Software Design Criteria for Maintainability

One of the current issues in the software engineering community is related to problems of software maintenance. It is a common belief that these problems are caused by bad software design and poor maintenance practices. The first of these is the concern of this paper. We argue that the existing software design methodologies are not properly developed based on criteria for easy software maintenance at later stages. Therefore, with a set of software design criteria for maintainability, software is believed to be more maintainable. In this paper we shall identify those criteria followed by assessment of several software design methodologies

Managing usability evaluation practices in agile development environments

Usability evaluation is a core usability activity that minimizes risks and improves product quality. The returns from usability evaluation are undeniable. Neglecting such evaluation at the development stage negatively affects software usability. In this paper, the authors develop a software management tool used to incorporate usability evaluation activities into the agile environment. Using this tool, agile development teams can manage a continuous evaluation process, tightly coupled with the development process, allowing them to develop high quality software products with adequate level of usability. The tool was evaluated through verification, followed by the validation on satisfaction. The evaluation results show that the tool increased software development practitioner satisfaction and is practical for supporting usability work in software projects.

A framework for software requirement ambiguity avoidance

This research deals with software requirements ambiguity problems. Among these are incomplete, incorrect, improper, inaccurate and unambiguous requirements. Interestingly, published material related to Software Requirements Specifications (SRS) problems discusses ambiguity as one of the most conversed problems. This paper proposes a Software Requirement Ambiguity Avoidance Framework (SRAAF) to assist and support requirement engineers to write unambiguous requirements, by selecting correct elicitation technique based on the evaluation of various attributes and by applying the W6H technique. We explored existing theories and the outcomes of experimental research to construct the framework. On the basis of existing and inferred knowledge, we tried to justify proposed frameworks components. Our selection process focuses on various situational attributes. We added various situational attributes related to project, stakeholders and requirement engineer for the selection process. Newly devised approach chooses techniques other than traditional techniques or most common techniques and deals with ambiguity to capture the correct requirements information from stakeholders. The framework will be able to address the selection and ambiguity issues in a more effective way and can handle vagueness. New evidence related to attributes and adequacy matrix can be easily added to the framework without any inconvenience

Knowledge sharing on implementing software process quality model evaluation: Focus group approach

The Extended Software Process Assessment and Certification(SPAC) Model is a model that assesses and certifies the effectiveness and efficiency of software process, which focuses on the agile and secured based software development practices. The proposed model was evaluated using focus group approach.This approach is not often used in the software engineering field even though it has various benefits.Therefore, this paper shares the experiences on the implementation of the focus group for model evaluation to reveal its usefulness.The detailed discussion on the steps taken to implement the approach is discussed. Based on the experience, it is found that this approach is very time effective, can be conducted easily and can get more evaluation done at onc

Using strategy mapping and cause-and-effect relationship for measuring ITSP implementation.

The Information Technology Strategic Planning (ITSP) was developed to lead and reflect the organizational achievement and future aspiration. The plan basically includes the information technology (IT) goals and strategies for the next few years. The intention was to justify IT contributions towards the efficiency, effectiveness and competitiveness. The plan may comprise of associated IT projects to achieve the planning strategies. Previous study has concluded that most of the plans are usually hard to manage due to various projects involved. Therefore, many performance measurement models and frameworks have been investigated and exploited to address the problem. Measuring ITSP implementation is important to justify the achievement of the planned projects. The focus of this paper is describing the application of the strategy mapping and cause and- effect relationship approach on measuring the achievement of the strategies and projects involved in the ITSP. This paper also report on the testing results of the related approach on the real case study to identify its applicability and measurability

Software Process Model for Dynamic Website Development towards Quality Product

Most sectors today, such as industries, banking, travel, education, and government, are moving towards the web as an improvement and enhancement to their businesses and services. Dynamic websites, which are considered as one type of web applications, should follow systematic and sound software development methodology to achieve quality and standard of the product. However, previous studies have revealed that many websites which are available on the Internet do not fulfil the quality requirements to be considered as a successful quality website. This study investigates the current issues in dynamic website development including the methodology, quality attribute, and the process for dynamic website development in order to achieve quality website. This work also determines factors that motivate developers to follow sound methodology in developing the dynamic websites and the barriers of not following one. Lastly, this paper presents the development of the software process model for dynamic website development that aim is to ensure the quality of the website as a good software product. The proposed model is developed based on findings from the empirical study conducted that involves software developers and practitioners as the respondents

Intelligent software quality model: The theoretical framework

Globally, software quality issues has increasingly been seen as a common strategic response for achieving competitiveness in business.It has been seen very important as the usage of software become very demanding.Software quality includes quality control tests, quality assurance and quality management.Currently, software quality models available were built based on static measurements of attributes and measures.Previous study has indicated that to ensure the quality of software meets the future requirements and needs, the new dynamic and intelligent software quality model has to be developed.This paper discusses the development of intelligent software quality model based on behavioral and human perspectives approach which enhances from Pragmatic Quality Factor (PQF) model as a benchmark of the quality assessment

Filter-wrapper based feature ranking technique for dynamic software quality attributes

This article presents a filter-wrapper based feature ranking technique that is able to learn and rank quality attributes according to new cases of software quality assessment data.The proposed feature ranking technique consists of a scoring method named Most Priority of Feature (MPF) and a learning algorithm to learn the software quality attribute weights. The existing ranking techniques do not address the issue of redundancy in ranking the software quality attributes. Our proposed technique resolves the redundancy issue by using classifiers to choose attributes that shows high classification accuracy. Experimental result indicates that our technique outperforms other similar technique and correlates better with human experts