Crowdtesting intermediary tool for managing public service software project

Software testing is important to ensure correctness of the software, gaining confidence from stakeholders, and contributing towards achieving high quality software. One approach to conduct software testing is through crowdtesting.It allows people from the crowd to test a particular software using their own devices in real environment. Currently in publicservice sector there is no existing intermediary tool to manage crowdtesting activities for public service software project.Therefore, public service software project relied on common testing approaches such as testing by internal employees oroutsourced to specific suppliers, that in turn making public service software projects facing the risk of inadequate testing. This study intends to determine whether the implementation of crowdtesting is able to address the problems of inadequate testing in public service software project and to propose an application as intermediary tool for crowdtesting in public service. This study employed interviews and survey with IT practitioners in public service sector to understand the applicability of crowdtesting in public service and specifications for the proposed intermediary tool. The intermediary tool is developed and evaluated to determine its effectiveness in managing crowdtesting for public service software project. The evaluation shows that most of the participants agree that the intermediary tool shows effectiveness in terms of defect detection, cost benefit, time, and testing coverage

Usability testing on government agencies web portal: a study on Ministry of Education Malaysia (MOE) web portal

Web portals are emerging as a key component for government agencies in Malaysia to served public citizen in providing information and services in a more convenient, prompt, and secured platform. Usability of the web portal is one of the most important attributes for web portal quality because it generates persuasive factor to attract and satisfy users. This study evaluates the usability of the Ministry of Education Malaysia (MOE) web portal by conducting the usability testing in order to measure the usability level of the web portal and provides the relevant usability enhancement bas It also focused on evaluation of seven (7) usability attributes adopted from ISO/IEC 25010 and Website Analysis and Measurement Inventory (WAMMI) which are effectiveness, efficiency, learnability, controllability, attractiveness, helpfulness and satisfaction. The evaluation is limited to frequent tasks that ordinarily performed by the users on the MOE web portal which gathered from pilot study. Two stages of usability testing was conducted in this study which are pre-usability testing to evaluate the usability of the current MOE web portal and post-usability testing on the enhanced version of the MOE web portal. The pre-usability testing result showed that the usability of the current MOE web portal was at a moderate level for all the usability attributes and the post-usability testing result showed that the usability score improved significantly for all the usability attributes. This study proved that the usability testing method is one of the useful methods in enhancing web portal usability

Application of social media among medical practitioner for sharing tacit knowledge: a pilot study

Tacit knowledge is perceived as the most strategically important resource of competitiveness. The rise of web-based applications such as social media also gives rise to the question on whether these applications can facilitate tacit knowledge sharing in a collaborative work environment. Previous studies have indicated that such notion is indeed possible, but there is still a lack of understanding of how social media could facilitate tacit knowledge sharing as well as the condition that is most effective in transferring this type of knowledge. Hence, it is crucial to understand the individual and technical characteristics involved in tacit knowledge sharing using social media. This research attempts to bridge this gap as there is a need to develop a holistic tacit knowledge sharing model. Towards this end, before the model is developed, the conceptual model and its instruments are validated by three field experts. A pilot study is conducted to determine the reliability and validity of the measurement indicators as well as an analysis using SPSS. The findings of the pilot study are hence presented in this paper. The results confirmed the validity of the proposed model as well as the validity and reliability of the instrument. This pilot study investigated on whether the proposed research model is viable for further research, or whether pertinent changes to the model or the methodology need to be done before the model can be used on a larger sample. Recommendations for a follow-up study concludes the paper

