Ali Yazici

E-Government: A Global View and an Empirical Evaluation of Some Attributes of Citizens.

Abstract This paper reviews and discusses e-government (e-gov) issues in general, its global perspective, and then reports the findings of a survey concerning impact of gender and education amongst the e-gov users in Turkey. Although the impact of gender and education in the use of e-gov has long been attracting interests of academics, no quantitative research has ever been realized in this field in the country. The survey was conducted among e-gov users with different gender and level of education from different sectors such as ordinary citizens, government, and private sectors. According to the comparative analysis the use of e-gov content and services is pervasive and is closely linked to gender and level of education.

Successful requirement elicitation by combining requirement engineering techniques

The role of customers and other stakeholders is becoming increasingly significant during requirement engineering activities. Methods of eliciting requirements are now more co-operative. There are many techniques to obtain requirements from customers. Selecting the right techniques according to the characteristics of the project is very important. In some complex problems, combination of requirement engineering techniques should be applied for efficient and successful requirement engineering process. In this paper, we have presented the application of combination of requirement engineering techniques for a real life complex project (Supply Chain Management) with higher requirements volatility developed in a small scale software development organization.This will help in understanding requirements elicitation for such kind of complex software and facilitate in selecting the appropriate techniques towards getting the consistent and complete requirements.

A neural network-based approach for calculating dissolved oxygen profiles in reservoirs

A Neural Network (NN) modelling approach has been shown to be successful in calculating pseudo steady state time and space dependent Dissolved Oxygen (DO) concentrations in three separate reservoirs with different characteristics using limited number of input variables. The Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm was adopted during training. Pre-processing before training and post processing after simulation steps were the treatments applied to raw data and predictions respectively. Generalisation was improved and over-fitting problems were eliminated: Early stopping method was applied for improving generalisation. The correlation coefficients between neural network estimates and field measurements were as high as 0.98 for two of the reservoirs with experiments that involve double layer neural network structure with 30 neurons within each hidden layer. A simple one layer neural network structure with 11 neurons has yielded comparable and satisfactorily high correlation coefficients for complete data set, and training, validation and test sets of the third reservoir.

JMathNorm: A Database Normalization Tool Using Mathematica

This paper is about designing a complete interactive tool, named JMathNorm, for relational database (RDB) normalization using Mathematica. It is an extension of the prototype developed by the same authors [1] with the inclusion of Second Normal Form (2NF), and Boyce-Codd Normal Form (BCNF) in addition to the existing Third normal Form (3NF) module. The tool developed in this study is complete and can be used for real-time database design as well as an aid in teaching fundamental concepts of DB normalization to students with limited mathematical background. JMathNorm also supports interactive use of modules for experimenting the fundamental set operations such as closure, and full closure together with modules to obtain the minimal cover of the functional dependency set and testing an attribute for a candidate key. JMathNorms GUI interface is written in Java and utilizes Mathematicas JLink facility to drive the Mathematica kernel.

Software piracy among IT professionals in organizations

This paper reviews and discusses software piracy issues from a global perspective. It also reports the findings of a survey concerning the impact of demographic factors on software piracy among IT professionals in Turkey. Although the impact of these factors on software piracy has long been attracting the interest of academics, no quantitative research has ever been realized in this field in the country. Elsewhere also, most of the software piracy-related studies are limited to students and academics and very few have reported findings related to IT professionals in different organizations. The survey was conducted among IT professionals from government and private sector organizations. Based on this survey, the results indicated that gender, age and experience have significant impact on software piracy. The implications of these findings are discussed and compared with other related studies.

Normalizing relational database schemas using mathematica

In this paper, basic relational database (DB) normalization algorithms are implemented efficiently as Mathematica modules. It was observed that, Mathematica provided a straightforward platform as opposed to previous ones, mainly Prolog based tools which required complex data structures such as linked list representations with pointers. A Java user interface called JMath-Norm was designed to execute the Mathematica modules in a systematic way. For this purpose, Mathematicas Java link facility (JLink) is utilized to drive the Mathematica kernel. JMath-Norm provides an effective interactive tool in an educational setting for teaching DB normalization theory.

