Formalization of the prediction and ranking of software development life cycle models

The study of software engineering professional practices includes the use of the formal methodology in a software development. Identifying the appropriate methodology will not only reduce the failure of software but will also help to deliver the software in accordance with the predetermined budget and schedule. In literature, few works have been developed a tool for prediction of the most appropriate methodology for the specific software project. In this paper, a method for selecting an appropriate software development life cycle (SDLC) model based on a ranking manner from the highest to the lowest scoring is presented. The selection and ranking of appropriate SDLC elaborate the related SDLC’s critical factors, these factors are given different weights according to the SDLC, then these weights are used by the proposed mathematical method. The proposed approach has been extensively experimented on a dataset by software practitioners who are working in the software industry. Experimental results show that, the proposed method represents an applicable tool in predicting and ranking suitable SDLC models on various types of projects, such as: life-critical systems, commercial uses systems, and entertainment applications.

Identifying Key Characteristics of Business Rules That Affect Software Project Success

Today, businesses need to continuously adjust to a dynamic environment. Enterprises have to deal with global competition and technological advances, meet government regulations, and keep their expenses under control. Under these pressures, enterprises need to implement and improve software that supports and helps to evolve their business. However, as practice shows, software implementation projects are complex, and a considerable percentage of them do not meet business requirements. Therefore, a business needs to manage software implementation properly. Existing research shows that using business rules (BR) in software implementation projects helps to ensure its success. The purpose of our study is to advance the understanding of how BR affect software implementation success, namely, which key characteristics of BR are the most important. To achieve this goal, the top thousand enterprises in Slovenia, by added value, facing typical software implementation projects were surveyed. The obtained results show that BR that are specifically prepared for a particular project and easy to understand have a statistically significant positive effect on software implementation project success.

Intuitionistic Fuzzy Decision Making Towards Efficient Team Selection in Global Software Development

For successful completion of any software project, an efficient team is needed. This task becomes more challenging when the project is to be completed under global software development umbrella. The manual selection of team members based on some expert judgment may lead to inappropriate selection. In reality, there are hundreds of employees in an organization and a single expert may be biased towards any member. Thus, there is a need to adopt methods which consider multiple selection criteria with multiple expert views for making appropriate selection. This article uses an intuitionistic fuzzy approach to handle uncertainty in the expert's decision in multicriteria group decision making process and ranking among the finite team members. An intuitionistic fuzzy Muirhead Mean (IFMM) is used to aggregate the intuitionistic criteria's. To gain confidence between criteria and expert score relationship, the Annova test is performed. The results are promising with p value as small as 0.02 and one-tail t-test score equals to 0.0000002.

MMT

This paper presents the Metrics Monitoring Tool (MMT) that was developed in university graduate and undergraduate courses on software project work in 2014-2016. The tool aims to support project members, project managers and upper management in reporting and monitoring software and project metrics for their easier and more effective utilization. The paper covers the development process of the tool, evaluation assessment, its current composition and features. The paradigm applied in this study is Design Science Research and the methods for evaluation include prototype, expert evaluation, case study and technical experiment. Data was collected from the tool users by two questionnaires. As a result, MMT was evaluated to ease the metrics handling, while several aspects related to the richness of functionalities and usability still require further development.

Risk Management Metrics

This chapter describes how risk management deals with the detection, the evaluation and the precedence of the risks in the process of project management. There is always an uncertainty factor related to the decisions of an investment while managing a project. Risk management is a proactive approach to deal with such future events that can lead to slow performance of the software project management. For successful risk management; there are different metrics that have been used in the past and are being getting used in the present for inspecting the progress of a project at specific points in a timeline that help in reducing the amount of risk. For the adoption of effective metrics for risk management, data is required. All of the metrics can be applied to the different domains of project, process and product. The chapter also covers strategies to advance, distinguish, estimate, and forecast the risk management process. A review of the key point indicators (KPIs) are also integrated along with the project metrics to signify the future and the present renderings.

eXtreme Programming, Agile Methodologies, Software Project Management, Customer Role, Rigorous Testing

Agile software development methodologies are attracting attention from academics and practitioners for planning and managing software projects. The eXtreme Programming (XP) challenges conformist wisdom regarding software system development processes and practices as agile methodologies. To work efficiently in the current software development practice, characterized by requirements fuzziness, XP moves away from document-centric operations into people-centric management. In the XP-based software project, the customers play an essential role, having multiple responsibilities such as driving the project, gathering requirements (‘user stories'), and exercising quality control (or acceptance testing). Besides, the customers must liaise with external project stakeholders (e.g., funding authorities, end-users) while maintaining the development team's trust and the wider business. The success of such software project management practices relies on the quality result of each stage of development obtained through rigorous testing. This chapter describes three characteristics of XP project management: customer role, software testing feedback, and learning.

The Mythical Lines of Code Metric

Using the lines of code (LOC) metric in software project management can be a financial moral hazard to an organization. This is especially true for upper management who handles an organizational budget and strategic plan. Software project managers have their own budgets. However, if they fail to meet the budget, the organization's cash flow, rather than the project manager's personal cash flow, will suffer. This chapter will discuss the practice of software project management, the field of software metrics, game theory, and the game theory issue of moral hazard. It will demonstrate why using LOC as a metric can present a moral hazard to senior management and an organization.