The effects of perceived organizational support and organizational citizenship behaviors on continuance intention of enterprise resource planning

Although perceived organizational support (POS) and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) have long received research attention, little is known of the effects of POS and OCBs in the IS usage context, specifically in the context of enterprise resource planning (ERP) continuance. In this study, the authors integrate three research streams, including POS, OCBs, and ERP continuance intention into one model in order to investigate whether POS and OCBs: altruism, conscientiousness, courtesy, civic virtue, and sportsmanship affect ERP users' continuance intention. Grounded on social exchange theory (SET), this study examined the influence of POS on OCBs, satisfaction, and continuance. In addition, the authors also assessed the mediating effects of OCBs between POS and continuance. A survey utilizing a questionnaire was used to collect data and a total of 250 usable responses were analyzed by using partial least squares (PLS). The authors found that POS indirectly influence continuance intention through satisfaction and OCBs. Conscientiousness, civic virtue, and sportsmanship mediated the relationship between POS and continuance intention, but altruism and courtesy do not. Also, a number of implications for both researchers and managers are proposed

An Improved COCOMO based Model to Estimate the Effort of Software Projects

One of important aspects of software projects is estimating the cost and time required to develop projects. Nowadays, this issue has become one of the key concerns of project managers. Accurate estimation of essential effort to produce and develop software is heavily effective on success or failure of software projects and it is highly regarded as a vital factor. Failure to achieve convincing accuracy and little flexibility of current models in this field have attracted the attention of researchers in the last few years. Despite improvements to estimate effort, no agreement was obtained to select estimation model as the best one. One of effort estimation methods which is highly regarded is COCOMO. It is an extremely appropriate method to estimate effort. Although COCOMO was invented many years ago, it enjoys the effort estimation capability in software projects. Researchers have always attempted to improve the effort estimation capability in COCOMO through improving its structure. However, COCOMO results are not always satisfactory. The present study introduces a hybrid model for increasing the accuracy of COCOMO estimation. Combining bee colony algorithm with COCOMO estimation method, the proposed method obtained more efficient coefficient relative to the basic mode of COCOMO. Selecting the best coefficients maximizes the efficiency of the proposed method. The simulation results revealed the superiority of the proposed model based on MMRE and PRED(0.15)

Open Hybrid Model: A New Ensemble Model for Software Development Cost Estimation

Given various features of a software project, it may face different administrative challenges requiring right decisions by software project managers. A major challenge is to estimate software development cost for which different methods have been proposed by many researchers. According to the literature, the capability of a proposed model or method is demonstrated in a specific set of software projects. Hence, the aim of this study is to present a model to take advantage of the capabilities of various software development cost estimation models and methods simultaneously. For this purpose, a new model called "open hybrid model" was proposed based on the firefly algorithm. The proposed model includes an extensible bank of estimation methods. The model also includes an extensible bank of rules to describe the relation between existing methods. Considering project conditions, the proposed model tries to find the best rule for combining estimation methods in the methods bank. Three datasets of real projects were used to evaluate the precision of the proposed model, and the results were compared with those of other 11 methods. The results were compared based on performance parmeters widely used to show the accuracy and stability of estimation models. According to the results, the open hybrid model was able to select the most appropriate methods present in the methods bank

TASA: A New Task Scheduling Algorithm in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing refers to services that run in a distributed network and are accessible through common internet protocols. It merges a lot of physical resources and offers them to users as services according to service level agreement. Therefore, resource management alongside with task scheduling has direct influence on cloud networks’ performance and efficiency. Presenting a proper scheduling method can lead to efficiency of resources by decreasing response time and costs. This paper studies the existing approaches of task scheduling and resource allocation in cloud infrastructures and assessment of their advantages and disadvantages. Afterwards, a compound algorithm is presented in order to allocate tasks to resources properly and decrease runtime. The proposed algorithm is built according to conditions of compounding Min-min and Sufferage algorithms. In the proposed algorithm, task allocation between machines takes place alternatively and with continuous change of scheduling algorithms. The main idea of the proposed algorithm is to concentrate on the number of tasks instead of the existing resources. The simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm can achieve higher performance in decreasing response time

Optimization Task Scheduling Algorithm in Cloud Computing

Abstract -Since software systems play an important role in applications more than ever, the security has become one of the most important indicators of softwares. Cloud computing refers to services that run in a distributed network and are accessible through common internet protocols. Presenting a proper scheduling method can lead to efficiency of resources by decreasing response time and costs. This research studies the existing approaches of task scheduling and resource allocation in cloud infrastructures and assessment of their advantages and disadvantages. Afterwards, a compound algorithm is presented in order to allocate tasks to resources properly and decrease runtime. In this paper we proposed a new method for task scheduling by learning automata (LA). This method where has named RAOLA is trained by historical information of task execution on the cloud, then divide task to many classes and evaluate them. Next, manage virtual machine for capture physical resources at any period based on rate of task classes, such that improve efficiency of cloud network

Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Approach To Increase The Accuracy Of Software Development Effort Estimation

predicting the effort of a successful project has been a major problem for software engineers the significance of which has led to extensive investigation in this area. One of the main objectives of software engineering society is the development of useful models to predict the costs of software product development. The absence of these activities before starting the project will lead to various problems. Researchers focus their attention on determining techniques with the highest effort prediction accuracy or on suggesting new combinatory techniques for providing better estimates. Despite providing various methods for the estimation of effort in software projects, compatibility and accuracy of the existing methods is not yet satisfactory. In this article, a new method has been presented in order to increase the accuracy of effort estimation. This model is based on the type-2 fuzzy logic in which the gradient descend algorithm and the neuro-fuzzy-genetic hybrid approach have been used in order to teach the type-2 fuzzy system. In order to evaluate the proposed algorithm, three databases have been used. The results of the proposed model have been compared with neuro-fuzzy and type-1 fuzzy system. This comparison reveals that the results of the proposed model have been more favorable than those of the other two models

A Novel ICA-based Estimator for Software Cost Estimation

One of the most important and valuable goal of software development life cycle is software cost estimation or SCE. During the recent years, SCE has attracted the attention of researchers due to huge amount of software project requests. There have been proposed so many models using heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms to do machine learning process for SCE. COCOMO81 is one of the most popular models for SCE proposed by Barry Boehm in 1981. However COCOMO81 is an old estimation model, it has been widely used for the purpose of cost estimation in its new forms. In this paper, the Imperialism Competition Algorithm (ICA) has been employed to tune the COCOMO81 parameters. Experimental results show that in the separated COCOMO81 dataset, ICA can estimate the COCOMO81 model parameters such that the performance parameters are significantly improved. The proposed hybrid model is flexible enough to tune the parameters for any data sets in form of COCOMO81

Experimental Evaluation of Algorithmic Effort Estimation Models using Projects Clustering

One of the most important aspects of software project management is the estimation of cost and time required for running information system. Therefore, software managers try to carry estimation based on behavior, properties, and project restrictions. Software cost estimation refers to the process of development requirement prediction of software system. Various kinds of effort estimation patterns have been presented in recent years, which are focused on intelligent techniques. This study made use of clustering approach for estimating required effort in software projects. The effort estimation is carried out through SWR (StepWise Regression) and MLR (Multiple Linear Regressions) regression models as well as CART (Classification And Regression Tree) method. The performance of these methods is experimentally evaluated using real software projects. Moreover, clustering of projects is applied to the estimation process. As indicated by the results of this study, the combination of clustering method and algorithmic estimation techniques can improve the accuracy of estimates

Towards improvement of analogy-based software development effort estimation: a review

In this paper a systematic review is conducted to investigate the structure, components, techniques, evaluation procedure, and comparison scope related to prior ABE-based studies. The undeniable role of accurate development effort estimation in the success of software project management has attracted the attention of researchers over the past few years. Among various algorithmic and non-Algorithmic estimation methods, analogy based estimation (ABE) is a widely accepted method due to its simplicity and estimation capability. This paper investigates the improvement process of ABE method during 2000 to 2012. Six research questions are defined to be addressed through evaluation of prior ABE-based studies. The review domain includes 24 papers selected through a tough filtration process. The results show that improvement of ABE can be performed through adjustment, grey theory, attribute weighting and attribute selection techniques. Moreover, ABE configurations can significantly affect the results

A PSO-based model to increase the accuracy of software development effort estimation

Development effort is one of the most important metrics that must be estimated in order to design the plan of a project. The uncertainty and complexity of software projects make the process of effort estimation dif?cult and ambiguous. Analogy-based estimation (ABE) is the most common method in this area because it is quite straightforward and practical, relying on comparison between new projects and completed projects to estimate the development effort. Despite many advantages, ABE is unable to produce accurate estimates when the importance level of project features is not the same or the relationship among features is dif?cult to determine. In such situations, ef?cient feature weighting can be a solution to improve the performance of ABE. This paper proposes a hybrid estimation model based on a combination of a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and ABE to increase the accuracy of software development effort estimation. This combination leads to accurate identi?cation of projects that are similar, based on optimizing the performance of the similarity function in ABE. A framework is presented in which the appropriate weights are allocated to project features so that the most accurate estimates are achieved. The suggested model is ?exible enough to be used in different datasets including categorical and non-categorical project features. Three real data sets are employed to evaluate the proposed model, and the results are compared with other estimation models. The promising results show that a combination of PSO and ABE could signi?cantly improve the performance of existing estimation models