Users' voice and service selection: An empirical study

© 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

A systematic review on the relationship between user involvement and system success

© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Context: For more than four decades it has been intuitively accepted that user involvement (UI) during system development lifecycle leads to system success. However when the researchers have evaluated the user involvement and system success (UI-SS) relationship empirically, the results were not always positive. Objective: Our objective was to explore the UI-SS relationship by synthesizing the results of all the studies that have empirically investigated this complex phenomenon. Method: We performed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) following the steps provided in the guidelines of Evidence Based Software Engineering. From the resulting studies we extracted data to answer our 9 research questions related to the UI-SS relationship, identification of users, perspectives of UI, benefits, problems and challenges of UI, degree and level of UI, relevance of stages of software development lifecycle (SDLC) and the research method employed on the UI-SS relationship. Results: Our systematic review resulted in selecting 87 empirical studies published during the period 1980-2012. Among 87 studies reviewed, 52 reported that UI positively contributes to system success, 12 suggested a negative contribution and 23 were uncertain. The UI-SS relationship is neither direct nor binary, and there are various confounding factors that play their role. The identification of users, their degree/level of involvement, stage of SDLC for UI, and choice of research method have been claimed to have impact on the UI-SS relationship. However, there is not sufficient empirical evidence available to support these claims. Conclusion: Our results have revealed that UI does contribute positively to system success. But it is a double edged sword and if not managed carefully it may cause more problems than benefits. Based on the analysis of 87 studies, we were able to identify factors for effective management of UI alluding to the causes for inconsistency in the results of published literature

Systematic reviews in requirements engineering: A tertiary study

© 2014 IEEE. There has been an increasing interest in conducting Systematic Literature Reviews (SLR) among Requirements Engineering (RE) researchers in recent years. However, so far there have been no tertiary studies conducted to provide a comprehensive overview of these published SLR in RE. In this paper we present a tertiary study of SLR that focus solely on RE related topics by following the guidelines of Evidence Based Software Engineering. We have conducted both automated search of major online sources and manual search of the RE and SLR related conferences and journals. Our tertiary study has identified 53 distinct systematic reviews published from 2006 to 2014 and reported in 64 publications. We have assessed the resulting SLR for their quality, and coverage of specific RE related topics thus identifying some gaps. We have observed that the quality of SLR in RE has been decreasing over the recent years. There is a strong need to replicate some of these SLR to increase the reliability of their results for future RE research

Empirical study of communication structures and barriers in geographically distributed teams

Conway's law asserts that communication structures of organisations constrain the design of the products they develop. This law is more explicitly observable in geographically distributed contexts because distributed teams are required to share information across different time zones and barriers. The diverse business processes and functions adopted by individual teams in geographically distributed settings create challenges for effective communication. Since the publication of Conway's law, a significant body of research has emerged in its relation to the communication structures. When it comes to software projects, the explicit observation about Conway's law has produced mixed results. The research reported in this study explores the communication structures and corresponding challenges faced by teams within a large geographically distributed software development organisation. The data was collected from relevant documents, a questionnaire and interviews with relevant stakeholders. The findings suggest that Conway's law is observable within the communication structures of globally distributed software development teams. The authors have identified the barriers and challenges of effective communications in this setting and have investigated the benefits of utilising an integrated system to overcome these challenges

Pathogenicity markers of Clostridium spp. in commercial turkeys

Since growth promoters ban in Europe, enteritis of different aetiologies (virus, bacteria and protozoa) are increasingly becoming the main cause of economic loss in commercial turkeys production. This study is focused on typing of Clostridium spp. isolated from samples of jejunum and ileum of 82 birds out of 17 turkeys flocks. The birds were 6-day to 104-day old, both male and female, with enteric disorders. The presence of toxin NetB was investigated. Multiplex PCR to detect cpa, cpb1, cpetx, cp1, cpb2 and cpe toxin genes were used for Clostridium typing. No lesions of necrotic enteritis were observed. Clostridium perfringens type A was isolated from 25 enteric samples, Clostridium difficile was found in 4 cases and Clostridium sordelli in one case. Clostridium perfringens was present from 6 to 104 days of age indicating its possible role in the enteric disorders of commercial turkeys. NetB toxin was found in no sample. 3 out of 4 isolates of Clostridium difficile were characterized by the presence of toxin genes

