Mohd Hairul Nizam Md Nasir

Critical success factors for software projects: A comparative study

Although there have been studies completed on the critical success factors of software projects, these studies all have been specific to one particular country. There has been no comprehensive study reporting on different project sizes in various domains and in multiple countries. We present our extensive literature survey of critical success factors that impact software projects. Forty-three articles from the years 1990 to 2010 were found to be significant contributions that could be analysed in order to develop a list of critical factors that specifically affect the success of software projects. The method of content analysis and frequency analysis was adopted. Twenty-six critical success factors were found to be related to software project success. We suggest that organisation or project manager is attentive to control the top five critical factors to drive towards project success since the percentage of frequency of occurrences for each is more than 50%. Also, it appears that non-technical factors (94%) dominated over technical factors (6%). In a result unique to our study compared with previous one, we found that the factors of clear and frozen requirements, realistic estimation of the schedule and budget, along with a competent project manager are the five most critical success factors of software projects.

The use of mobile phones by older adults: a Malaysian study

Mobile phone has become essential parts of personal and business life. The recent growth of mobile phone usage is an observable fact that crosses all age and gender boundaries. It can potentially play a significant role in assisting older people in many ways especially in terms of maintaining social relationship, providing sense of safety and accessibility. However, older people seem to be a neglected user group in the design of mobile phone devices and services. Hence, this paper attempts to report the issues which are related with the design of mobile devices and services for older people aged 56 years old and over in Malaysia. The findings may serve as a reference to mobile device manufacturers and service providers when designing mobile devices and services for older Malaysians. This research uses a survey instrument to gather data from older peoples across all the states in Malaysia with the total of 176 older peoples responded. The questionnaires were mainly distributed to older persons who use mobile phones independently in their daily routines

Impact analysis and change propagation in service-oriented enterprises

ContextThe adoption of Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Management (BPM) is fairly recent. The major concern is now shifting towards the maintenance and evolution of service-based business information systems. Moreover, these systems are highly dynamic and frequent changes are anticipated across multiple levels of abstraction. Impact analysis and change propagation are identified as potential research areas in this regard. ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to systematically review extant research on impact analysis and propagation in the BPM and SOA domains. Identifying, categorizing and synthesizing relevant solutions are the main study objectives. MethodThrough careful review and screening, we identified 60 studies relevant to 4 research questions. Two classification schemes served to comprehend and analyze the anatomy of existing solutions. BPM is considered at the business level for business operations and processes, while SOA is considered at the service level as deployment architecture. We focused on both horizontal and vertical impacts of changes across multiple abstraction layers. ResultsImpact analysis solutions were mainly divided into dependency analysis, traceability analysis and history mining. Dependency analysis is the most frequently adopted technique followed by traceability analysis. Further categorization of dependency analysis indicates that graph-based techniques are extensively used, followed by formal dependency modeling. While considering hierarchical coverage, inter-process and inter-service change analyses have received considerable attention from the research community, whereas bottom-up analysis has been the most neglected research area. The majority of change propagation solutions are top-down and semi-automated. ConclusionsThis study concludes with new insight suggestions for future research. Although, the evolution of service-based systems is becoming of grave concern, existing solutions in this field are less mature. Studies on hierarchical change impact are scarce. Complex relationships of services with business processes and semantic dependencies are poorly understood and require more attention from the research community.

Consumer acceptance of RFID-enabled services in validating Halal status

As Halal is the greatest concert to all Muslims, several measures have been taken by the authorities to educate Muslims about Halal status on food products. Introducing Halal logo is one of the significant approaches. Challenges faced by manufacturers in promoting their products to Muslims consumers made process of securing Halal logo harder. Fake Halal logos are produced massively which then leads to confusion to the consumers. This study is focused on validating Halal status for food products by using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to enhance existing methods in Malaysia. A preliminary survey was performed to valuate the industrys readiness ti implement RFID technology in Malaysia. A process model and prototype were developed to enhance existing systems. With this method, the authentic Halal logo that is issued by JAKIM can easily be validated, because every stamp that will be embedded into food packages is identified with its own unique identification number. An RFID reader will be placed at retail stores for consumers to validate products status. User evaluation has been conducted to measure satisfaction in term of usability, efficiency, security, affordability and profitability. Based on the evaluation, all respondents are satisfied with the performance of this new technology and fully support implementing this system globally, as the Malaysian government is now moving towards becoming the worlds Halal hub.

Resistance factors in the implementation of software process improvement project

Over decades, software model for improving the quality of software through management of the software process has became significant in the software industry. Many companies are now being assessed according to standards such as the CMM, SIX-SIGMA or ISO 9000, which have brought substantial profit to the companies that utilize them to improve the quality of software product. Several companies in Malaysia have been carried out software process improvement projects. However, a software process improvement initiative is still sometimes delayed, costs are over budgeted and some of them surrender before the project ends. Therefore, this paper attempt to analyze and identify the resistance factors which influence the implementation of the software process improvement project initiated by the company. This paper will serve as reference to the professionals in the area. In the other hand, it may also helping the other companies to manage future projects through the use of preventive actions that will eliminate or at least lessening the resistance factors’ consequences during the implementation of the software process improvement projects. This paper present a survey with 8 Malaysia’s companies around Kuala Lumpur and Selangor which have an experience in initiating and conducting software process improvement project. A total of 117 respondents from various background have participated this survey.

