Addressing challenges to teach traditional and agile project management in academia

In order to prepare students for a professional IT career, most universities attempt to provide a current educational curriculum in the Project Management (PM) area to their students. This is usually based on the most promising methodologies used by the software industry. As instructors, we need to balance traditional methodologies focused on proven project planning and control processes leveraging widely accepted methods and tools along with the newer agile methodologies. Such new frameworks emphasize that software delivery should be done in a flexible and iterative manner and with significant collaboration with product owners and customers. In our experience agile methodologies have witnessed an exponential growth in many diverse software organizations, and the various agile PM tools and techniques will continue to see an increase in adoption in the software development sector. Reflecting on these changes, there is a critical need to accommodate best practices and current methodologies in our courses that deliver Project Management content. In this paper we analyse two of the most widely used methodologies for traditional and agile software development – the widely used ISO/PMBOK standard provided by the Project Management Institute and the well-accepted Scrum framework. We discuss how to overcome curriculum challenges and deliver a quality undergraduate PM course for a Computer Science and Information systems curricula. Based on our teaching experience in Europe and North America, we present a comprehensive comparison of the two approaches. Our research covers the main concepts, processes, and roles associated with the two PM frameworks and recommended learning outcomes. The paper should be of value to instructors who are keen to see their computing students graduate with a sound understanding of current PM methodologies and who can deliver real-world software products.Accepted manuscrip

INFORMATION SYSTEMS ANALYSIS AND DESIGN COURSE WITH PROJECTS BASED ON REAL CUSTOMERS REQUIREMENTS

Establishing a learning process that reflects various specifics of Information systems area is a challenge for every Information Systems educational program. Creating practical skills at student education requires significant efforts universities cannot afford using only traditional forms of education. This is particularly true when it comes to information systems development, where the expectation of the users play significant role in defining systems requirements. To address this challenge for an important issue – information systems analysis and design, we apply a specific approach of involving real user’s requirements for student projects as a part of students’ education. The study contributes to the pedagogical and theoretical aspects of education in Information systems area by adapting methods and models for successful information systems analysis and design process. To practitioners, this paper presents directions for using effective requirements engineering activities

Communication and leadership skills in the Computer Science and Information Systems curricula: A case study comparison of US and Bulgarian programs

In this paper we present results from our curriculum research on the behavioral educational topics being in the computer science (CS) and information systems (IS) academic programs in two countries USA and Bulgaria. Specifically, we address learning outcomes as they pertain to IT Project Management. Our research reveals that the two countries approach undergraduate education from different vantage points. The US universities provide a flexible general education curriculum in many academic areas and students have the opportunity to strengthen their soft skills before they enter the workforce. Bulgarian universities provide specialized education in main CS subject areas and the students are technically strong upon graduation. Is there a way to balance out this divergent educational experience so that students get the best of both worlds? Our paper explores this aspect and provides possible solutions

Monitoring and Evaluating a Project for Upgrading Bulgarian E-Government Systems: A Case Study

The increasing importance of service sector forces organizations to present more and more services to citizens and business. Every country aims to improve and facilitate the use of e-services in the public sector. This paper enquires into a process of effective evaluating and controlling the development of new services and upgrading the existing ones as a part of a comprehensive project at a national level in Bulgaria. The implementations of different concepts of Information Systems, Software Engineering, and Project Management areas are discussed in the paper in the connection with the presented approach

SPARSITY HANDLING AND DATA EXPLOSION IN OLAP SYSTEMS

A common problem with OnLine Analytical Processing (OLAP) databases is data explosion - data size multiplies, when it is loaded from the source data into multidimensional cubes. Data explosion is not an issue for small databases, but can be serious problems with large databases. In this paper we discuss the sparsity and data explosion phenomenon in multidimensional data model, which lie at the core of OLAP systems. Our researches over five companies with different branch of business confirm the observations that in reality most of the cubes are extremely sparse. We also consider a different method that relational and multidimensional severs applies to reduce the data explosion and sparsity problems as compression and indexes techniques, partitioning, preliminary aggregations

Addressing Data Quality in Healthcare

Data quality is an important part of information processing, but its application in practice is often underestimated. The complexity of data quality management, especially in the case of big data, makes it difficult to work in different areas of application. Although medical records are a significant source of errors in most cases data quality assessment on medical data is partially performed. The presented data quality analysis and recommendations in this paper can help physicians and software developers to understand better data quality dimensions, identify gaps in quality assessment, and develop |own procedures and techniques that correspond to their specific use cases.BG05M2OP001-1.001-0004 Universities for Science, Informatics and Technologies in the e-Society (UNITe) and the National Scientific Program “eHealth” in Bulgaria

Data Errors And Relevant Dimension Values Detection With A Regular Sparsity Map

Data warehouses require and provide extensive support for data cleaning. They load and continuously refresh huge amounts of data from a variety of sources so the probability that some of the sources contain “dirty data” is high. In this paper we present our regular sparsity map editor which can be used for the purpose of detection of specific data errors in the data warehouse systems. We also discuss how it can be used for a selection of relevant dimension elements

Delegates' Summit: Best Practice and Definitions - Quality of Knowledge and Quality of Data

Post-Summit Results, Delegates' Summit, September 19, 2022, The Twelfth Symposium on Advanced Computation and Information in Natural and Applied Sciences (SACINAS), The 20th International Conference of Numerical Analysis and Applied Mathematics (ICNAAM), September 19--25, 2022, Heraklion, Crete, Greec

IDENTIFYING AND EMBEDDING BEHAVIORAL COMPETENCIES IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS COURSES

This paper describes our efforts in auditing coverage of critical all-inclusive behavioral competencies in Information Systems (IS) and Computer Science (CS) curricula. The paper introduces a framework to teach critical behavioral competencies such as communications, conflict management and leadership in teams in IS and CS programs. Such programs provide limited opportunity to students to develop these skills of great importance in the workforce. Our research reveals that usually such abilities are spread out across several courses and it is difficult to get a broad picture of which competencies are being delivered and where. We have researched a spreadsheet model that makes it possible to assess if topics such as leadership, teams or communications are underdeveloped. If any specific competency is missing, the model recommends a list of topics and exercises for integration into a course