Personas based support tool for requirements elicitation

Lack of user understanding can bring a damaging effect to software development projects. As we acknowledge, there is a wide variety of users in each software project and consequently there are variation of goals, needs and attitudes within the establishment of users' requirements.So, there are difficulties in organizing and categorizing these information and also, in validating these requirements within a development project. Using personas to capture and analyze users can facilitate user’s understanding.However, identifying personas from large user information is difficult.This research examines the persona technique and proposes a software support tool to help developers in gathering and analyzing requirements by using personas.Likewise, the goals and tasks of each persona are established via actual requirements of the users.The creation and utilization of persona have been investigated via proposed tool aimed to elicit and represent users' requirements in a manageable format. A “Personas based Support Tool for Requirements Elicitation (PSTRE)” facilitates software developers to gather and analyze user requirements.The resulting personas which are suggested by the proposed tool, have to be well understood and well presented to the development team and also provide easy way to extract main functionalities and features of the proposed system

A solution-based intelligent tutoring system integrated with an online game-based formative assessment: development and evaluation

Nowadays, intelligent tutoring systems are considered an effective research tool for learning systems and problem-solving skill improvement. Nonetheless, such individualized systems may cause students to lose learning motivation when interaction and timely guidance are lacking. In order to address this problem, a solution-based intelligent tutoring system (SITS) is integrated with an online game-based formative assessment game called tic-tac-toe quiz for single-player (TRIS-Q-SP) for learning computer programming. This assessment game combines tic-tac-toe with online assessment, and the rules of tic-tac-toe are revised to stimulate students to use online formative assessment actively. Finally, an experimental study is devised to assess the success of SITS, and significant achievements are observed for the experimental group, besides enjoyment and positive opinions toward the TRIS-Q-SP. Therefore, the practical use of SITS is supported, as the results indicate considerable advantages for the experimental group over the control group. The findings also reveal that immediate elaborated feedback upon answering each question in TRIS-Q-SP is part of an optimal design

Towards a highly customizable framework for release planning process

U razvoju softvera, planiranjem puštanja u promet izabiru se važna svojstva i zahtjevi temeljeni na tehničkim ograničenjima i ograničenjima sredstava te odnosima između zahtjeva. Planiranje puštanja u promet usmjereno je na pronalaženje optimalnog rješenja traženjem raznih stanja. Takav način traženja rješenja otkriva dvije stvari. Prvo, pokazuje da postoje različiti nejasni i nesigurni parametri koji utječu na rješenje. Drugo, da ne postoji samo jedno rješenja za neki problem. Mogu postojati različita rješenja koja se razlikuju po svojim karakteristikama (na pr. u odnosu na trajanje, složenost itd.). Stoga su mnoge metode planiranja puštanja u promet često specifične za samo neke aspekte problema. U ovom se radu istražuju razne postojeće metode za planiranje pokretanja u svrhu pronalaženja nekih općih razmišljanja i aktivnosti za uspostavljanje prilagodljivog okvira za planiranje puštanja u promet. Prilagodba se postiže identificiranjem učinkovitih parametara ili primjera parametara i njihovih odnosa tako da se može izabrati pravi algoritam ili metoda za svaku aktivnost. Karakteristike projekta mogu se odrediti na osnovu primjera parametara te se oni tada primjenjuju za određivanje odgovarajuće metode za izvršavanje pojedine aktivnosti u okviru čitavog postupka planiranja puštanja u promet, a čiji se rezultati bilježe. Taj predloženi okvir vrlo prilagodljivog postupka sa svojim mogućim obilježjima prilagođavanja zatim se ocjenjuje u nekoliko softverskih poduzeća. U 85 % slučajeva predloženi okvir za svaku aktivnost u skladu je s uvjetima poduzeća i pomaže u ubrzanju postupka planiranja puštanja u promet.In software development, release planning is performed to select important features and requirements based on resource and technical constraints and the relationships between requirements. Release planning focuses on finding an optimal solution by seeking various states. This kind of solution finding reveals two remarks. First, it shows that there are various, ambiguous and uncertain parameters that influence the solution. Second, there is not only one solution to any problem. Various solutions can be found that differ in their performance (e.g. time performance, complexity performance, etc.). Consequently, many methods for release planning are often specific to only certain problem domains. This paper examines various current release planning methods to extract the common activities and thoughts in order to establish a customizable framework for release planning. Customization is done by identifying effective parameters, parameter instances and their relationships so that they can affect the selection of the right algorithm or method for each activity. Project characteristics can be specified based on the parameter instances and they are then used to determine the suitable method for achieving each activity within the whole release planning process and the results of which are recorded. This proposed highly customizable process framework with its possible customization features is then validated in several software companies. In 85 % of the cases, the suggested framework for every activity of the process fits the companies’ circumstances and helps to hasten the process of release planning

