Theory, practice and policy: An inquiry into the uptake of HCI practices in the software industry of a developing country

With almost four decades of existence as a community, human–computer interaction (HCI) practice has yet to diffuse into a large range of software industries globally. A review of existing literature suggests that the diffusion of HCI practices in software organizations lacks theoretical guidance. Although many studies have tried to facilitate HCI uptake by the software industry, there are scarce studies that consider HCI practices as innovations that software organizations could or should adopt. Furthermore, there appears to be a lack of structure in the facilitation of HCI methodological development within the specialized emerging regions field such as Sub-Saharan Africa. In order to address this gap, an exploratory investigation regarding the state of uptake of HCI practices in Nigeria is conducted. The aim of this article is to improve our understanding regarding the state of HCI uptake in developing countries and the challenges prevailing. The findings show that HCI practice still remains within its infancy stage in most software companies. Universities are also lacking the required knowledge transfer of HCI to the students, and in effect themselves contributing to the lack of HCI skills in industry. Furthermore, government policies are in need of refinement and end-users’ involvement in software development is not prioritized

Software Process Improvement Using Force Field Analysis

Software process improvement is a necessity especially since the dynamic nature of today’s hardware demands reciprocal improvements in the underlying software systems. Several process improvement models exist where organizations perform an introspective study of the current software development process and identify factors that require improvement. An improvement plan is then drawn and implemented. This paper studiedthe state of Nigerian software development organizations based on selected attributes. Force field analysis is used to partition the factors obtained into driving and restraining forces. An attempt was made to improve the software development process by transforming some of the restraining forces to driving forces.Keywords: Software, Process improvement, driving forces, restraining forces, force field analysis

From Stigma to Coolness The emergence of Naija (Nigerian Pidgin) as a 100 million speaker African language

Breakfast Debate, Institut Français du Nigéria, 26/09/201