Software Development Perspective Research Articles

Virtual Laboratories in STEM

Virtual laboratory utilization has been trending in STEM undergraduate curricula for over twenty years. A virtual laboratory is an interactive computer simulation that mimics real-world laboratory experiences in silico. Virtual labs are cost-effective pedagogical options for academic institutions that lack adequate funding for physical infrastructure and instrumentation. Virtual labs are an excellent proxy for lab activities threatening individual safety and public health. Further, during the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual labs were the primary pedagogical strategy for laboratory instruction. STEM faculty have developed numerous techniques for incorporating virtual labs into classroom and laboratory activities. New technology like artificial intelligence will expand virtual lab usability and effectiveness. Educational research demonstrates positive student outcomes and other benefits from virtual lab engagement. Continued effective mixed-methods research and production of essential virtual lab-based evaluation materials, such as discipline-specific rubrics, are needed to advance the application of this vital technology further. Moreover, from a software development perspective, many more virtual laboratories are needed in technology, engineering, mathematics, and specialized scientific fields.

Improving Project Management in Capital Market Regulators: A Software Development Perspective

Improving Project Management in Capital Market Regulators: A Software Development Perspective

A Conceptual Framework Based on PLS-SEM Approach for Sustainable Customer Relationship Management in Enterprise Software Development: Insights from Developers

Due to its significant relevance in outsourcing, the global software industry, such as enterprise software development organizations, accepted the implementation of global software development (GSD). Customers play a pivotal role in any industry, and effective customer relationship management (CRM) is instrumental in ensuring client satisfaction while developing software projects. However, software organizations operating globally often need more insight into their customers’ perspectives. These challenges give rise to a major combination for the success of the GSD projects. Organizations working globally face the key challenge of the implementation of CRM. The main objective of this paper is to investigate and understand the challenges faced by global software development organizations when implementing customer relationship management (CRM) in their enterprise software projects. This paper aims to assess how these CRM implementation challenges impact the value of enterprise software products in the context of global software development (GSD). To achieve this objective, the study employs the partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach and conducts a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify relevant challenges. Additionally, this paper presents a conceptual framework based on the identified challenges and validates it through surveys and qualitative research with software outsourcing companies in Pakistan. The research provides valuable insights from the perspective of software developers and aims to offer practical guidance for the successful application of CRM in outsourcing.

How to design data access for researchers: A legal and software development perspective

Public scrutiny of platforms has been limited by a lack of transparency. In response, EU law increasingly requires platforms to provide data to researchers. The Digital Services Act and the proposed Regulation on the Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising in particular require platforms to provide access to data through ad libraries and in response to data access requests. However, these obligations leave platforms considerable discretion to determine how access to data is provided. As the history of platforms’ self-regulated data access projects shows, the technical choices involved in designing data access significantly affect how researchers can use the provided data to scrutinise platforms. Ignoring the way data access is designed therefore creates a danger that platforms’ ability to limit research into their services simply shifts from controlling what data is available to researchers, to how data access is provided. This article explores how the Digital Services Act and proposed Political Advertising Regulation should be used to control the operationalisation of data access obligations that enable researchers to scrutinise platforms. It argues the operationalisation of data access regimes should not only be seen as a legal problem, but also as a software design problem. To that end it explores how software development principles may inform the operationalisation of data access obligations. The article closes by exploring the legal mechanisms available in the Digital Services Act and proposed Political Advertising Regulation to exercise control over the design of data access regimes, and makes five recommendations for ways in which these mechanisms should be used to enable research into platforms.

Understanding and Analyzing Factors that Affect Merge Conflicts from the Perspective of Software Developers

Merge conflicts are very common in collaborative software development, which is supported mainly by the use of branches that can be potentially merged. In this context, several studies have proposed mechanisms to avoid conflicts whenever possible and some identified factors that lead to conflicts. In this article, we report on an investigation of factors that can lead to conflicts or that can somehow reduce the chances of conflict from the developers’ perspective. To do so, based on related work, we conducted two empirical studies with Brazilian software developers to both understand and analyze factors that affect merge conflicts. Firstly, we conducted survey research with 109 software developers to understand how they use branches, the occurrence of conflicts and the resolution process, and factors that can lead to or avoid conflicts. Results showed that the use of branches is very common and mostly has the purpose of creating a new feature or fixing a bug. According to the participants, in most projects, developers have the autonomy to create new branches and sometimes conflicts happen. The main factors that can lead to conflicts are “the time a branch is isolated” and “lack of communication”. On the other hand, the factors cited as good practices to avoid conflicts were “improve team communication” and “less branching duration”. Secondly, we conducted a field study based on interviews with 15 software developers to analyze those factors to understand better what leads to or avoids conflicts in a merge. Finally, this work allowed us to conclude that communication with the team, checking code updates, shorter branch duration, and management are important for software developers, especially when they think about what increases and decreases merge conflicts.

