A holistic approach to requirements elicitation for mobile tourist recommendation systems

Mobile recommendation systems (MRS) are becoming ever more popular in the tourism industry, due to their potential to declutter the decision-making process of tourists. Despite their proliferation, such systems seem to lack accuracy and relevance to the needs of their users. This paper describes the mobile recommendation problem and explores the relationships between personality, emotion, context and recommendations for tourists. Its aim is to investigate user-requirements of prospective mobile recommendation systems for tourists and the influence of personality and emotional state on user needs. To that end, a survey was conducted with tourists in Cyprus at a point of interest to identify their recommendation needs. Collected data have been analyzed and preliminary results indicate different user requirements among contextual factors. This indicated that the contextualization of these applications in accordance with users’ personality and emotional state is essential to realize their full potential

Human Resource Allocation and Scheduling for Software Project Management

Software project management consists of a number of planning, organizing, staffing, directing and controlling activities. Human resources feature prominently in all of these activities and, as a consequence, they can affect and determine project management decisions. Therefore, in order to help guarantee the success of a software project, managers must take into consideration this type of resource when performing the aforementioned activities. This chapter specifically investigates human resources from a planning perspective and, in particular, focuses on the responsibilities of allocating developers and teams to project tasks, scheduling developers and teams, as well as forming development teams. These responsibilities are often challenging to undertake because they are accompanied by time, budget and quality constraints, which software project managers find difficult to balance correctly. The purpose of the chapter is to explore the most recent research work in the field of human resource allocation and scheduling, and to specifically examine the motivation behind each approach and the goals and benefits to real-world practitioners. In addition, the chapter investigates development team formation, which can be considered as an indirect method of allocating human resources to a software project. This perspective, in particular, sheds light on current and future trends, which lean towards incorporating human-centric aspects of software development in planning activities