Incorporating software agents in automated personal software process (PSP) tools

The PSP-Expert Visualization Agent (EVA) is designed for software engineers specifically to introduce the agent-oriented concept, as well as to automate all the processes and fields involved in PSP. Currently, some developers of PSP automated tools include the agents element in their system that focuses on sensor-based tracking of lines of code. However, none of them fully utilize this element for other purposes or provide the agent with a personal assistant for the software engineer. This sensor-based tracking is limited to Eclipse environments such as Java and is not compatible with the use of web platforms as a PSP automated tool. The PSP-EVA system is required to perform several tasks. There are three agents that exist within the system: Interface Agent (IA), TaskAgent (TA), and SearchAgent (SA). By incorporating the multi-software agent in this automation system, PSP-EVA is able to have ready-access to applications and also to provide a visual representation of performance to the user. Additionally, evaluation of software engineers and team performance can be easily derived and evaluated statistically.

Predicting the adoption of cloud-based technology using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process and structural equation modelling approaches.

Abstract With the emergence of cloud-based technology, personalized learning mechanism has increasingly become a fundamental requirement for most learning systems. This study aimed to identify the key factors that influence user adoption of cloud-based collaborative learning technology in the educational context. Grounded on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), personalization construct was linked to the behavioral intention, performance expectancy and effort expectancy. This research applied a new methodological approach combining both Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to determine the relative weight and importance of the factors as well as to test the proposed hypotheses in the research model. Using a survey questionnaire, data was collected from 150 students of four Malaysian public universities. The findings of FAHP demonstrated that performance expectancy, social influence, and personalization were the most important factors predicting behavioral intention to adopt cloud-based collaborative learning technology from experts’ point of view. The results of the SEM showed that users’ behavioral intention was significantly influenced by performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and personalization. Although, personalization performed a direct influence on behavioral intention, its indirect influence through performance expectancy and effort expectancy was also considerable. This study and its findings can serve as a baseline by which cloud service providers, ministry of education, and educational institutions can make strategic and strong decisions about adoption of cloud-based technology in educational environments.

A framework for automatic text-to-flowchart conversion: A novel teaching aid for novice programmers

From the time of early exploration in the area of programming languages, many tools have been employed to introduce novice programmers to programming. The most common tools entail flowchart-based notation as well as programming environments based on icons. More research in this field has revealed that the lack of problem-solving skills, which is considered as one of the prominent shortcomings that novices deal with, is exacerbated by language syntax that the novices employ. Thus, our proposed novel text-to-flowchart conversion approach intend to prompt novices to focus on solution rather than on programming syntax by engaging them in meaningful planning activities and solution designing prior to their attempt to do an implementation. The main target group of the research is CS minors students who do not know anything about programming before using the proposed framework. Therefore, only simple basic algorithmic programming problems designed for novice programmers are only considered as an input. One of the significant features applied in the system is to use automatic text-to-flowchart conversion. The main objective of this research is to develop a framework to improve the solution designing and problem-solving skills in novice programmers for both sighted and blind users. A knowledge base and lexical resources are used to draw its corresponding flowchart as well as a dialogue-based tutoring system, which gets novices involved in a dialogue with asking them to complete the corresponding flowchart or tracing the finalized flowchart. A crawler to search for the unknown programming problems entered by users through the Internet in order to improve the first knowledge base is also improvised to assure that the system automatically fortifies its knowledge base system. The initial evaluation of this framework has been done by 7 experts from Malaysia and Australia and very promising result has been shown.

Thread-Level Parallelism & Shared-Memory Pool Techniques for Authorization of Credit Card System

Nowadays, credit card is a famous trend used by millions of people around the world as a form of payment. This paper presented an architectural framework and prototype of credit card authorization system using thread-level parallelism and shared memory pool techniques in order to support dynamic tuning of the size of the thread pool at runtime. Normally, single threaded were chosen by software developer in current credit card authorization whereby authentication process takes longer time to respond and its limitation of handling huge number of simultaneous transactions at the same time. As a result, the performance of the authorization system was affected during peak hours. Through thread-level parallelism technique or usually known as multi-threading, each worker thread will be assigned with several child threads to perform online fraud validation concurrently, depending on numbers of cryptographic elements presented in transaction message while the work thread itself performed card restriction validation based on the card information stored in cards shared memory pool.

Flowchart-based approach to aid novice programmers: A novel framework

Many tools have been used in the programming area to teach programming to novices. The most familiar tools comprise of flowchart-based notation along with programming environments depending on icons. Much more exploration on this area has disclosed that the deficiency of problem-solving abilities is directly tied with language syntax that they apply and the development environment. The main objective of this research is to develop a framework for improving the problem-solving skills of novice programmers. Hence, our research proposes a novel strategy, simulating human mechanism of solving problems in programming by converting the textual description of a problem, in English, into a flowchart. Two knowledge bases are employed to interpret the programming meaning of a given textual description in an attempt to draw its flowchart. Our future work will include the implementation and evaluation of this proposed framework.