Abdul Azim Abd Ghani

Requirements Engineering Problems and Practices in Software Companies: An Industrial Survey

This paper presents about a study conducted to investigate the current state of Requirements Engineering (RE) problems and practices amongst the software development companies in Malaysia. The main objective of the study is to determine areas in RE process that should be addressed in future research in order to improve the process. Information required for the study was obtained through a survey, questionnaires distributed to project managers and software developers who are working at various software development companies in the country. Results show that software companies in this study are still facing great challenges in getting their requirements right due to organizational and technical factors. Also, we found out that high-maturity ratings do not generally correlate better performance and do not indicate effective, high-maturity practices especially to the RE practices. The findings imply that we must consider both human and technical problems, with extra care should be given to the technical issues and all the RE practices in our future research which is to re-build a specialized RE process improvement model.

Re-defining the Requirements Engineering Process Improvement Model

A specialized Requirements Capability Maturity Model (R-CMM) was created by a group of researchers from UK as an attempt to support the requirements engineering phase of software development. The validation performed to this model shows that it has some potentials to be a useful tool for both practitioners and researchers in the field of process improvement and requirements engineering. However, the R-CMM focuses on the requirements engineering process defined within the retired Software Engineering Institute’s (SEI’s) Software Capability Maturity Model (SW_CMM) process improvement framework. To continue its relevance and usefulness, we re-define the whole R-CMM within the characteristics of the latest Capability Maturity Model for Integration (CMMI) for Development (CMMI-DEV) v1.2. This paper describes how the CMMI-DEV characteristics are used to re-define the R-CMM, and rationale for re-building the requirements engineering model based on the latest process improvement framework. Also, this paper explains how the re-defined R-CMM adapts to the goals and practices set by the CMMI-DEV.

Requirements engineering problems in 63 software companies in Malaysia

It is widely acknowledged that problems associated with Requirements Engineering affect the quality of software and the effectiveness of the software development process. Malaysia is fast becoming an IT outsourcing heaven yet there is a lack of published studies on these problems in the region. This paper presents exploratory survey results of project and Requirements Engineering problems as identified by 63 Malaysian software development companies.

Relationships analysis between quality factors for Web applications

Software product quality should be evaluated using a defined quality model. The problem with earlier models was the lack of ability to account for dependency between the quality factors. In this paper, a case study on three different Web domains, i.e., academic, e-commerce and museum has been conducted to investigate the existence of interactions and dependencies between quality factors. The Pearson correlation technique has been applied in this study. The result indicated that for all 6 pairs of quality factors, for each pair, they are correlated to each other in all three domains. This means that there are interactions and dependencies between quality factors.

An Analysis on SAWSDL and its Implementation Tools

Recently, Semantic Annotations for WSDL SAWSDL standard emerged as a W3C recommendation to add semantics to WSDL components. SAWSDL annotates WSDL components with different semantics in order to automate Web service tasks, such as service discovery, composition, mediation, and invocation. In fact, certain service task requires a specific service semantic that semantically describes the service. As a result, several tools and techniques have emerged to allow users to get maximum advantage of semantic Web service by implementing SAWSDL. This paper analyzes SAWSDL standard. The relationships between SAWSDL and WSDL components were revealed. The direct relationships between SAWSDL components and service tasks through service semantics were investigated and reported. This paper also reviews some well-known tools that are used for SAWSDL implementation.

Excessive and addictive gaming control using counselling agent in online game design

In recent times, online game play has become a food for thought to concerned individuals, researchers and authorities of various countries due to its excessive and addictive usage. Although, various government have taken certain measures such as shutting down internet cafe at certain hours of the day, censoring the most brutal, offensive and aggressive sections of certain games before they are released. Researchers have advised developers on ways of limiting harm on players by suggesting design changes on time limit. Furthermore, researchers have also suggested that online game distributors ought to make available appropriate referral services. The impart of the above are yet to make any remarkable impact on players. In this paper, we have proposed a Counseling Agent model integrating informative and self-appraisal messages in online game design as a control measure. Informative and self-appraisal messaging in games have proven optimistic through making positive impact on player’s thoughts and behavior towards gaming. These messages are expected to remind players about the negative impact of excessive and addictive gaming habits, as well as suggesting possible reductive solutions through message streaming.In recent times, online game play has become a food for thought to concerned individuals, researchers and authorities of various countries due to its excessive and addictive usage. Although, various government have taken certain measures such as shutting down internet cafe at certain hours of the day, censoring the most brutal, offensive and aggressive sections of certain games before they are released. Researchers have advised developers on ways of limiting harm on players by suggesting design changes on time limit. Furthermore, researchers have also suggested that online game distributors ought to make available appropriate referral services. The impart of the above are yet to make any remarkable impact on players. In this paper, we have proposed a Counseling Agent model integrating informative and self-appraisal messages in online game design as a control measure. Informative and self-appraisal messaging in games have proven optimistic through making positive impact on player’s thoughts and behavior to...