A survey on refinement in formal methods and software engineering

In software engineering, formal methods allow the design, modelling and verification of hardware and software systems. Formal methods introduce preciseness, remove ambiguity in specifications, and support the verification of requirements and design properties. Methods and approaches are needed to manage the formal models and handle their complexity. Refinement has been carried out for system artefacts ranging from modelling and design levels like architectures, and state machines to implementation and programming levels like source code. Refinement is a significant way for building complicated systems starting from simple ones by adding features gradually. Refinement has to be understood carefully in the context of formal specification and verification. This article provides a survey on some refinement techniques and methods and in the context of formal methods and software engineering. We believe that this survey sheds a light on the research direction in regards to the refinement of formal methods. This survey also helps formal methods practitioners and users in observing and understanding the advantages and limitations of refinements methods and techniques of various studied formal methods. Accordingly, they can decide which formal method is to be used in modelling systems via refinement or which formal method is to be extended with new concepts and notions to support refinement

Methodology of refinement and decomposition in UML-B

UML-B is a UML-like graphical front end for Event-B that provides support for object-oriented modelling concepts. In particular, UML-B supports class diagrams and state machines, concepts that are not explicitly supported in plain Event-B. In Event-B, refinement is used to relate system models at different abstraction levels. The same abstraction-refinement concepts can also be applied in UML-B. This work introduces the notions of refined classes, refined state machines and extended classtypes to enable refinement of classes and state machines in UML-B. This work makes explicit the structures of class and state machine refinement in UML-B. This work also introduces seven refinement techniques which are, adding new attributes and associations, adding new classes, elaborating state, elaborating transition, moving a class event (or a state machine transition), adding new attributes and associations, and adding new class types.In Event-B, decomposition is used to decompose a system into components. The same decomposition concepts can be applied in UML-B. This work introduces the techniques of flattening state machines and state grouping to facilitate a decomposition of a UML-B machine. This work also introduces the notion of composed machine which composes the component machines. The composed machine refines a machine which is being decomposed. The composed machine is used to ensure the composition of the component machines is a valid refinement. Together with the composed UML-B machine, the notions of included machine, composed event and constituent event are introduced.The UML-B drawing tool and Event-B translator are extended to support the new refinement and decomposition concepts. A case study of an auto teller machine (ATM) is presented to validate the extensions of UML-B with regards to the above notions. The ATM case study also demonstrates the above techniques introduced in refinement and decomposition. In addition, this work provides guidelines for performing refinement and decomposition in UML-B and presents a number of generic invariants that may be used when refining a middleware. The middleware is a component via which a requesting component such as an ATM and a responding component such as bank interact in a distributed system

A method of refinement in UML-B

UML-B is a ‘UML-like’ graphical front end for Event-B that provides support for object-oriented and state-machine modelling concepts, which are not available in Event-B. In particular, UML-B includes class diagram and state-machine diagram editors with automatic generation of corresponding Event-B. In Event- B, refinement is used to relate system models at different abstraction levels. The same refinement concepts are also applicable in UML-B but require special consideration due to the higher-level modelling concepts. In previous work we described a case study to introduce support for refinement in UML-B. We now provide a more complete presentation of the technique of refinement in UML-B including a formalisation of the refinement rules and a definition of the extensions to the abstract syntax of UML-B notation. The provision of gluing invariants to discharge the proof obligations associated with a refinement is a significant step in providing verifiable models. We discuss and compare two approaches for constructing gluing invariants in the context of UML-B refinement

ATM Case study models - UML-B/Event-B

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Behaviour-driven formal model development

Formal systems modelling offers a rigorous system-level analysis resulting in a precise and reliable specification. However, some issues remain: Modellers need to understand the requirements in order to formulate the models, formal verification may focus on safety properties rather than temporal behaviour, domain experts need to validate thefinal models to ensure they fit the needs of stakeholders. In this paper we discuss how the principles of Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) can be applied to formal systems modelling and validation. We propose a process where manually authored scenarios are used initially to support the requirements and help the modeller.The same scenarios are used to verify behavioural properties of the model. The model is then mutated to automatically generate scenarios that have a more complete coverage than the manual ones. These automatically generated scenarios are used to animate the model in a final acceptance stage. For this acceptance stage, it is important that a domain expert decides whether or not the behaviour is useful