Advanced Accessibility Features for Inclusive Distance Education

The globalization of software development industry continues to experience a significant growth. The increased trend of globalization brings new challenges, increases the scope of the core functions of human resource management and impacts the dynamics of process improvement. The aim of this study is to explore the challenges of globalization and indicators of process improvement in distributed teams’ environment. This study also explores the impact of HRM practices on challenges of global software development, and, the impact of HRM practices and challenges of global software development on process improvement. The exploratory mixed method design is adapted as research methodology for this study. In this multi-method approach, study is completed in two phases. In first phase, qualitative data is collected, and analyzed to explore the study variables and their relationships in global software development environment. In second phase, quantitative data is collected, and analyzed to validate the findings of first phase. The findings of this study suggest that the challenges of global software development negatively impact the process improvement; but, effective HRM practices help to minimize the negative impact of challenges and positively impacts the process improvement in global software development environment.

Accessibility remains a significant challenge in software development, often due to the lack of structured and actionable guidance for specifying requirements that address diverse user needs. This paper introduces Path4All, a lightweight and user-centered method that integrates Personas, User Stories (US), Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), and WCAG guidelines to support the clear and consistent specification of accessibility requirements. To gather early insights into the method’s applicability, we conducted a focus group with experienced software professionals who applied Path4All in a practical, scenario-based activity. The findings suggest that Path4All fosters empathy, improves requirement clarity, and promotes the production of actionable and inclusive specifications. Participants highlighted the method’s potential benefits, while also identifying challenges related to WCAG complexity, organizational culture, and the need for clearer role definitions. These initial results point to Path4All’s potential to support inclusive design practices from the early stages of development.

One of the key challenges in software engineering and development is how to successfully reuse knowledge and experience, as well as the software itself. A primary goal is how to reuse solutions (e.g., software design, software modules) in new applications that were previously developed for other, possibly different applications. Specifically, how can we describe successful solutions to common software problems so that they can be successfully understood, customized, and reapplied on succeeding development efforts? Patterns provide one step toward goal of developing handbooks for software engineers.“Design pattern” is a term that has come into widespread use to represent a set of partial, proven solutions to general software design problems. Design patterns address one of the key challenges in software engineering and development: reusing the success experience of other developers. Patterns provide a means to capture successful solutions to common software problems in a formal written manner so that they can be successfully passed on to and understood by software developers. Developers can then customize and reapply the pattern on succeeding development efforts. Patterns are not limited to just design; however, they can be and are being applied on a host of domains, including system analysis and the software development process itself.

Achieving effective inter-team coordination is one of the most pressing challenges in large-scale software development. Hybrid approaches of traditional and agile development promise combining the overview and predictability of long-term planning on inter-team level with the flexibility and adaptability of agile development on team level. It is currently unclear, however, why such hybrids often fail. Our case study within a large software development unit of 13 teams at a global enterprise software company explores how and why a combination of traditional planning on inter-team level and agile development on team level can result in ineffective coordination. Based on a variety of data, including interviews with scrum masters, product owners, architects and senior management, and using Grounded Theory data analysis procedures, we identify a lack of dependency awareness across development teams as a key explanation of ineffective coordination. Our findings show how a lack of dependency awareness emerges from misaligned planning activities of specification, prioritization, estimation and allocation between agile team and traditional inter-team levels and ultimately prevents effective coordination. Knowing about these issues, large-scale hybrid projects in similar contexts can try to better align their planning activities across levels to improve dependency awareness and in turn achieve more effective coordination.

The concept of global software development was adopted by software organizations for the purpose of delivering quality software products at a reduced cost. Software reliability became one of the eminent challenges in the global software development. The main objective of this research paper is to develop a classification of the challenging factors in the global software development process faced by vendor organizations. The classification of the challenges depends on the data gathered through systematic literature review and implementation of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). A total of 18 challenges were explored through systematic literature review and mapped into five categories, that is, capability, reliance, delivery, management, and distinction. The explored issues played a major role for assisting the researcher and designer for mitigating the challenges during “AHP based prioritization framework for Vendor's Reliability challenges in Global Software Development”. Taking the AHP approach, we tried to fill this research gap by exploring and prioritizing the challenges that could negatively impact the vendor reliability of a specific organization. The classification of the explored challenges provided a framework that was used to deal with the issues associated with software reliability in the global software environment, which provided the vital role for the success of software organizations.

Metacomputing means exploiting computer resources that are distributed over the Internet in a transparent, user-friendly way. It is motivated by the requirements of cooperative, computation-intensive, time-critical applications. The recent development of metacomputing systems has led to so-called Computational Grids, whose heterogeneity poses new challenges in software development. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to programming Grid systems using special software components called skeletons. We describe a prototypical implementation in Java and RMI and study the performance on a Grid consisting of multiprocessor clusters.KeywordsNode ServerInput ListService ObjectAlgorithmic SkeletonLookup ServiceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) have found their ways into industry to enable better business-to-business cooperation. With the advent of SOA, new challenges for software development and testing also appeared. In this article, we motivate the need for SOA online testing and show how it can reveal faults that slipped offline testing. The paper outlines a case study in which online testing has been implemented as proof-of-concept, but also evaluated in terms of its effectiveness to identify typical SOA runtime reconfiguration problems according to an existing fault taxonomy. The experiments of the case study demonstrate that online testing (1) can detect many typical runtime reconfiguration faults, and that (2) online testing provides additional value over offline testing.