Impact Propagation of Human Errors on Software Requirements Volatility

Requirements volatility (RV) is one of the key risk sources in software development and maintenance projects because of the frequent changes made to the software. Human faults and errors are major factors contributing to requirement change in software development projects. As such, predicting requirements volatility is a challenge to risk management in the software area. Previous studies only focused on certain aspects of the human error in this area. This study specifically identifies and analyses the impact of human errors on requirements gathering and requirements volatility. It proposes a model based on responses to a survey questionnaire administered to 215 participants who have experience in software requirement gathering. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and structural equation modelling (SEM) were used to analyse the correlation of human errors and requirement volatility. The results of the analysis confirm the correlation between human errors and RV. The results show that human actions have a higher impact on RV compared to human perception. The study provides insights into software management to understand socio-technical aspects of requirements volatility in order to control risk management. Human actions and perceptions respectively are a root cause contributing to human errors that lead to RV.

Enhanced Weighted Method for Test Case Prioritization in Regression Testing Using Unique Priority Value

Regression testing is an integral and expensive part in software testing. To reduce its effort, test case prioritization approaches were proposed. The problem with most of the existing approaches is the random ranking of test cases with equal weight. In this paper, an enhanced weighted method to prioritize the full test suite without using random ranking is presented. In addition, a controlled experiment was executed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show an improved performance in terms of prioritizing test cases and recording higher APFD values over the original weighted method. In future, a larger experiment would be executed to generalize the results.

Systematic literature review on effort estimation for Open Sources (OSS) web application development

The development of Web applications has a crucial role as most organizations have their own corporate Web applications to meet the needs of their respective businesses. Different needs create different complexities which represent a new challenge to Web application development. In order to ensure the timely delivery of a project, software providers offering this service choose to use Open Sources (OSS) as an alternative. Since OSS consist of an existing framework that can be implemented directly into the application, how far does this affect the complexity of the effort estimation? A number of research papers have outlined the efforts made to refine the complexity of this field. However, to our best knowledge a systematic overview of the research done on Web application development that involves OSS usage does not appear to exist. Hence, the aim of this paper is to conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) of OSS Web application development. For this purpose, 34 papers from a total of 67 papers were identified and studied. The findings of this study indicate that (a) no research has been carried out on the field mentioned; (b) there is no early effort estimation model for Web projects that involve the usage of OSS. Therefore, this work provides an overview of the field besides identifying future research possibilities.

Regression Test Case Selection &PrioritizationUsing Dependence Graph and Genetic Algorithm

Regression testing is very important process in software maintenance. Unfortunately, it is costly and time consuming to allow for the re-execution of all test cases during regression testing. The challenge in regression testing is the selection of best test cases from the existing test suite.This paper presents an evolutionary regression test case prioritization for object-oriented software based on extended system dependence graph model of the affected program using genetic algorithm. The approach is based on optimization of selected test case from dependency analysis of the source codes. The goal is to identify changes in a methods body due to data dependence, control dependence and dependent due to object relation such as inheritance and polymorphism, select the test cases based on affected statements and ordered them based on their fitness by using GA.The number of affected statements determined how fit a test case is good for regression testing. A case study is reported to provide evidence of the feasibility of the approach and its benefits in increasing the rate of fault detection and reduction in regression testing effort compared with retest-all. It was shown that our approach needs 30% of the test cases to cover all the faults, while 80% is needed to cover all the faults using retest-all, which is time consuming and costly.