gestion de fiches d'anomalie pour faciliter les maintenances corrective et préventive

The daily practice of an activity generates a set of knowledge that results in a know-how, a mastery, a skill a person gains over time. In order to take advantage of this experience, capitalization of knowledge has become an essential activity for companies. Our research work aims to model and implement such a system that extracts and formalizes knowledge from defects that occur in the context of industrial production, and to integrate it into a framework in order to facilitate corrective and preventive maintenance. This framework organizes the knowledge in the form of defects' groups. These groups can be compared to patterns: they represent a problem to which one or more solutions are related. They are not defined a priori; the analysis of past defects generates relevant groups, which may change with the addition of new defects. To identify these patterns, a complete process of knowledge extraction and formalization is adopted, Knowledge Discovery in Databases, well known in the domain of knowledge management. This process has been applied in very diversified fields. In this work, we give a new dimension to this process, the processing of defects, especially those that occur during industrial production processes. The generic steps that compose it, from the simple data selection to the interpretation of patterns that support knowledge, are considered. A specific processing, relevant to our applicative context, is assigned to each of these steps.La pratique quotidienne d'une activité génère un ensemble de connaissances qui se traduisent par un savoir-faire, une maîtrise, une compétence qu'une personne acquiert au cours du temps. Pour les préserver, la capitalisation des connaissances est devenue une activité essentielle dans les entreprises. Nos travaux de recherche ont pour objectif de modéliser et mettre en œuvre un système afin d'extraire et de formaliser les connaissances issues des anomalies qui surviennent dans un contexte de production industrielle et de les intégrer dans un framework facilitant la maintenance corrective et préventive. Ce framework structure la connaissance sous la forme de groupes d'anomalies. Ces groupes peuvent être rapprochés des patterns : ils représentent un problème auquel une ou plusieurs solutions sont associées. Ils ne sont pas définis a priori, c'est l'analyse des anomalies passées qui génère des groupes pertinents, qui peuvent évoluer avec l'ajout de nouvelles anomalies. Pour identifier ces patterns, supports de la connaissance, un processus complet d'extraction et de formalisation de la connaissance est suivi, Knowledge Discovery in Databases. Ce processus a été appliqué dans des domaines très variés. Nous lui donnons ici une nouvelle dimension, le traitement d'anomalies et plus particulièrement celles qui surviennent au cours de processus de production industrielle. Les étapes génériques qui le composent, depuis la simple sélection des données jusqu'à l'interprétation des patterns qui supportent les connaissances, sont considérées pour affecter à chacune un traitement spécifique pertinent par rapport à notre contexte applicatif

Security-Pattern Recognition and Validation

The increasing and diverse number of technologies that are connected to the Internet, such as distributed enterprise systems or small electronic devices like smartphones, brings the topic IT security to the foreground. We interact daily with these technologies and spend much trust on a well-established software development process. However, security vulnerabilities appear in software on all kinds of PC(-like) platforms, and more and more vulnerabilities are published, which compromise systems and their users. Thus, software has also to be modified due to changing requirements, bugs, and security flaws and software engineers must more and more face security issues during the software design; especially maintenance programmers must deal with such use cases after a software has been released. In the domain of software development, design patterns have been proposed as the best-known solutions for recurring problems in software design. Analogously, security patterns are best practices aiming at ensuring security. This thesis develops a deeper understanding of the nature of security patterns. It focuses on their validation and detection regarding the support of reviews and maintenance activities. The landscape of security patterns is diverse. Thus, published security patterns are collected and organized to identify software-related security patterns. The description of the selected software-security patterns is assessed, and they are compared against the common design patterns described by Gamma et al. to identify differences and issues that may influence the detection of security patterns. Based on these insights and a manual detection approach, we illustrate an automatic detection method for security patterns. The approach is implemented in a tool and evaluated in a case study with 25 real-world Android applications from Google Play