Improving software quality using an ontology-based approach

Ensuring quality in software development is a challenging process. The concepts of anti-pattern and bad code smells utilize the knowledge of reoccurring problems to improve the quality of current and future software development. Anti-patterns describe recurring bad design solutions while bad code smells describe source code that is error-free but difficult to understand and maintain. Code refactoring aims to remove bad code smells without changing a program’s functionality while improving program quality. There are metrics-based tools to detect a few bad code smells from source code; however, the knowledge and understanding of these indicators of low quality software are still insufficient to resolve many of the problems they represent. Minimal research addresses the relationships between or among bad code smells, anti-patterns and refactoring. In this research, we present a new ontology, Ontology for Anti-patterns, Bad Code Smells and Refactoring (OABR), to define the concepts and their relation properties. Such an ontological infrastructure encourages a common understanding of these concepts among the software community and provides more concise definitions that help to avoid overlapping and inconsistent description. It utilizes reasoning capabilities associated with ontology to analyze the software development domain and offer new insights into the domain. Software quality issues such as understandability and maintainability can be improved by identifying and resolving anti-patterns associated with code smells as well as preventing bad code smells before coding begins

The strategic role of HRM in organizational performance: the large hotel sector in New Zealand

It is a commonly belief held that in today’s highly unstable and competitive business environment, human resources (HR) are the best and ultimate resource an organization can buy for its survival and long-term success. Thus, human resources are attracting more and more attention from both academia and industries. The traditional role of human resource management, which focuses on the various practices used to manage people within an organization, is widely challenged. In the past two decades, more and more human resource managers and scholars have advocated strongly that human resources have great potential that has been ‘hidden’, and, instead, should be fully considered during an organization’s strategic planning and decision-making process. This thesis is devoted to exploring whether and how HR contributes to improved organizational performance when it is integrated with the organization’s strategic planning and decision making at different levels. The research is conducted on the large hotel sector in New Zealand. This context was chosen because of the gaps in the current strategic human resource management studies – they are dominated by research on manufacturing sectors in Europe and the US and lack evidence from the service industries in other parts of the world. The significance of the hotel business to New Zealand’s economy as a whole adds value to the justification. A mixed-method approach, namely interviews and a web survey, was used to collect data from general managers of hotels with more than 50 rooms throughout New Zealand. Emphasis was put on two major areas: current HR practices in the hotels, and the HR-strategy integration level and its influence on a hotel’s financial and non-financial performances. To explore the influence in depth, factors such as the size and ownership of the hotel, as well as business strategies being used by the hotels, were taken into consideration. Results from the two sources (interviews and a web survey) are carefully compared and contrasted. Results of the research indicate that the importance of HR is widely recognized by New Zealand hotel managers. HR practices that are being used by hotels all over the world have been adopted by hotels in New Zealand. More importantly, the HR-strategy integration present in New Zealand hotels is found have a positive association with a hotel’s future performance, through the hotel’s HR outcomes. More particularly, the high level of HR’s involvement in a hotel’s strategic decision-making process is significantly linked with the functional flexibility of a hotel’s staff, which in turn links to the hotel’s labour productivity. The findings of the thesis contribute to the theory development of strategic human resource management in that it supports the proposition that close HR-strategy integration has positive impacts on an organization’s performance. Also, it supports the hypothesis that there exists a time lag between the integration and the performance. The methodology used by the thesis also contributes to research in strategic human resources and hotel studies. The implications of the findings for hotel practitioners and policy-makers within the tourism industry are also discussed

Privacy protection for e-health systems by means of dynamic authentication and three-factor key agreement

During the past decade, the electronic healthcare (e-health) system has been evolved into a more patient-oriented service with smaller and smarter wireless devices. However, these convenient smart devices have limited computing capacity and memory size, which makes it harder to protect the user’s massive private data in the e-health system. Although some works have established a secure session key between the user and the medical server, the weaknesses still exist in preserving the anonymity with low energy consumption. Moreover, the misuse of biometric information in key agreement process may lead to privacy disclosure, which is irreparable. In this study, we design a dynamic privacy protection mechanism offering the biometric authentication at the server side whereas the exact value of the biometric template remains unknown to the server. And the user anonymity can be fully preserved during the authentication and key negotiation process because the messages transmitted with the proposed scheme are untraceable. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is proved to be semantic secure under the Real-or-Random Model. The performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme suits the e-health environment at the aspect of security and resource occupation