The perspective of Brazilian software developers on data privacy

Context:Maintaining the privacy of user data is a concern in software development to satisfy customer needs or to comply with privacy laws. Recent studies have shown that software development approaches still neglect non-functional requirements, including privacy. Concern about privacy may increase in the period between when a privacy law is initially announced and when it is passed into law. During this period, companies will be challenged to comply with the new law. Research has shown that many developers do not have sufficient knowledge to develop privacy-preserving software systems. Objective:We investigate the level of knowledge and understanding that developers possess regarding privacy. We explore the personal, behavioural, and external environmental factors affecting a developer’s decision-making regarding privacy requirements. Methods:We replicated a study by means of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with thirteen practitioners at six companies. Our data analysis is based on the principles of ‘grounded theory codification’. Results:We identified nine personal factors, five behavioural factors, and seven external environment factors that are relevant to how software developers make decisions regarding. Conclusion:Our identification of factors that influence the development of privacy-preserving software systems can be seen as a contribution to the specification of effective methods for securing privacy.

Implementation of Garbage Litter Detection using Image Processing with Novel Perspective of Software Development

Implementation of Garbage Litter Detection using Image Processing with Novel Perspective of Software Development

Analysis on the Maintainability of Smart Meter Software for Full Lifetime

With the deepening of Internet concept and electricity marketization reform, more requirements are put forward for metering equipment, and the scale and complexity of software also increase. The new generation of intelligent electricity meters meet the IR46 standard and adopt the multi-core modular design scheme, which also puts forward higher requirements for the maintainability of software. This paper starts from the key control points of the whole life cycle of intelligent electricity meters and combines the characteristics of software testing, so as to analyze and evaluate the maintainability of the software. Firstly, the factors that influence the maintainability of watt-hour meter products are analyzed, and the software key data is considered from the perspective of software development and design. Then, the index system of the maintainability of the intelligent software is established, and the key points of the maintainability test and the weight of each index are analyzed in combination with the testing technology of the intelligent meter software and the analytic hierarchy process.

Design and implementation of regional online ride-hailing scheduling algorithm

The network car has solved some problems of traditional taxis from the perspective of safety and convenience, but there are still gaps in the inter-city field. This paper proposes a scheduling method to solve the inter-city travel field from the regional perspective. Firstly, the platform of the system is built from the perspective of software development, and then the traditional scheduling algorithm for dispatching orders in the city is studied. Finally, the intercity scheduling algorithm is mainly designed. This paper fills the gap in the field of inter-city travel between vehicles, and the scheduling algorithm performs well, with good order taking rate and travel efficiency. The establishment of the regional network car platform meets the needs of the public for inter-city travel. The platform itself has practical significance, and the study of scheduling algorithm also provides ideas and reference for the field of vehicle scheduling.

Convergences between social exchange theory and mediation of information and knowledge from the perspective of software developers

Informação e conhecimento são imprescindíveis à sobrevivência das empresas e no cotidiano das pessoas. Ademais, o software é elemento fundamental para gerir essas informações. Os profissionais de programação fazem uso de informação e conhecimento organizacional para desenvolverem seus projetos e trabalharem em equipe. Informação e conhecimento representam poder, e seu compartilhamento inclui barganhas, comportamentos estudados pela Teoria da Troca Social. Compartilhar informação efetivamente envolve mais do que repassá-la, envolve uma interferência visando que o receptor faça sua apropriação, para a execução do trabalho, por meio de sujeitos mediadores da informação. Objetiva-se verificar como se dá o compartilhamento de informação e conhecimento entre profissionais de software, inferindo como princípios da Teoria da Troca Social interferem ou em sua mediação, destacando a influência de motivadores egocêntricos e altruístas, ou voltados à coletividade. Como procedimentos metodológicos, efetuou-se um estudo de caso, de natureza descritiva, com profissionais de software discentes de uma instituição pública de ensino superior, de Garça, São Paulo, bem como seus funcionários administrativos, utilizando questionários, entrevistas e análise do site da instituição. Como resultados, verificou-se existirem evidências de mediação da informação e conhecimento entre os pesquisados, sendo que motivações altruístas e egocêntricas se conciliam dialeticamente nessa /mediação/compartilhamento. Atribui-se os resultados possivelmente a valores internalizados na formação universitária e a um ambiente de trabalho psicologicamente positivo. Conclui-se que existem convergências entre a Teoria da Troca Social e a mediação da informação, tanto no aspecto teórico quanto prático, evidenciando a possiblidade da mediação além dos equipamentos informacionais tradicionais: bibliotecas, arquivos e museus.

The anatomy of a distributed predictive modeling framework: online learning, blockchain network, and consensus algorithm.

