Adding Value to Software Requirements： An Empirical Study in the Chinese Software Industry

The rapid growth of the Chinese software industry has attracted attention from all over the world. Meanwhile, software requirements selection has a crucial impact on the final value of a software product and the satisfaction of stakeholders. This paper presents an empirical study, which focuses on the decision-making criteria for requirements selection in market-driven software development projects in international companies in China. The outcome shows that some criteria, such as business strategy, customer satisfaction, and software features, are more important than others when making decisions for requirements selection

A Systematic Review on Search Engine Advertising

The innovation of Search Engine Advertising (SEA) was first introduced in 1998. It soon became a very popular tool among practitioners for promoting their websites on the Web and turned into a billion dollar revenue source for search engines. In parallel with its rapid growth in use, SEA attracted the attention of academic researchers resulting in a large number of publications on the topic of SEA. However, no comprehensive review of this accumulated body of knowledge is currently available. This shortcoming has motivated us to conduct a systematic review of SEA literature. Herewith, we searched for and collected 101 papers on the topic of SEA, published in 72 journals from different disciplines and analyzed them to answer the research questions for this study. We have identified the historical development of SEA literature, predominant journals in the publication of SEA research, active reference disciplines as well as the main researchers in the field of SEA. Moreover, we have classified SEA literature into four categories and 10 research topics. We also uncovered a number of gaps in SEA literature and provided future research direction accordingly. Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/pajais/vol7/iss3/2

An industrial case study of usability evaluation in market-driven packaged software development

In market-driven software development it is crucial to produce the best product as quickly as possible in order to reach customer satisfaction. Requirements arrive at a high rate and the main focus tends to be on the functional requirements. The functional requirements are important, but their usefulness relies on their usability, which may be a rewarding competitive means on its own. Existing methods help software development companies to improve the usability of their product. However, companies that have little experience in usability still find them to be difficult to use, unreliable, and expensive. In this study we present results and experiences on conducting two known usability evaluations, using a questionnaire and a heuristic eval-uation, at a large software development company. We have found that the two methods complement each other very well, the first giving scientific measures of usability attributes, and the second revealing actual usability deficiencies in the software. Although we did not use any usability experts, evaluations performed by company employees produced valuable results. The company, who had no prior experience in usability evaluation, found the results both useful and meaningful. We can conclude that the evaluators need a brief introduction on usability to receive even better results from the heuristic evaluation, but this may not be required in the initial stages. Much more essential is the support from every level of management. Usability engi-neering is cost effective and does not require many resources. However, without direct management support, usability engi-neering efforts will most likely be fruitless

Knowledge management in software engineering - describing the process

The management of knowledge and experience are key means by which systematic software development and process improvement occur. Within the domain of Software Engineering (SE), quality continues to remain an issue of concern. Although remedies such as fourth generation programming languages, structured techniques and object-oriented technology have been promoted, a “silver bullet ” has yet to be found. Knowledge Management (KM) gives organisations the opportunity to appreciate the challenges and complexities inherent in software development. This paper reports on two case studies that investigate KM in SE at two IT organisations. Structured interviews were conducted, with the assistance of a qualitative questionnaire. The results were used to describe current practices for KM in SE, to investigate the nature of KM activities in these organisations, and to explain the impact of leadership, technology, culture and measurement as enablers of the KM process for SE

Balancing Software Product Investments

The long-term sustainability of a software product depends on more than developing features. Priorities are placed on aspects that support the development of software, like software product quality (eg. ISO 9126), project constraints -- time and cost, and even the development of intellectual capital (IC). A greater focus on any one aspect takes priority from another, but as each aspects delivers a different type of value managers have trouble comparing and balancing these aspects. This paper presents a method to help determine the balance between key priorities in the software development process. The method is applied to a new case study, that also combines with results from previous studies. The results show it is possible to compare features, quality, time, cost and IC in a comprehensive way, with the case study showing that participants perceive a change from a shorter-term product perspective to a longer-term organisation beneficial to the business

An Experiment in Inspecting the Quality of Use Case Descriptions

Achieving higher quality software is one of the aims sought by development organizations worldwide. Establishing defect free statements of requirements is a key strategy for achieving improvements in quality. In this paper we present the results of a laboratory experiment that explored the application of a checklist in the process of inspecting use case descriptions. We compare the checklist with others in the literature then report experimental findings. A simple experimental design was adopted in which the control group used an ad hoc approach and the treatment group was provided with a six-point checklist. The defects identified in the experiment were classified at three levels of significance: i. Internal to the use case ii. Specification impact, and iii. Requirements impact. It was found that the identification of requirements defects was not significantly different between the control and treatment groups, but that more specification and internal defects were found by the groups using the checklist. In the paper we explore the implications of these findings. ACM Classification: D.2.1 (Software – Software Engineering – Requirements/Specifications) 1