Model to cope with Requirements Engineering Issues for Software Development Outsourcing

The anticipated benefits of Software Development Outsourcing (SDO) are not achieved in case of several projects because of the issues that emanate from Requirements Engineering (RE) process. This research work presents a Requirements Engineering Practices (REP) model to cope with the customarily occurring issues of the RE process for SDO. To formulate the model, five workshops have been conducted and Root Cause Analysis has been performed by considering 43 commonly occurring SDO RE process issues, and 147 RE practices to tackle the issues. To discover the root causes for commonly transpiring issues, 5-Whys technique has been employed. The relevant RE practices that can be used to deal with the root causes, have been endorsed by applying Brainstorming technique. For the 43 frequently occurring issues, 89 root causes have been discovered. Afterwards, 124 relevant RE practices have been recommended to eradicate the root causes and hence to address the corresponding issues. Thus, REP model postulates the root causes for commonly occurring issues of the SDO RE process, maps the root causes to the best relevant RE practices to address the corresponding issues. The model has been evaluated by an expert panel and evaluation results have been analysed through Inter-Rater Reliability analysis and Analysis of Means. The REP model supports the RE process for SDO by i). evading the adoption of random and inappropriate RE practices for dealing with the common issues of the process, ii) helping to attain the expected benefits of SDO

A Hybrid Personalized Scientific Paper Recommendation Approach Integrating Public Contextual Metadata

Rapid increase in scholarly publications on the web has posed a new challenge to the researchers in finding highly relevant and important research articles associated with a particular area of interest. Even a highly relevant paper is sometimes missed especially for novice researchers due to lack of knowledge and experience in finding and accessing the most suitable articles. Scholarly recommender system is a very appropriate tool for this purpose that can enable researchers to locate relevant publications easily and quickly. However, the main downside of the existing approaches is that their effectiveness is dependent on priori user profiles and thus, they cannot recommend papers to the new users. Furthermore, the system uses both public and non-public metadata and therefore, the system is unable to find similarities between papers efficiently due to copyright restrictions. Considering the above challenges, in this research work, a novel hybrid approach is proposed that separately combines a Content Based Filtering (CBF) recommender module and a Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommender module. Unlike previous CBF and CF approaches, public contextual metadata and paper-citation relationship information are effectively incorporated into these two approaches separately to enhance the recommendation accuracy. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, publicly available datasets were employed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the baseline approaches in terms of standard metrics (precision, recall, F1-measure, mean average precision, and mean reciprocal rank), indicating that the proposed approach is more efficient in recommending scholarly publications

Diversity in protein–protein interactions of connexins: emerging roles

AbstractGap junctions, specialised membrane structures that mediate cell-to-cell communication in almost all tissues, are composed of channel-forming integral membrane proteins termed connexins. The activity of these intercellular channels is closely regulated, particularly by intramolecular modifications as phosphorylations of proteins by protein kinases, which appear to regulate the gap junction at several levels, including assembly of channels in the plasma membrane, connexin turnover as well as directly affecting the opening and closure (“gating”) of channels. The regulation of membrane channels by protein phosphorylation/dephosphorylation processes commonly requires the formation of a multiprotein complex, where pore-forming subunits bind to auxiliary proteins (e.g. scaffolding proteins, catalytic and regulatory subunits), that play essential roles in channel localisation and activity, linking signalling enzymes, substrates and effectors into a structure frequently anchored to the cytoskeleton. The present review summarises the up-to-date progress regarding the proteins capable of interacting or at least of co-localising with connexins and their functional importance

A critical inquiry of strategic information systems planning (SISP) analysis approaches

Strategic Information Systems Planning (SISP) is critical to assist in the effective use of Information Technology in enterprises. One of the vital components within SISP to ensure its success is to perform an all-embracing enterprise analysis to ensure enterprise requirements are well understood and addressed. Existing enterprise situation analysis approaches which are typically used within SISP process are critically examined to identify perceptible shortcomings. This paper discusses the identified shortcomings and outlines focal requirements for an enterprise analysis approach within SISP to cater for present challenges