Mohd Naz’ri Mahrin

A systematic literature review of software requirements prioritization research

Context: During requirements engineering, prioritization is performed to grade or rank requirements in their order of importance and subsequent implementation releases. It is a major step taken in making crucial decisions so as to increase the economic value of a system. Objective: The purpose of this study is to identify and analyze existing prioritization techniques in the context of the formulated research questions. Method: Search terms with relevant keywords were used to identify primary studies that relate requirements prioritization classified under journal articles, conference papers, workshops, symposiums, book chapters and IEEE bulletins. Results: 73 Primary studies were selected from the search processes. Out of these studies; 13 were journal articles, 35 were conference papers and 8 were workshop papers. Furthermore, contributions from symposiums as well as IEEE bulletins were 2 each while the total number of book chapters amounted to 13. Conclusion: Prioritization has been significantly discussed in the requirements engineering domain. However, it was generally discovered that, existing prioritization techniques suffer from a number of limitations which includes: lack of scalability, methods of dealing with rank updates during requirements evolution, coordination among stakeholders and requirements dependency issues. Also, the applicability of existing techniques in complex and real setting has not been reported yet.

A systematic literature review on Enterprise Architecture Implementation Methodologies

ContextEnterprise Architecture (EA) is a strategy to align business and Information Technology (IT) within an enterprise. EA is managed, developed, and maintained throughout the EA Implementation Methodology (EAIM). ObjectiveThe aims of this study are to identify the existing effective practices that are used by existing EAIMs, identify the factors that affect the effectiveness of EAIM, identify the current tools that are used by existing EAIMs, and identify the open problems and areas related to EAIM for improvement. MethodA Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was carried out. 669 papers were retrieved by a manual search in 6 databases and 46 primary studies were finally included. ResultFrom these studies 33% were journal articles, 41% were conference papers while 26% were contributions from the studies consisted of book chapters. Consequently, 28 practices, 19 factors, and 15 tools were identified and analysed. ConclusionSeveral rigorous researches have been done in order to provide effective EAIM, however there are still problems in components of EAIM, including: there is lack of tool support for whole part of EA implementation, there are deficiency in addressing the EAIMs practices especially in modeling, management, and maintenance, there is lack of consideration on non-functional requirement in existing EAIM, there is no appropriate consideration on requirement analysis in most existing EAIM. This review provides researchers with some guidelines for future research on this topic. It also provides broad information on EAIM, which could be useful for practitioners.

Current Issues on Enterprise Architecture Implementation Methodology

Enterprise Architecture (EA) becomes a strategy plan for enterprises to align their business and Information Technology (IT). EA is developed, managed, and maintained through EA implementation methodology (EAIM) processes. There are some problems in current EAIMs that lead to ineffectiveness implementation of EA. This paper represents current issues on EAIM. In this regard, we set the framework in order to represent EAIM’s issues based on the processes of EAIM including: modeling, developing, and maintaining. The results of this research not only increase the knowledge of EAIM, but also could be useful for both scientific and practitioner in order to realize the current situation of EAIMs.

A systematic literature review on the state of research and practice of collaborative filtering technique and implicit feedback

User profiles in collaborative filtering (CF) recommendation technique are built based on ratings given by users on a set of items. The most eminent shortcoming of the CF technique is the sparsity problem. This problem refers to the low ratio of rated items by users to the total number of available items; hence the quality of recommendation will be affected. Most researchers use implicit data as a solution for sparsity problem, to decrease the dependency of CF technique on the user’s rating and this term is more common in this field. The aim of this research is to aggregate evidence on state of research and practice of CF and implicit data applying systematic literature review (SLR) which is a method for evidence-based software engineering (EBSE). EBSE has the potential value for synthesizing evidence and make this evidence available to practitioners and researchers with providing the best references and appropriate software engineering solutions for sparsity problem. We executed the standard systematic literature review method using a manual search in 5 prestigious databases and 38 studies were finally included for analyzing. This paper follows manifestation of Kitchenham’s SLR guidelines and describes in a great detail the process of selecting and analyzing research papers. This paper is first academic systematic literature review of CF technique along with implicit data from user behaviors and activities to aggregate existing evidence as a synthesis of best quality scientific studies. The 38 research papers are categorized into eleven application fields (movie, shopping, books, Social systems, music and others) and six data mining techniques (dimensionality reduction, association rule, heuristic methods and other). According to the review results, neighborhood formation is a relevant aspect of CF and it can be improved with the use of user-item preference matrix as implicit feedback mechanism, the most common domains of CF are in e-commerce and movie software applications.