Power and politics of user involvement in software development

© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery. [CONTEXT] Involving users in software development is a complex and multi-faceted concept. Empirical research that studies power and politics of user involvement in software development is scarce. [OBJECTIVE] In this paper, we present the results from a case study of a software development project, where organizational politics was explored in context of user involvement in software development. [METHOD] We collected data through 30 interviews with 20 participants, attending workshops, observing project meetings, and analysing projects documents. The qualitative data was rigorously and iteratively analyzed. [RESULTS] The results indicate that the politics was a significant factor used to exert power and influence in decision-making processes. Communication channels were exploited for political purposes. These contributed to the users' dissatisfaction with their involvement thus impacting on the project outcome. [CONCLUSION] Having multiple teams of stakeholders with different levels of power in decision-making, the politics is inevitable and inescapable. Without careful attention, the political aspect of user involvement in software development can contribute to unsuccessful project

What makes service oriented requirements engineering challenging? A qualitative study

The focus of Service Oriented Software Development (SOSD) is to develop software by integrating reusable services to lower the required cost, time and effort of development and increase reusability, agility, quality and customer satisfaction. It has been recognised in the literature that SOSD faces various challenges especially in requirements engineering (RE). The objective of this study is to investigate these challenges of Service Oriented RE (SORE) from practitioners' perspectives in order to gain a deeper understanding of the related issues and to reveal potential gaps between research and practice in SORE. They present a qualitative study of the challenges and issues in SORE. The data were collected by conducting interviews with practitioners working in IT companies in Sydney, who have had substantial experience with service oriented software projects. The authors findings reveal that most of the challenges of SORE are similar to those that are faced during RE in traditional or component-based software development. According to the practitioners, the research and practice has made some advances in the technical direction but the human related issues in SORE have not been addressed adequately. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2014

Hybrid Loss with Network Trimming for Disease Recognition in Gastrointestinal Endoscopy

EndoTect Challenge 2020, which aims at the detection of gastrointestinal diseases and abnormalities, consists of three tasks including Detection, Efficient Detection and Segmentation in endoscopic images. Although pathologies belonging to different classes can be manually separated by experienced experts, however, existing classification models struggle to discriminate them due to low inter-class variability. As a result, the models’ convergence deteriorates. To this end, we propose a hybrid loss function to stabilise model training. For the detection and efficient detection tasks, we utilise ResNet-152 and MobileNetV3 architectures, respectively, along with the hybrid loss function. For the segmentation task, Cascade Mask R-CNN is investigated. In this paper, we report the architecture of our detection and segmentation models and the performance of our methods on HyperKvasir and EndoTect test dataset

Ni-doped Bi0.5Sb1.5Te3 single crystal: a potential functional material for thermoelectricity, topological insulator, and optoelectronics

We report the growth of Ni-doped Bi0.5Sb1.35Ni0.15Te3 single crystal via the self-flux method. The crystalline nature of a grown single crystal was confirmed by the X-ray diffraction technique (XRD). Interestingly, the XRD pattern shows a sharp reflections of type of planes, revealing the growth of the crystal in c-direction. The grown single crystal was subjected for measurement of field dependence magnetization at 300 K and temperature-dependent magnetic moment. The electronic transport property of bulk single crystal was also carried out in a wide range of temperatures from 150 to 450 K. Reasonably large electrical conductivity sigma similar to 1584 S/cm at room temperature was observed which shows similar to 400% enhancement in sigma than the electrical conductivity of bare Bi0.5Sb1.5Te3 single crystal (400 S/cm at 300 K). This enhanced electrical conductivity results to significant power factor similar to 1.68 x 10(- 3)W/m K(2)at 300K which is 163% larger than that of bare Bi0.5Sb1.5Te3 single crystal (6.45 x 10(- 4)W/m K-2). Magnetic properties of a single crystal of Bi0.5Sb1.35Ni0.15Te3 reveal ferromagnetic behavior at 300 K. The photoluminescence (PL) behavior of Bi0.5Sb1.35Ni0.15Te3 single-crystal was also scrutinized. The PL spectra of Bi0.5Sb1.35Ni0.15Te3 single crystal shows the strong red emission peak in the visible region from 600 to 690 nm upon excitation at 375 nm wavelength, which corresponds to the optical bandgap of 2.1 eV

Interferometric and localized surface plasmon based fiber optic sensor

We demonstrate a novel single point, multi-parameter, fiber optic sensor concept based on a combination of interferometric and plasmonic sensor modalities on an optical fiber end face. The sensor consists of a microFabry-Perot interferometer in the form of a hemispherical stimuli-responsive hydrogel with immobilized gold nanoparticles. We present results of proof-of-concept experiments demonstrating local surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) sensing of refractive index (RI) in the visible range and interferometric measurements of volumetric changes of the pH stimuli-responsive hydrogel in near infrared range. The response of LSPR to RI ( ∆λr ∆RI ∼ 877nm/RI) and the free spectral range (FSR) to pH ( ∆pH ∆FSR = 0.09624/nm) were measured with LSPR relatively constant for hydrogel swelling degree and FSR relatively constant for RI. We expect this novel sensor concept to be of great value for biosensors for medical applications