Piers R. J. Campbell

A three-dimensional view of software ecosystems

The concept of a Software ecosystem is gaining in popularity amongst large organizations and inherently relies on the adoption of common architectural development for multiple product development. The adoption of these approaches represents a significant shift in traditional software development style and process methodology. Currently several organizations are in practice with this new process model which embraces business, third party involvement and open architecture as its central pillars and these institutions have thrived as a result. The advent of software ecosystems have caused major players in the software industry to rethink their operating practices and engage with third parties, opening their platforms to external entities to attain business objectives. In this paper we present a three dimensional view of the software ecosystem model examine the role played by each of the three central pillars; business; architecture; and social aspects. We further highlight their relationships and conclude that this study will help in further aiding understanding of the overall engineering process of ecosystem software.

Methodologies for Load Forecasting

The ability to accurately forecast load is vitally important for the electric industry in a deregulated economy. Load forecasting has many applications including energy purchasing and generation, load switching, contract evaluation, and infrastructure development. A large variety of methods have been developed for and applied to load forecasting. In this paper we examine various approaches to load forecasting, highlighting the importance of intelligent systems and explore the possible future directions of forecasting research

Evaluating the Demand for Soft Skills in Software Development

An analysis of 500 advertisements for IT positions focuses on the soft skills mentioned in the ads, revealing which soft skills are in high demand for software development and which ones are neglected despite their importance. Our survey indicates that soft skills are in demand in the software industry, but only to a limited extent. This highlights the lack of understanding of the role that soft skills play in an employees professional ability and performance.

Predictive data mining to support clinical decisions: An overview of heart disease prediction systems

Healthcare organizations are faced with challenges to provide cost-effective and high quality patient care. Both administrators and clinicians need to analyze a wealth of data available in the databases of healthcare information systems in order to discover knowledge and to make informed decisions. This is critical in particular to enhance the effectiveness of disease treatment and preventions. It becomes of more important in case of heart disease (HD) that is regarded as the primary reason behind death in adults. Data mining serves as an analysis tool to discover hidden relationships and patterns in HD medical data. This paper reviews five models constructed of single and combined data mining techniques to support clinical decisions in (HD) diagnosis and prediction. The five systems provide automatic pattern recognition and attempts to uncover relationships among different parameters and symptoms of HD. Each system exhibits set of strengths and limitations in terms of the type of data it handles, accuracy, ease of interpretation, reliability and generalization ability. Poor generalization ability is still a major open issue for data mining in healthcare mainly because of the lack of input data and cost of re-processing.

An assessment of mobile OS-centric ecosystems

The evolution of software ecosystems is the result of the popularity and adoption of common architectural development for multiple product development and represents a significant shift in traditional software development style and process methodology. Currently several organizations are in practice with this new process model that embraces business as one of its central factors and have thrived as a result. There can be no doubt that the development of software ecosystems have caused major players in the software industry to rethink their operating practices and engage with third parties, opening their platforms to external entities to attain business objectives. In this paper we examine four of the organizations that are at the forefront of software ecosystem adoption, specifically for mobile devices and explore their business development models. This investigation explores and compares their business process models in terms of how they engage with the external players in order to develop and distribute software and services in this changing marketplace. The study found some commonalities as well as some salient differences in their business processes and presents an assessment of the health of each mobile OS-centric ecosystem. We conclude that this study will help in further aiding understanding of the business process role in this area of ecosystem software.

Learning & Personality Types: A Case Study of a Software Design Course

Introduction The Software Engineering curriculum in most of the universities around the world aims to provide education and hands-on training in various phases of the software development life cycle. The waterfall model of the software development cycle is generally covered in the curriculum of software engineering, despite being classified as an old approach to software development. Design is a fundamental activity in software development and involves the identification of the major sub-systems and their relationship at an abstract level. It involves problem solving and creating a workable and implementable solution. The software design is ultimately translated into code, which takes the physical shape of the software running on any machine. According to Budgen (2003) the design process in its classical form is a scientific approach to problem solving typically consisting of observing the characteristics of some phenomenon, making measurements of these, building a theory to explain them, and then seeking to verify these. According to Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (Hilburn, Hirmanpour, Khajenoori, Turner, & Qasem, 1999): Software design area is concerned with the transformation of the statement of requirements into a description of how these requirements are to be implemented. Software design consists of activities such as architectural design, abstract specification, interface design, component design, data structure design, tasking design, and algorithm design. Software design uses a variety of techniques and forms of representation, each providing a capability for capturing and expressing a different view of the system. (p. 17) The psychological hypothesis that not everyone can perform all tasks effectively reveals that personality traits or types play a critical role in the performance of people executing the same task. The personality type of an individual generates a great deal of impact on the performance of various activities that humans can carry out. The behavior of individuals with a particular type of personality reflects the way these people perceive the world and make decisions. This personality type classification covers many aspects of human behavior such as attitude, action and reaction, thinking, learning, feeling, and lifestyle. In this work we are concentrating on the role of personality type in learning one of the core phases of software development life cycle. The study will aid us in understanding how different personality types of the students influence progress in a software design course. Keeping in view the significantly important phases of the software development cycle, the objective of this study is to investigate the impact of the personality type in acquiring the knowledge and necessary skills for the design process. The overall objective of this study is to find an answer to the following research question (RQ): RQ: Does personality type have an impact on the learning capability of the students in acquiring skills and knowledge of the software design process? Literature Survey There have been several studies that have dealt with the personality types, particularly in computer science and software engineering education. It is a common phenomenon that people have different personality traits, and the way they perceive, plan, and execute any assigned task is influenced by it. Software is a product of human activity, which often includes problem solving capabilities, cognitive aspects, and social interaction. On the other hand, human beings are more complicated and less predictable than computers. Therefore, the complexity of human personality gives rise to intricate dynamics along software development that cannot be ignored, but have often been overlooked. In their paper, McCaulley, MacDavid, and Walsh (1987) provide empirical evidence that the students having the personality traits of introvert and thinker are most likely to complete their degree programs, while students classified as extroverts and perceivers do not move along with their degree completion requirements. …