ObjectiveCross-institutional distributed healthcare/genomic predictive modeling is an emerging technology that fulfills both the need of building a more generalizable model and of protecting patient data by only exchanging the models but not the patient data. In this article, the implementation details are presented for one specific blockchain-based approach, ExplorerChain, from a software development perspective. The healthcare/genomic use cases of myocardial infarction, cancer biomarker, and length of hospitalization after surgery are also described.Materials and MethodsExplorerChain’s 3 main technical components, including online machine learning, metadata of transaction, and the Proof-of-Information-Timed (PoINT) algorithm, are introduced in this study. Specifically, the 3 algorithms (ie, core, new network, and new site/data) are described in detail.ResultsExplorerChain was implemented and the design details of it were illustrated, especially the development configurations in a practical setting. Also, the system architecture and programming languages are introduced. The code was also released in an open source repository available at https://github.com/tsungtingkuo/explorerchain.DiscussionThe designing considerations of semi-trust assumption, data format normalization, and non-determinism was discussed. The limitations of the implementation include fixed-number participating sites, limited join-or-leave capability during initialization, advanced privacy technology yet to be included, and further investigation in ethical, legal, and social implications.ConclusionThis study can serve as a reference for the researchers who would like to implement and even deploy blockchain technology. Furthermore, the off-the-shelf software can also serve as a cornerstone to accelerate the development and investigation of future healthcare/genomic blockchain studies.

Ontology-based process integration incorporating reference associations between medical standards from the perspective of medical software developers

International standards for medical software require systematic development, with the core standards being IEC 60601-1, IEC 62034, and ISO 14971. Three core standards represent five development activities by referring activities undertaken as per other standards. As a result, developers have difficulty identifying the reference relationships. There are studies supporting the reference associations, but they do not provide the associations at each stage of the development. So, we propose an integrated process in which core standards are re-configured from the developer’s point of view and describe as an ontology. By analyzing associations oriented development process, the integrated process is defined corresponding to requirements at each stage of the development procedure. Also, we define the cost required to comply with the standards. By randomly generated scenarios, a cost reduction of 47% can be achieved by suggested process. As a result, the integrated process enables the systematic and effective development of medical software.

Performance evaluation of list iteration methods in Java: an empirical study

Introduction: Lists are used in various software applications including web applications, desktop applications, and Internet ofThings (IoT) applications to store different types of items (e.g.country name, product model, and device category). Users can select one or more of these items to perform specific tasks such asfilling forms, ordering products, reading device data, etc. In somesoftware applications, lists store a huge number of items to be iterated over in order to know what users have selected. From a software development perspective, there are a number of methods toiterate over list items. Materials and Methods: In this paper, fivelist iteration methods: Classic For, Enhanced For, Iterator, List Iterator, and For Each have been compared experimentally with eachother with regard to their performance (execution time required toiterate over list items). Thus, a number of experimental test scenarios have been conducted to obtain the comparison results. Resultsand Discussion: The experimental results of this study have beenpresented in Table 4. Conclusions: Overall performance evaluation showed that Iterator and List Iterator methods outperformedother list iteration methods in all test scenarios. However, List Iterator outperformed Iterator when the list size was small. On theother hand, Iterator outperformed List Iterator when the list sizewas large.

Instruction-Level Abstraction (ILA)

Modern Systems-on-Chip (SoC) designs are increasingly heterogeneous and contain specialized semi-programmable accelerators in addition to programmable processors. In contrast to the pre-accelerator era, when the ISA played an important role in verification by enabling a clean separation of concerns between software and hardware, verification of these “accelerator-rich” SoCs presents new challenges. From the perspective of hardware designers, there is a lack of a common framework for formal functional specification of accelerator behavior. From the perspective of software developers, there exists no unified framework for reasoning about software/hardware interactions of programs that interact with accelerators. This article addresses these challenges by providing a formal specification and high-level abstraction for accelerator functional behavior. It formalizes the concept of an Instruction Level Abstraction (ILA), developed informally in our previous work, and shows its application in modeling and verification of accelerators. This formal ILA extends the familiar notion of instructions to accelerators and provides a uniform, modular, and hierarchical abstraction for modeling software-visible behavior of both accelerators and programmable processors. We demonstrate the applicability of the ILA through several case studies of accelerators (for image processing, machine learning, and cryptography), and a general-purpose processor (RISC-V). We show how the ILA model facilitates equivalence checking between two ILAs, and between an ILA and its hardware finite-state machine (FSM) implementation. Further, this equivalence checking supports accelerator upgrades using the notion of ILA compatibility, similar to processor upgrades using ISA compatibility.

