Rodina Ahmad

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.

Hybrid ANFIS-PSO approach for predicting optimum parameters of a protective spur dike

A protective spur dike is used to reduce scour depth around main spur dikes.A new hybrid approach, combining particle swarm optimization and adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS-PSO) was used.Optimized parameters of the protective spur dike are presented. In this study a new approach was proposed to determine optimum parameters of a protective spur dike to mitigate scouring depth amount around existing main spur dikes. The studied parameters were angle of the protective spur dike relative to the flume wall, its length, and its distance from the main spur dikes, flow intensity, and the diameters of the sediment particles that were explored to find the optimum amounts. In prediction phase, a novel hybrid approach was developed, combining adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference system and particle swarm optimization (ANFIS-PSO) to predict protective spur dikes parameters in order to control scouring around a series of spur dikes. The results indicated that the accuracy of the proposed method is increased significantly compared to other approaches. In addition, the effectiveness of the developed method was confirmed using the available data.

Identification and prioritization of critical issues for the promotion of e-learning in Pakistan

Identification of state-of-the-art issues for the promotion of e-learning in Pakistan.Analysis of the impact of issues on the promotion of e-learning in HEIs of Pakistan.Classifying the identified issues in to respective dimensions.Development of taxonomy for the identified issues of e-learning.Prioritization of the issues according to their importance for the promotion of e-learning. Integration of information and communication technology in education is emerging as the new paradigm of learning and training. Higher education institutions are struggling to shift to this new paradigm to facilitate more and more learners with the flexibility of any time-anywhere learning. E-learning is not gaining as much popularity in the developing countries as it was expected in the last decade. Little work has been done in this area of research in the developing countries. This study contributes to identify and analyze the impact of critical issues which are creating barriers in the promotion of e-learning in the developing countries like Pakistan. Furthermore, this study contributes in devising taxonomy and proposing new category software for the identified critical issues. A mix mode research model has been applied to collect data from the e-learning experts of different public sector universities of Pakistan to get a deeper understanding of the issues and their impact on the promotion of e-learning in Pakistan. The findings of this study reveal sixteen (16) critical issues which are classified in five (5) dimensions, to be addressed on priority basis to promote e-learning in Pakistan. The identified dimensions and issues have been prioritized according to their importance using the Analytical Hierarchy Process method.

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.

Architecture for Applying Data Mining and Visualization on Network Flow for Botnet Traffic Detection

Botnet is one of the most recent tools used in cyber-crime including Distributed Denial of Service attacks, phishing, spamming, and spying on remote computers. These days, governments, business, and individuals are facing catastrophic damages caused by hackers using malicious botnets. It is a major challenge for cyber-security research community to combat the emerging threat of botnets. Current network intrusion detection methods based on anomaly detection approaches suffer from fairly high error rate and low performance. The proposed flow based botnet detection system tackles these issues by combining data mining and visualization. The anomalous data is passed to several trust models, and the flows are re-evaluated to obtain their trustfulness, which is then aggregated to detect malicious traffic via visualization. The visualized information will be analyzed by human intellectual and conceptual ability to gain useful knowledge about botnet activities for further precaution and validation.

Study of Prioritization Techniques Using Students as Subjects

In many software development projects there are more candidate requirements. Most projects are also constrained by budget and time; therefore it is often difficult to implement all requirements that have been elicited for a system. For prioritization purposes, many approaches have been proposed so far to help the process. Several empirical studies have been conducted to analyze characteristics of the available approaches, but their results are often difficult to compare. In this paper, a study designed at evaluating two requirements prioritization techniques, AHP and Numeral assignment technique is discussed. The study used students as subjects to prioritize requirements from an estate agency system and a library information system. Two groups of students, one from requirements engineering classroom and another group consists of research students participate in the study. The results reaffirm previous study that AHP gives more accurate and more informative result than the numeral assignment technique.

A flowchart-based intelligent tutoring system for improving problem-solving skills of novice programmers

Intelligent tutoring and personalization are considered as the two most important factors in the research of learning systems and environments. An effective tool that can be used to improve problem-solving ability is an Intelligent Tutoring System which is capable of mimicking a human tutors actions in implementing a one-to-one personalized and adaptive teaching. In this paper, a novel Flowchart-based Intelligent Tutoring System FITS is proposed benefiting from Bayesian networks for the process of decision making so as to aid students in problem-solving activities and learning computer programming. FITS not only takes full advantage of Bayesian networks, but also benefits from a multi-agent system using an automatic text-to-flowchart conversion approach for engaging novice programmers in flowchart development with the aim of improving their problem-solving skills. In the end, in order to investigate the efficacy of FITS in problem-solving ability acquisition, a quasi-experimental design was adopted by this research. According to the results, students in the FITS group experienced better improvement in their problem-solving abilities than those in the control group. Moreover, with regard to the improvement of a users problem-solving ability, FITS has shown to be considerably effective for students with different levels of prior knowledge, especially for those with a lower level of prior knowledge.

Problems in requirements engineering education: a survey

Requirements Engineering Education literature presents various problems that students face while taking courses in Requirements Engineering. This paper reports on an exploratory study to assess the present status of the Requirements Engineering course offered in major public universities in Malaysia. The main instrument used to gather data was the questionnaire. 47 responses were received and analyzed. The results from the questionnaire were discussed and compared with the problems presented in Requirements Engineering Education Literature.

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.

An AOP-Based Approach for Collecting Software Maintainability Dynamic Metrics

Software quality is gaining more attention from the software industry. Quality metrics are usually utilized to provide a quantitative measure of the software quality. Although dynamic metrics can provide a clearer insight into the software quality issue, it is observed that usually static metrics are used for such a purpose. This is due mainly to the technical difficulties associated with the collection of dynamic metrics. One of the known issues when dealing with dynamic metrics is the need to instrument code by inserting points for data collection. This is a very tedious and counterproductive task. Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is a promising technology that is used in the present time to add cross-cutting concerns to the software applications. AOP can be used to transparently instrument the code at compile-time. This research is suggesting AOP as a new technique that can be used for collecting software maintainability dynamic metrics data. Therefore, an AOP-based framework for collecting dynamic metrics has been designed and implemented, and finally, it has been evaluated. The evaluation results showed that the framework is a reasonable approach for collecting a maintainability dynamic metrics. The AOP-based framework provides an effective way for the transparent collection of a maintainability dynamic metrics data.