Amir Zeid

A UML profile for service oriented architectures

Service Oriented Computing is the new paradigm for Distributed computing and e-business processing that is changing the way software applications are designed, architected, delivered and consumed. Services are autonomous platform-independent computational elements that can be described, published, discovered, orchestrated and programmed using standard protocols for the purpose of building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Engineering and modeling service-oriented architectures need extensions to existing modeling techniques and methodologies. In this paper, we propose a UML profile for service-oriented architectures.

Integrated QoS Utility-Based Model for Cloud Computing Service Provider Selection

Cloud Computing is gaining a considerable attention in the past few years. It changes the way people acquire software and hardware as it provides them as services through internet on-demand following a pay-as-you-go financial model. With the exponential increase of such service, selecting the optimal provider based on predefined Quality of Service (QoS) requirements becomes crucial. The current techniques are just designed for performance evaluation and cost-benefit analysis; yet optimal service provider selection based on a group of QoS requirements is still uncovered as it should be. In this paper we propose a mathematical model addressing the Cloud service provider selection optimization problem based on QoS guarantees. The proposed model efficiently matches with the characteristics of market-oriented platforms covering a wide range of service provider selection problems. The efficiency of the proposed model is validated through simulation studies.

Towards best practices in designing for the cloud

The explosion of Cloud computing propaganda has forced many companies to quickly move towards this new technology. Particularly given the current economic climate it seems like a prudent way to dynamically increase and decrease infrastructure at low cost. However, past experience with SOA has taught us that lack of commercial adaption and a proliferation of unusable standards may hinder this technology. Support from IBM and Microsoft for cloud is promising and leads to the need for strong design of cloud based systems to ensure quality and productivity. Issues already identified in Grid Computing and SOA will certainly prove important in the design of cloud based systems Due to the speed of network development due to cloud architectures, an increasing level of importance must be placed on the design to regulate issues such as: instance access control, regulatory issues, development practices, security and practical operational issues. Capturing and discussing best practices on these subjects will contribute to a healthy movement in the right direction for those who will develop the Service Cloud.

Impact of introducing single-gender classrooms in higher education on student achievement levels: A case study in software engineering courses in the GCC region

Changing from a co-education to a single-gender learning environment could be an opportunity and a challenge to any institute. Software engineering is one of the fields that could be affected by gender-segregation policies. Teaching the subject involves group and individual activities which could be dramatically affected in single-gender settings. In this paper, we present our experience in teaching software engineering in gender segregated classes. We will compare the performance of students before and after gender segregation. We will show samples of the activities and the findings. We will have a discussion about the impact of gender segregation on the overall course performance. Our findings could be useful in providing strategies to enhance the higher education learning experience and to eliminate future gender divide issues in the workplace.

Establishing a global software development course: A cultural perspective

Global software development (GSD) is one of the main practices in software industry. The ability to outsource and manage software development at remote sites allows organizations to benefit from GSD since they get access to a wider and more economically feasible pool of developers. Recently, global software engineering courses are being introduced at academic institutes as part of computer science and software engineering degree requirements. There are many challenges associated with managing and executing globally distributed software projects in academic settings. In this paper, we will attempt to analyze the framework and components of a collaborative global software engineering course from a cultural perspective. We examine the different challenges related to team-setting, grading, communication tools, gender issues and associated risks. A discussion of how cultural differences may affect setting up the course is included. The uniqueness of the proposed research lies in two main areas: it examines collaboration between Kuwait, USA and Poland; and it investigates the proposed topics from a cultural perspective.

Lessons Learned from Establishing a Software Engineering Academic Programme in Developing Countries

Developing a curriculum in software engineering is challenging. Many technical, cultural and ethical issues have to be considered. This paper summarizes our experience in developing a B.Sc. degree in Computer Science with specialization in software engineering for the British University in Egypt (BUE). We will present the methodology we followed to design the curriculum. In addition, we will present the structure of the degree and we will give examples to show some courses that we had to introduce to handle some of the issues relevant to the local and global market needs. In addition, we will present some factors that had to be considered like the maturity of local software industry and awareness of copyright issues.