Situational factors affecting Requirement Engineering process in Global Software Development

A most favorable Requirement Engineering process is considered to be subject of situational characteristics of Software Requirement Engineering settings. These characteristics are related to organizations, project, process, requirements, stakeholders etc. However, list of situational factors affecting the Requirement Engineering process during Global Software Development is presently not available. The lack of such study is challenging as it not only restrain the ability to improve Requirement Engineering process, but also it can undermine the competence of Requirement Engineering team to determine the core constraints and characteristics of developing software. To address this scarcity, we have merged a considerable related research into an initial list of situational factors that affect the Requirement Engineering Process during Global Software Development. We have performed Systematic Literature Review for situational factors identification. To carry on data merging, we have used thorough data coding techniques adopted from Grounded Theory. The initial list of situational factors consists of 37 factors, which is the sound initial reference list for Requirement Engineering process definition in Global Software Development environment. The outcome of this study symbolizes a significant contribution to the Requirement Engineering body of knowledge.

The state of the art and issues in software process tailoring

This study aims to review research works on software process tailoring in order to investigate the state of the art of the domain in terms of research activities. Based on the review, a classification of the research works was performed and issues pertaining to the domain were highlighted. Three classifications were produced that classify the research works into critical success factors, experiences and practices in a tailoring reference model and supporting tool. The issues discussed in this study are related to the framework and model, value-based tailored process, experience ware and quality of tailored process. This paper provides essential information on the software process tailoring research works to novice researchers who plan to conduct further research in this domain.

Agent-Oriented Based Enterprise Architecture Implementation Methodology

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is managed, developed, and maintained by Enterprise Architecture Implementation Methodology (EAIM). There is ineffectiveness in existing EAIMs due to the complexities; these complexities come from EAIM’s processes, models, methods, and strategy. Consequently, EA projects may be faced with lack of support in the following parts of EA: requirement analysis, governance and evaluation, a guideline for implementation, and continual improvement of EA implementation. This research aims to represent an Agent-Oriented based EAIM. The proposed EAIM was evaluated by means of a case study. The results show that proposed EAIM could directly affect the effectiveness of EA implementation in following items: reducing the mismatch between business and IT, defining reachable goals for enterprise, employing easy implementation practices and easy learning procedure, using efficient documentation, applying appropriate communication among project team member, providing an effective environment for alignment of business and IT, and using effective plan for governance and migration plan. This research extends the application of Agent Technology, which provides new area of research for academics and provides effective EAIM, which can be employed by practitioners in EA project.

An Adaptive Fuzzy Decision Matrix Model for Software Requirements Prioritization

Software elicitation process is the act of extracting and sorting requirements of a proposed system perceived to reflect the projected performance of the software under consideration for development. For software systems to be long-lived and satisfy stakeholder’s expectations; there will be need to prioritize choices at the elicitation level. However, these choices could be distorted or misleading if appropriate techniques are not utilized in analyzing and prioritizing them. Consequently, if software systems are developed on vague prioritization results, the end product will not meet stakeholder’s expectations. In this research, we present a scalable innovative prioritization model that is capable of comparing sets of elicited requirements by computing the weights of each criterion that makes up specified requirements. To achieve our aim, the weights assigned to each requirement by relevant stakeholders are normalized and a confidence function is computed to ascertain the ranking order of requirements. To validate the applicability of our model, we describe an empirical case scenario detailing the adaptability prowess of the proposed model.

Formulation of Usability Risk Assessment Model

Usability is considered as one of the significant factors of software product quality and becoming an emergent property of an entire closed and open system. Existence of usability problem has been discovered to cause many quality problems in several studies. Despite various efforts have been taken to overcome these problems, usability problems still exist in software products. This affects continuous interaction of an open system with the user and environment. This paper presents study on formulation of Usability Risk Assessment Model to identify, analyse and prioritize potential usability risk during Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). Using this model, usability problems in software products are dealt before it occurs to produce more usable software product and continuous interaction of an open system with the user and environment can be ensured.

A software traceability model to support software testing documentation

Software Documentation is one of the key quality factors in software development. However, many developers are still putting less effort and less priority on documentation. To them writing documentation during project development is very tedious and time consuming. As a result, the documentation tends to be significantly outdated, poor quality and difficult to access that will certainly lead to poor software maintenance. Current studies have proved that the key point to this problem is software traceability. Traceability relates to an ability to trace all related software components within a software system that includes requirements, test cases, test results and other artefacts. This research reveals some issues related to current software traceability and attempts to suggest a new software traceability model that focuses on software test documentation for test management. This effort leads to a new software test documentation generation process model based on software engineering standards.