Knowledge-based system with enhanced situational awareness, analysis for Malaysian Un Oilitary Observer (UNMO): A software development perspective

Nowadays, there are numerous of knowledge-based systems have been developed for military personnel involved in military missions. The existing system, nevertheless, none developed with situational awareness (SA) for Malaysian military personnel. The purpose of this paper is to invent a knowledge-based system with SA analysis that can be used by the Malaysian military personnel and later on, the system is integrated into rugged tablet or any pervasive equipment used in United Nation peacekeeping military operations. The system is created to assist military personnel, especially for military observer in decision-making when facing all possible scenarios based on United Nation peacekeeping military operation location and environment. This research will release a complete system of knowledge-based with SA analysis that emphasize to equip Malaysian observer in United Nation peacekeeping military operations.

Extending Amdahl’s Law for Multicores with Turbo Boost

Rewriting sequential programs to make use of multiple cores requires considerable effort. For many years, Amdahl’s law has served as a guideline to assess the performance benefits of parallel programs over sequential ones, but recent advances in multicore design introduced variability in the performance of the cores and motivated the reexamination of the underlying model. This paper extends Amdahl’s law for multicore processors with built-in dynamic frequency scaling mechanisms such as Intel’s Turbo Boost. Using a model that captures performance dependencies between cores, we present tighter upper bounds for the speedup and reduction in energy consumption of a parallel program over a sequential one on a given multicore processor and validate them on Haswell and Sandy Bridge Intel CPUs. Previous studies have shown that from a processor design perspective, Turbo Boost mitigates the speedup limitations obtained under Amdahl’s law by providing higher performance for the same energy budget. However, our new model and evaluation show that from a software development perspective, Turbo Boost aggravates these limitations by making parallelization of sequential codes less profitable.

Using static and dynamic impact analysis for effort estimation

Change effort estimation is needed not only in software maintenance phase, but also in the software development phase. Many techniques have been developed to estimate required change effort for a particular change request. One of these techniques is impact analysis. One main challenge of this technique from a software development perspective is that the existence of inconsistent states of some software artefacts, i.e. some classes have completely developed and some of them partially developed. Therefore, this research proposes a new change effort estimation model that overcomes this challenge using a combination of static and dynamic analysis techniques. The results of this research are two-fold: (i) a new change effort estimation model using static and dynamic analysis techniques for software development phase; and (ii) demonstration of significant achievements of the approach via extensive experimental validation using several case studies.

Workshop videos for requirements communication

Shared understanding of requirements between stakeholders and the development team is a critical success factor for requirements engineering. Workshops are an effective means for achieving such shared understanding. Stakeholders and team representatives can meet and discuss what a planned software system should be and how it should support achieving stakeholder goals. However, some important intended recipients of the requirements are often not present in such workshops: the developers. Thus, they cannot benefit from the in-depth understanding of the requirements and of the rationales for these requirements that develops during the workshops. The simple handover of a requirements specification hardly compensates the rich requirements understanding that is needed for the development of an acceptable system. To compensate the lack of presence in a requirements workshop, we propose to record that requirements workshop on video. If workshop participants agree to be recorded, a video is relatively simple to create and can capture much more aspects about requirements and rationales than a specification document. This paper presents the workshop video technique and a phenomenological evaluation of its use for requirements communication from the perspective of software developers. The results show how the technique was appreciated by observers of the video, present positive and negative feedbacks from the observers, and lead to recommendations for implementing the technique in practice.

A novel effort estimation approach for requirement changes during software development phase

Managing software changes and achieving an effective change acceptance decision is one of the crucial factors in ensuring the software project success. Accepting too many changes will cause expense and delay and rejecting the changes may cause customer dissatisfaction. One of the inputs that help in achieving an effective change acceptance decision is by having reliable estimation on the change effort. From software development perspective, the estimation has to take into account the inconsistent states of software artifacts across project lifecycle i.e., fully developed or partially developed. These inconsistent states require different ways of estimation such as the fully developed artifacts may have different calculation compared to the partially developed artifacts. Many change effort estimation approaches have been developed and one of them is using impact analysis. One main challenge of this technique from software development perspective is that this technique is specifically used for software maintenance phase in which all software artifacts have been completely developed. This research introduces a new change effort estimation approach that is able to use different estimation techniques for different states of software artifacts. The outcome of this research is a new change effort estimation approach for software development phase using the extended version of the static and dynamic analysis techniques from our previous works.

Predicting Number of Faults in Software System using Genetic Programming

Abstract In software development perspective, dealing with software faults is a vital and foremost important task. Presence of faults not only reduces the quality of the software, but also increases its development cost. A large number of models have been presented in the past to predict the fault proneness of the software system. However, most of them provide inadequate information and thus make the task of fault prediction difficult. In this paper, we present an approach to predict the number of faults in the given software system using the Genetic Programming (GP). We validate the proposed approach using an experimental investigation where we use the fault datasets of the ten software projects available in the PROMISE data repository. The Error rate, Recall and Completeness of the fault prediction model are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The results show that GP based models have produced the significant results for the number of faults prediction.