A Generic Framework for Modeling and Simulation of Cloud Computing Services

Cloud Computing is a paradigm in which tasks are assigned to a combination of computing resources, software and services accessed over a network following the pay-as–you-go financial model. It has been also described as on-demand computing. With the continuous increases of cloud service providers, it becomes crucial to develop a simulation tool to reflect the properties of such complex environment to help clients selecting the appropriate providers. Available Cloudbased tools are designed for cloud architectures and resources scheduling, not the problem of provider selection. Even the Grid-based tools who share many features with the Cloud cannot cope with such problem due to the novel characteristics and services of the Cloud. This paper provides a new simulation tool that reflects the nature of clouds embedding all its aspects, as well as its QoS parameters. Such tool is designed to simulate any framework or solution for service provider selection problem. The proposed simulation tool is validated by running a framework developed for service provider selection problem based on QoS and utility functions. The paper also reviews various mathematical approaches that have been used to model cloud services, where most of them are formulations of cloud services that aim to optimize its quality of service, performance or energy efficiency under given constraints.

Integrating international students' contests with computer sciecnce capstone: Lessons learned and best practices

Microsoft Imagine Cup is the worlds premier student technology competition. Every year students from all over the world compete to solve the world toughest problems in different categories. In ten years, the Imagine Cup has grown to be a truly global competition focused on finding solutions to real-world problems. Since 2003, over 1.4 million students have participated in the Imagine Cup with 358,000 students representing 183 countries and regions registering for the Imagine Cup 2011 competition [7]. In this paper, we present our experience in integrating imagine cup (IC) with computer science (CS) capstone courses at the American University of Kuwait (AUK). In the past four years, we coached four different teams in three consecutive years (2009-2012) to win Microsoft Imagine cup in the Gulf region (GCC region includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE) and qualify to the world finals. We present our best practices and three case studies of winning projects in the region (one of the three teams was totally formed of girls). We will also present the lessons learned and guidelines on how to integrate such design competitions with computer science capstone.

Best practices in cloud computing: designing for the cloud

Cloud computing is the latest technology evolution and potential silver bullet, and there is both great expectation and fear to what consequences these technologies might cause. Based on the experience with the lack of adoption of SOA among the general development community the recommendation is to make sure that the development community engage in how cloud computing evolves. Although there is already strong support for these technologies from companies such as IBM and Microsoft, there is a need to explore good ways of designing services for the Cloud to ensure quality and productivity. There are movements in the modelling community that require further investigation as well as surviving concepts from the SOA era that need to be captured. In addition - due to the potential rapid availability of services in the cloud it is important to start exploring consequences of using such services, for instance access control, regulatory issues, development practices, security and practical operational issues. Capturing and discussing best practices on these subjects will contribute to a healthy movement in the right direction for those who will develop services for the Cloud.

Using simulation games to teach global software engineering courses

Global software engineering is a growing field of research. The ability to develop software at remote sites provides means to utilize talents and skills in different parts of the world. Organizations and companies benefit from such diverse pool of developers. Recently, global software engineering courses started to be popular in academic settings to prepare generations of developers who can function in a professional way in such distributed setting. Courses are normally offered as part of computer science or software engineering degrees. There are different challenges pertaining to team members, environment and the interlacing factors like time zones, cultural diversity of team members, location barriers and gender issues. Simulation games have been used to teach classical software engineering courses. Simulation games can be used to illustrate and experiment with concepts like team management, performance and tool selection. SimSE is an educational simulation tool that provides graphical simulation environment to help students to practice anticipated challenges during software development. In this paper, we propose a model for distributed global software development simulation games. The model includes factors like time zones, cultural diversity of users (mainly Hofstedes culture dimensions are used), location barriers and gender issues. These factors will result in game triggers that may affect the development of the virtual project. The model is then implemented using the SimSE model builder. The game will be illustrated showing how it can be used in teaching global software engineering courses. The results will be verified using existing models.