Soft Skills and Software Development: A Reflection from the Software Industry

We review the literature relating to soft skills and the software engineering and information systems domain before describing a study based on 650 job advertisements posted on well-known recruitment sites from a range of geographical locations including, North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. The study makes use of nine defined soft skills to assess the level of demand for each of these skills related to individual job roles within the software industry. This work reports some of the vital statistics from industry about the requirements of soft skills in various roles of software development phases. The work also highlights the variation in the types of skills required for each of the roles. We found that currently although the software industry is paying attention to soft skills up to some extent while hiring but there is a need to further acknowledge the role of these skills in software development. The objective of this paper is to analyze the software industry soft skills requirements for various software development positions, such as system analyst, designer, programmer, and tester. We pose two research questions, namely, (1) What soft skills are appropriate to different software development lifecycle roles, and (2) Up to what extend does the software industry consider soft skills when hiring an employee. The study suggests that there is a further need of acknowledgment of the significance of soft skills from employers in software industry.

Conotoxin protein classification using pairwise comparison and amino acid composition: toxin-aam

Conotoxin classification could assist in the study of the structure function relationship of ion-channels and receptors as well as identifying potential therapeutics in the treatment of a wide variety of diseases such as schizophrenia, chronic pain, cardiovascular and bladder dysfunction. In this study, we introduce a novel method (Toxin-AAM) for conotoxin superfamily classification. Toxin-AAM incorporates evolutionary information using a powerful means of pairwise sequence comparison and amino acid composition knowledge. The combination of the sequential model and the discrete model has made the Toxin-AAM method exceptional in classifying conotoxin superfamily, when compared to other state-of-the-art techniques.

Managing support requests in open source software project: The role of online forums

The use of free and open source software is gaining momentum due to the ever increasing availability and use of the Internet. Organizations are also now adopting open source software, despite some reservations in particular regarding the provision and availability of support. One of the greatest concerns about free and open source software is the availability of post release support and the handling of for support. A common belief is that there is no appropriate support available for this class of software, while an alternative argument is that due to the active involvement of Internet users in online forums, there is in fact a large resource available that communicates and manages the management of support requests. The research model of this empirical investigation establishes and studies the relationship between open source software support requests and online public forums. The results of this empirical study provide evidence about the realities of support that is present in open source software projects. We used a dataset consisting of 616 open source software projects covering a broad range of categories in this investigation. The results show that online forums play a significant role in managing support requests in open source software, thus becoming a major source of assistance in maintenance of the open source projects

Enterprise web services-enabled translation framework

Managing multilingual documents is a time consuming, error prone and expensive task, particularly when dealing with dynamic documents such as web contents. A broad spectrum of organizations such as corporations, NGO’s and Governments are committed to offer such documents in a number of languages where the content is further localized to suit specific cultural settings. In this paper, we propose a business model supported by a web services-enabled framework, which facilitate all aspects related to multilingual web contents management, from negotiating translation-request quotations through production of final localized output as well as its verification, and delivery. This service is based on a collaborative internet-based translation framework, referred to in this paper as Translation Management System (TMS). Our approach uses XLIFF, a Web service standard developed by OASIS, in order to interoperate enterprise translation services and related Web applications. We present and implement a translation business model centered around standardized processes, which we validate through a case study in the context of a Web translation project. We also propose a QoS monitoring model to satisfy the quality-related requirements of a translation job. Finally, we evaluate the usability of our streamlined Web translation services through users’ perception in terms of flexibility, ease of use, and quality of translation. The results revealed interesting performance tradeoffs relative to translation workflows and content-translation accuracy as well as flexibility, and diversity of TMS provided services.