Shamsul Sahibuddin

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.

Requirements Engineering Problems and Practices in Software Companies: An Industrial Survey

This paper presents about a study conducted to investigate the current state of Requirements Engineering (RE) problems and practices amongst the software development companies in Malaysia. The main objective of the study is to determine areas in RE process that should be addressed in future research in order to improve the process. Information required for the study was obtained through a survey, questionnaires distributed to project managers and software developers who are working at various software development companies in the country. Results show that software companies in this study are still facing great challenges in getting their requirements right due to organizational and technical factors. Also, we found out that high-maturity ratings do not generally correlate better performance and do not indicate effective, high-maturity practices especially to the RE practices. The findings imply that we must consider both human and technical problems, with extra care should be given to the technical issues and all the RE practices in our future research which is to re-build a specialized RE process improvement model.

Considering service strategy in ITIL V3 as a framework for IT Governance

IT governance is the process by which decisions are made around IT investments. A well-matured IT governance framework is based on three major elements: structure, process and communication. In addition, there are four objectives that drives IT governance and must be covered in IT governance processes: IT value and alignment, accountability, performance measurement, and risk management. As we know Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a public framework that describes Best Practice in IT service management. Although some researchers have considered ITIL V2 as a part of their IT Governance framework, this paper claims that ITIL V3 (new publication of ITIL in 2007) and “Service Strategy” as the core of this publication, can provide a well-matured framework for the governance of IT by covering all requirement of IT Governance.

The strength and weakness of Requirement Engineering (RE) process

The need of organization is to enhance the services through system application. The IT Personnel should talented in identified the critical issues in RE. The IT Personnel supposed to recognize the strength and weaknesses of selected RE standard. This paper shows listed of issues identified during the software project development. The RE process assist a standard in managing the system application needs throughout six components of software projects. RE does this by helping the management to well organize related processes, methods and tools.

Issues in Implementing IT Governance in Small and Medium Enterprises

Nowadays, almost all the enterprises in the world fall in Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) category even though SMEs has different definitions in different countries. At the same time, there is no exemplar standard and /or framework for information technology (IT) governance for SMEs. This paper presents the main issues in implementing IT governance in SMEs. Firstly, it explains the definition of SMEs and their characteristics, secondly it discusses IT governance definition and its framework. Finally, some issues and approaches for ITG implementation in SMEs are described, and end with conclusion and future work.

A service based framework for integration of ITIL V3 and enterprise architecture

ITIL V3 could be introduced as a governance framework for IT service management (ITSM) and attempts to align IT investments with business objectives. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is also referred as a general framework for designing business and IT/IS architectures of organizations and it also attempts to align these architectures with business strategies. Our research tends to provide a service based framework for EA in order to meet IT Service Architecture requirements of ITIL V3. Regard to this issue our Integrated Service Architecture Framework (ISAF) is outlined here to be developed through main research. One of our goals is to provide a solution for practitioners in utilization of EA architectures in ITIL V3. Authors also hope this study would contribute in academic domain through bridging computer science and information system disciplines due to service-oriented technology and management aspects of the research.

Adoption of Requirements Engineering Practices in Malaysian Software Development Companies

This paper presents exploratory survey results on Requirements Engineering (RE) practices of some software development companies in Malaysia. The survey attempted to identify patterns of RE practices the companies are implementing. Information required for the survey was obtained through a survey, mailed self-administered questionnaires distributed to project managers and software developers who are working at software development companies operated across the country. The results showed that the overall adoption of the RE practices in these companies is strong. However, the results also indicated that fewer companies in the survey have use appropriate CASE tools or software to support their RE process and practices, define traceability policies and maintain traceability manual in their projects.

Requirements engineering problems in 63 software companies in Malaysia

It is widely acknowledged that problems associated with Requirements Engineering affect the quality of software and the effectiveness of the software development process. Malaysia is fast becoming an IT outsourcing heaven yet there is a lack of published studies on these problems in the region. This paper presents exploratory survey results of project and Requirements Engineering problems as identified by 63 Malaysian software development companies.

Dynamic WLAN Fingerprinting RadioMap for Adapted Indoor Positioning Model

As a result of Smartphone usage increment a sharp growth in demand for indoor environment computing especially for Location Based Services (LBS) has been occurred. The basic concept of LBS is to determine the mobile users’ location, which is important for services such as tracking or navigation in Civil defense and Healthcare. Currently, there are many techniques used to locate a mobile user in indoor environment. WLAN is considered as one of the best choices for indoor positioning due to its low cost, simple configuration and high accuracy. Although the WLAN Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) fingerprinting method is the most accurate positioning method, it has a serious drawback because it’s Radio Map (RM) become outdated when environmental change occurs. In addition, recalibrating the RM is a time consuming process. This paper presents a novel adapted indoor positioning model which uses the path loss propagation model of the wireless signal to overcome the outdated RM. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed adapted model is highly efficient in solving the problems mentioned especially in a dynamically changing environment.

Re-documenting, visualizing and understanding software system using DocLike Viewer

Visualizing the artifacts of a software system graphically has proven to improve the cognitive strategies and understanding of the subject system by programmers. This is more crucial when they need to maintain a software system with out-dated documentation or without system documentation at all. Many tools have emerged and they predominantly consist of a reverse engineering environment and a viewer to visualize software artifacts such as in the form of graphs. The tools also grant structural redocumentation of existing software system but they do not directly utilize document-like software visualization in their approaches. We propose DocLike modularized graph (DMG) method that represents the software architectures of a reverse engineered subject system graphically in a modularized and standardized document-like manner. To realize this method, we have built a prototype tool called DocLike Viewer that enables a user to redocument, visualize and comprehend a subject system written in C language that is parsed by an existing parser. From the experiment conducted we found that our method managed to statistically improve cognition of a subject system in terms of productivity and quality to solve certain types of maintenance tasks.