Martin Dick

Is it okay to cheat? - the views of postgraduate students

This paper examines the attitudes of students in the Masters of Information Technology, Honours Degree in the Bachelor of Computing and Graduate Diploma of Computing at Monash University. Students were surveyed on the acceptability of a variety of scenarios involving cheating and on their knowledge of the occurrence of these scenarios. The survey found a strong consensus amongst the students as to what was acceptable or unacceptable practice. The paper then examines the significance of these results for educators aiming to prevent cheating amongst their students. The study reported is part of a larger study currently being undertaken in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE) at Monash University.

Making usability work in industry: an Australian practitioner perspective

The gap in usability knowledge between research and industry practice is an important one to bridge. This paper presents the findings of 12 interviews with usability practitioners. The interviews focus on eliciting stories about successful and unsuccessful usability outcomes. The analysis shows that an iterative usability process, ensuring stakeholder involvement, articulating usability goals and requirements and avoiding technological constraints are critical issues to achieving a successful usability outcome in a project.

Tool Support for Teaching the Personal Software Process

Software engineering education can be viewed as a challenging task. Computer science students tend to focus on the programming aspects of a project, and take a “hacking approach” to completing a project, rather than viewing the process. Our course material includes teaching the Personal Software Process (PSP). Students are required to produce defect and effort metrics, as well as project summary reports. Tools to assist information recording and production of reports are difficult for students to access. The cost in terms of financial and learning time is usually too high at the educational level to justify using commercial tools that are available for the professional software engineer. We have developed a tool—Personal Assistant for Software Engineers—to aid students in the learning of the PSP. The tool has been successfully used in four subjects for a semester. Following feedback and evaluation, it has been redesigned, and is currently in stage two. The tool has been useful for students, and has automated the previous manual process of producing time and defect reports, along with project summaries, thus allowing them to focus on the meaning of the information.

Improving operational efficiency of Web services with mobile agent technology

The distributed environment has often been described as unpredictable and variable, thus exposing hosted applications to potential reliability and performance related problems. The Web service architecture lacks support for applications to handle potential problems (including system overloading, insufficient performance, and security threats). This paper proposes and describes an implemented mechanism to address the lack of a formalized infrastructure for handling some of the potential problems, using the mobile agent technology. In particular, we propose a nomadic and adaptive Web service infrastructure, which facilitates applications to autonomously react to operational issues arising during execution. Further, the process of Web service relocation is also demonstrated and implementation has also been discussed.

A generic cost model and infrastructure for improving Web service efficiency through dynamic relocation

The Web service paradigm promotes the delivery of software as a service via the Web, instead of a product to end-users. The increase in assigned responsibilities for supporting organizational operations drives the needs for higher operational efficiencies (i.e. performance and reliability) and flexibilities (i.e. customizations). This paper makes two contributions. An infrastructure to support the development and operation of customized cost model components, used to manage cost efficiency and reliability issues. Secondly, a generic cost model algorithm that can be used as the foundation algorithm for cost model components. Further, the process of Web service relocation is also demonstrated and implementation has also been discussed.

Performance based cost models for improving web service efficiency through dynamic relocation

The performance and quality of a web service are important factors and are expected by parties utilizing the service. This paper proposes and implements a cost efficiency solution to cater for web services in a unique set of situation. The solution is designed for web services that have frequent user groups scattered in various geographic locations, without the existence of access patterns. This optimization solution is developed for the Fluid Infrastructure methodology. Its main emphasis is fundamentally to provide a mechanism that is capable of reacting to various problems (operational and performance related) in an efficient and autonomous manner. Discussions within this paper focus on the algorithms that are used to compute the efficiency metrics and implementation issues of the solution. Further, evaluation of these solutions are also demonstrated and validated.

Student interviews as a tool for assessment and learning in a systems analysis and design course

This paper examines the use of student interviews as a means of assessment for systems analysis and design assignments and as a means of providing feedback to students on their performance in the assignment. It uses student feedback from 510 student surveys gathered from Semester 1 2001 to Semester 2 2003 to assess the opinion of students on the use of interviews and describes the lessons learnt about this form of assessment.

The Influence of Word of Mouth on Customer Loyalty to Social Commerce Websites: Trust as a Mediator

The term Social Commerce (s-commerce) is referred as a new trend where the sellers and buyers are connected for interacting on social media. Customer loyalty is an important tool for developing future marketing business strategies in s-commerce field. Moreover, the effect of Word-of-Mouth (WOM) on customer loyalty is also very important to the stability and sustainability of an s-commerce platform. While customer loyalty and WOM have been examined widely in various research contexts, a considerable gap is noticed in the literature on the study of customer loyalty. Therefore, the objective of this study was to identify the influence of WOM on customers’ loyalty to s-commerce websites. This research gathers survey data and applies Partial Least Squares (PLS-SEM) structural equation modelling to analyze the data. The study found that WOM and trust have strong positive impact on loyalty to s-commerce website. The findings provide insights for s-commerce industries in developing strategies for improved implementation of s-commerce as well as the design of s-commerce sites.

The Influence of Social Presence and Trust on Customers’ Loyalty to Social Commerce Websites

Social Commerce (s-commerce) is a relatively new form of electronic commerce built around the notion of customer-oriented social website content, and made possible by the development of Web 2.0 technology. Businesses in this field, in order to develop effective marketing strategies, must understand the dynamics of how client loyalty is established and maintained. Scholars have explored the issue of customer loyalty from many angles, including social marketing, online environments and eCommerce. Some researchers have focused their studies on the behavioural dimension of customer loyalty, others on its attitudinal dimension, and still others on the composite dimension of customer loyalty. Though the importance of these individual influences has been broadly accepted, the societal aspect of s-commerce is still poorly understood, as is the influence on s-commerce of trust and social presence. The objective of this study is thus to investigate the impact of social presence (SP) and trust on s-commerce customer loyalty. Data were collected from s-commerce website users in Australia using a web-based questionnaire. Based on the results of the survey, social presence and trust both have significant influence on customer loyalty to s-commerce websites. The findings offer insight to business decision-makers who hope to improve their implementation of s-commerce as well as the design of their sites.

An investigation of customers' loyalty to social commerce websites

The emergence of web 2.0 has brought new applications which have played a significant role in extending e-commerce websites with social commerce (S-Commerce) functionality. S-Commerce is a new extension of B2C e-commerce where customers purchase products/services online with the existence of social cues in the websites (such as reviews, recommendations and sharing). There has been little research in the area of customer loyalty to S-Commerce websites. Drawing upon theories of social presence and trust; and the Delone and McLean model of information systems success, this study aims to determine what factors affect customer loyalty to S-Commerce websites and to develop a framework that helps in investigating those factors. In order to achieve this objective, a quantitative approach will be employed. Data will be collected from S-Commerce users in Australia via survey. Analysis will be performed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). This study will contribute to the S-Commerce literature through a theoretical framework that shows how the loyalty of customers can be generated in S-Commerce websites. In addition, it is expected that this study will help businesses to have understanding of how to retain their customers which will result in higher profits.