Naresh Chauhan

Cost and effort estimation in agile software development

Projects that are over-budget, delivered late, and fall short of users expectations have been a common problem are a for software development efforts for years. Agile methods, which represent an emerging set of software development methodologies based on the concepts of adaptability and flexibility, are currently touted as a way to alleviate these reoccurring problems and pave the way for the future of development. The estimation in Agile Software Development methods depends on an expert opinion and historical data of project for estimation of cost, size, effort and duration. In absence of the historical data and experts the previous method like analogy and planning poker are not useful. This paper focuses on the research work in Agile Software development and estimation in Agile. It also focuses the problems in current Agile practices thereby proposed a method for accurate cost and effort estimation.

Security on Mobile Agent Based Crawler (SMABC)

Mobile agents are active objects that can autonomously migrate in a network to perform tasks on behalf of their owners. Current web crawler uses the concept of Mobile Agent to enhance their crawling speed. In mobile crawling, mobile agents are dispatched to remote web severs for local crawling and processing of web documents. After crawling a specific web server, they dispatch themselves either back at the search engine machine, or at the next web server for further crawling. It gives a complete distributed crawling strategy by utilizing the mobile agent’s technology but it suffers with the problem of security. In this paper, a security solution has been proposed, which protects both the mobile agent itself and the host resources that encrypt the data before passing it to mobile agent and decrypt it on the visited host sides. The method of “computing with encryption function” has been used. The proposed approach solves the problem of malicious host that can harm mobile agent or the information it contain.

A multi-agent hybrid protocol for data fusion and data aggregation in non-deterministic wireless sensor networks

Data fusion deals with collaborative in-network processing and gathers relatively accurate information about the events in the environment. Conventional data fusion algorithms when assisted with mobile agent technology shifts computationally intensive tasks to these intelligent units thereby increasing the lifetime of the network. There exist mobile agent based event driven protocols for accumulating and forwarding the information to the sink(base station) eg: Tree-based Itinerary Design [4]. Usually, such protocols either deploy value-based fusion or decision-based fusion but very few are using both at the same time. Moreover, use of multi-agent systems(MAS) in such protocols is still in its infancy. The focus of this work is thus to propose a multi-agent hybrid protocol exploiting the benefits of both value and decision fusion by performing aggregation at the source level in a clustered WSN.

Prioritising user stories in agile environment

In the last few years Agile methodologies appeared as a reaction to traditional software development methodologies. In Agile environment the requirements from the client are always taken in the form of user-stories and prioritization of requirements is done by Moscow method, validate learning and walking skeleton methods. By literature survey it has been observed that these methods are not efficient because they do not consider importance of user-stories by client. In this research work some importance related and effort related factors are considered on the basis of which the prioritization of user-stories is done. Further the feasibility of work has been validated by a case study of Enable Quiz which is a lightweight technical quizzing solution; for companies that hire engineers. The research work will allows the companies to better screen job candidates and assess their internal talent for skills development.

A sprint-point based estimation technique in Scrum

In the last few years Agile methodologies appeared as a reaction to traditional software development methodologies. The Scrum is the widely used method of Agile. Most of the software development organizations are using Scrum these days but these are facing problems related to estimation of cost and effort. It has been observed that the current estimation method in Scrum mostly rely on historical data from past projects and expert opinion but in absence of historical data and experts these methods are not efficient. So there is need of an algorithmic method, which can calculate cost and effort of the software project. In this direction S. Bhalero, Maya Ingel [2] has considered some project-related factors that calculate the cost as well as effort of the project for a general Agile environment. However, several other project as well as people related factors may affect the Scrum environment. In this work an Algorithmic estimation method is being proposed considering various factors thereby estimating the more accurate release date, cost, effort and duration for the project specifically for Scrum. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed algorithm has been shown by considering three cases in which different levels of factors are taken and compared.

A framework to derive web page context from hyperlink structure

Since an anchor is used in an HTML document to point to a related document/picture/media application, anchor-text becomes a potential resource to extract the information about an associated web page. However, sometimes anchor-texts are either not present at all or a single word text/an image anchor is contained in the anchor tag. In these situations, the text surrounding a link or the link-context assumes importance in the sense that it can be used to derive the context of the target web page. In this paper, a dataset of about 100 web pages of different categories from Open Directory Project (ODP) has been surveyed and analysed. The results show that cohesive text surrounding the anchor in the form of full sentences and non-cohesive text present elsewhere in the in-link web pages provides rich semantic information about a target web page, which in turn can be considered as the context of the target web page. Since, generally, there are several in-links for a target web page, a filtering mechanism, based on the linguistic analysis of all context-sentences, which filters the best described context sentence, has been developed and is being described and evaluated in this paper.

Estimation in agile environment using resistance factors

The estimation of cost and effort is a critical task in Agile environment because of its dynamic nature. It has been observed that the current Agile methods mostly depends on historical data of project for estimation of cost, size, effort and duration and these methods are not efficient in absence of historical data. So there is need of an algorithmic method, which can calculate cost and effort of the project. In our previous work [2] some project-related factors and people-related factors were considered on the basis of which size as well as duration of the project was calculated. However, several other resistance factors may also affects estimation in the Agile dynamic environment. In this work an Algorithmic estimation method is being proposed that calculates more accurate release date, cost, effort and duration for the project by considering various factors. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed algorithm has been shown by considering two cases in which different levels of factors are taken and compared.

An Agent-Based Solution to Energy Sink-Hole Problem in Flat Wireless Sensor Networks

Repeated and continuous transmission of data to the sink leads to energy loss in all the nodes in case of flat WSN. Especially, depletion of energy is highly acute in case of nodes that are near to the sink. Conventionally known as energy sink-hole problem, it causes early failure of the network even when there is a substantial amount of residual energy left in it. Though the research fraternity has been continuously addressing this problem and even has provided various solutions to deal with it, the use of mobile agents to meet the above-stated problem is still in its infancy. The paper proposes a mobile agent-based solution for solving energy sink-hole problem. The proposed solution aims to extend the network life by reducing redundant data being passed to the nodes near to the sink thereby reducing the load and saving battery life. The algorithm is implemented using aglets and the analytical results show significant improvement in the network lifetime.

Tool based implementation of SQL injection for penetration testing

Web applications are a fundamental pillar of todays world. Society depends on them for business and day to day tasks. Because of their extensive use, Web applications are under constant attack by hackers that exploit their vulnerabilities to disrupt business and access confidential information. SQL Injection and Remote File Inclusion are the two most frequently used exploits and hackers prefer easier rather than complicated attack techniques. Every day as number of Internet users are increasing, the vulnerabilities of a system being attacked is becoming easier. SQL Injection is one of the most common attack method that is being used these days. Havij is one of the tools used to implement SQL Injection which will be discussed in this paper. Our research objective is to analyse the use of Havij in penetration testing in IT industry and to compare various SQL Injection tools available in the market.

A hierarchical test case prioritization technique for object oriented software

Software reuse is the use of existing artifacts to create new software. Inheritance is the foremost technique of reuse. But the inherent complexity due to inheritance hierarchy found in object - oriented paradigm also affect testing. Every time any change occurs in the software, new test cases are added in addition to the existing test suite. So there is need to conduct effective regression testing having less number of test cases to reduce cost and time. In this paper a hierarchical test case prioritization technique is proposed wherein various factors have been considered that affect error propagation in the inheritance. In this paper prioritization of test cases take place at two levels. In the first level the classes are prioritized and in the second level the test cases of prioritized classes are ordered. To show the effectiveness of proposed technique it was applied and analyze on a C++ program.