Systematic Mapping Study on Performance Scalability in Big Data on Cloud Using VM and Container

In recent years, big data and cloud computing have gained importance in IT and business. These two technologies are becoming complementing in a way that the former requires large amount of storage and computation power, which are the key enabler technologies of Big Data; the latter, cloud computing, brings the opportunity to scale on-demand computation power and provides massive quantities of storage space. Until recently, the only technique used in computation resource utilization was based on the hypervisor, which is used to create the virtual machine. Nowadays, another technique, which claims better resource utilization, called “container” is becoming popular. This technique is otherwise known as “lightweight virtualization” since it creates completely isolated virtual environments on top of underlying operating systems. The main objective of this study is to clarify the research area concerned with performance issues using VM and container in big data on cloud, and to give a direction for future research.

Cross-factor analysis of software engineering practices versus practitioner demographics

More experienced practitioners experience more challenges in SE phases and tasks.Almost 55% of participants measure software size.Agile development is used the least by participants in military and defense sector.Agile is favored by participants in small-sized companies, whereas Waterfall is not.As company size increases, Spiral life-cycle usage increases, whereas XP decreases. ContextUnderstanding the types of software engineering practices and techniques used in the industry is important. There is a wide spectrum in terms of the types and maturity of software engineering practices conducted in each software team and company. Furthermore, it is important to understand the cross-factor relationship of software engineering practices and practitioner demographics including their companies and projects, e.g., is it the case that practitioners developing software for sectors such as military would utilize software size measurement approaches more, or use different software development methodologies, compared to practitioners developing software for other sectors?, and what kinds of practices are conducted by practitioners in small versus large companies? ObjectiveOur objective is to get an understanding into the cross-factor correlation of various software engineering practices versus practitioner demographics including their companies and projects (e.g., target industry, size and work experience). Such an understanding will enable us to identify patterns and pinpoint special issues which should be studied and addressed in the context of each specific demographic (e.g., small versus large companies). Thus, we decided to conduct an exploratory study in this area and collected real industrial data in the context of Turkey which has a vibrant software industry. MethodTo achieve the above objective, we use the data from a recent Turkish-wide survey of software engineering practices which was systematically designed with 46 questions based on our past experience in the Canadian context and using the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK). 202 practicing software engineers participated in the survey. We raise a set of 12 research questions about the cross-factor correlation of software engineering practices and practitioner demographics, and address them using statistical analysis. ResultsThe exploratory study results reveal important and interesting findings about cross-factor relationship of software engineering practices and practitioner demographics. Among some of the most interesting findings are the followings: (1) By analyzing the trends, we were first surprised to see that as a practitioner gets more years of work experience, against what one would expect, s/he experiences more challenges in Software Development Life-Cycle (SDLC) phases and SE tasks; (2) Almost 55% of participants measure software size; (3) Agile/lean development is used the least (16%) by the participants working in the companies serving the military and defense sector; (4) Usage of waterfall is low among participants employed by small-sized companies whereas Agile/lean development is relatively popular among this class of participants; and (5) As company size increases, usage of spiral development slightly increases, whereas usage of extreme programming practices decreases. ConclusionThe results of this exploratory study will be useful to software engineering professionals and researchers both in Turkey and world-wide by revealing the cross-factor relationship of software engineering practices versus practitioner demographics. The study raises several new research directions, e.g., (1) Why are not many practitioners using any size nor project estimation metrics and how these fundamental engineering approaches could be utilized more frequently?, (2) What are the best practices, success stories and challenging experiences in using SE tools?, and (3) Why is Agile/lean development is not popular in the military and defense sector and how these approaches could be utilized more frequently.

A casestudy of data models in data warehousing

Data warehousing (DW) provides an excellent approach in transforming operational data into useful and reliable information to support the decision making process in any organization. In this paper, a case study is performed to implement a DW. This case-study is used to describe and compare various conceptual and logical design models for data warehousing. This comparison is done to find which of the conceptual and logical data models are more appropriate for implementing data warehouse for sales and shipping system.

2d polynomial interpolation: a symbolic approach with mathematica

This paper extends a previous work done by the same authors on teaching 1d polynomial interpolation using Mathematica [1] to higher dimensions. In this work, it is intended to simplify the the theoretical discussions in presenting multidimensional interpolation in a classroom environment by employing Mathematicas symbolic properties. In addition to symbolic derivations, some numerical tests are provided to show the interesting properties of the higher dimensional interpolation problem. Runges phenomenon was displayed for 2d polynomial interpolation.