Reengineering of legacy systems is one of trickiest challenges in software development. The paper addresses methodologies applicable to re-engineering legacy information systems. Specifically, it points out a possibility to couple ontological descriptions of the enterprise with information systems features. Such interconnection verifies whether a functionality implemented in the information system relates to business tasks or not. Business processes formulated as DEMO transaction patterns together with Behavior-Driven Development technique enable to link existing businesses processes to production codebase.

Agile approaches arose as a way of addressing some of the main challenges in software development. Some of the challenges are changing requirements, lack of understanding about the system's scope, and out-of-sync between code, requirements, and documentation. Software companies' professionals have adopted Design Thinking (DT) to support software development to understand better what customers want, fostering the creation of features and products. Due to the importance of requirement engineering to software development success, this study aimed to characterize what DT benefits and challenges were perceived in requirements engineering by the Brazilian software development community. The current study used mixed methods combining two qualitative methods, a focus group to collect and understand the professionals' DT usage opinions and a survey to confirm the professionals' challenges and benefits. This study identified that DT has helped the professionals improve the requirements gathering and specification, reflecting on better users' real needs understanding and building fittable solutions to support them. The results serve to understand better DT potential, perceived by software industry professionals, to anticipate and support these issues with other professionals.

One of the main challenges in software development is to ensure the correctness and reliability of software systems. In this sense, a system failure or malfunction can result in a catastrophe especially in critical embedded systems. In the context of software verification, bounded model checkers (BMCs) have already been applied to discover subtle errors in real projects. When a model checker finds an error, it produces a counter-example. On one hand, the value of counter-examples to debug software systems is widely recognized in the state-of-the-practice. On the other hand, model checkers often produce counter-examples that are either too large or difficult to be understood mainly because of the software size and the values chosen by the respective solver. This paper proposes a method with the purpose of automating the collection and manipulation of counter-examples in order to generate new instantiated code to reproduce the identified error. The proposed method may be seen as a complementary technique for the verification performed by state-of-the-art BMC tools. In particular, we used the ESBMC model checker to show the effectiveness of the proposed method over publicly available benchmarks and, additionally, a comparison with the tool Frama-C.

The explosive growth in Internet of Things (IoT) devices like smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, and smartwatches has brought new challenges for software developers. Currently a single app can be created and executed on multiple target platforms. In this scenario, different programming languages such as HTML5 and JavaScript, and operational systems like Tizen and webOS promises easy multi-platform development. However, one of the biggest concerns from companies that develop applications to these IoT devices is the leakage or exposure of sensitive data. In this work we are addressing this problem by creating a modified version of Tizen, called TTizen, that modifies the Tizen Web Runtime to add dynamic taint tracking, with that we can track sensitive information that is being leaked, even if the information is obfuscated, and warn the users. From our knowledge this is the first prototype that adds this kind of technique to Tizen and tracks web applications in mobile devices. The results show that TTizen is a promising approach that can be improved and used to detect data leakage in IoT devices.

Software development teams that work together well, particularly those that can operate virtually, are an enormous competitive advantage for organizations (Cohen & Gibson, 2003). One challenge for software development or new product development teams in a global marketplace is managing and developing individuals from different disciplines who are remotely located. Such teams often encounter communication, environmental and philosophical barriers related to completing design tasks that threaten the success of projects (Warkenton, Sayeed & Hightower, 1997). For students at the university level, virtual cross-disciplinary learning experiences are key to their success in the competitive marketplace. The authors are currently in the second phase of an ongoing project designed to explore pedagogical, communications and logistical issues related to development of a sense of community between graduate students in the United Kingdom (UK) and United States (U.S.) (Schaffer et.al., 2005). One of the main goals of the current phase is to learn more about how virtual cross-disciplinary teams communicate and learn the concepts, models and discipline-specific language used by one another, as well as to identify key barriers and supports to such learning.

Thread-Level Parallelism (TLP) exploitation for embedded systems has been a challenge for software developers: while it is necessary to take advantage of the availability of multiple cores, it is also mandatory to consume less energy. To speed up the development process and make it as transparent as possible, software designers use Parallel Programming Interfaces (PPIs). However, as will be shown in this paper, each PPI implements different ways to exchange data using shared memory regions, influencing performance, energy consumption and Energy-Delay Product (EDP), which varies across different embedded processors. By evaluating four PPIs and three multicore processors (ARM A8, A9 and Intel Atom), we demonstrate that by simply switching PPI it is possible to save up to 59% in energy consumption and achieve up to 85% of EDP improvements, in the most significant case. We also show that the efficiency (i.e., The best possible use of the available resources) decreases as the number of threads increases in almost all cases, but at distinct rates.

The complexity of software-intensive systems is a challenge for software developers in choosing the optimal method from hundreds safety analysis methods. This paper proposed a comparison between two common safety analysis techniques: Software Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (SFMEA) and System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA). The comparison is based on the results of both methods applied in one case study: Level Crossing system. The comparison results are useful for safety analysts in choosing appropriate techniques.

One of the main challenges in software development is the complex structure of a system. The software development for event sequences is complex. It is a challenge to define a complexity metric for event sequences application. Lack of knowledge in complexity metric can lead to issues such as rises in software cost and delays in project timing. Numerous complexity metrics have been proposed and published, such as information flow complexity, lines of code, function points, and unique complexity metric. However, in the context of the event sequences, most of the research focuses on measuring web graphs, measuring the web traffic and how the complexity of the web impacts the customer. In this paper, the researchers studied and compared five different software complexity metrics. This paper describes the on-going research that addresses the issue to produce a unique weight to prioritise event sequences test cases.