Markov Decision Theory-Based Crowdsourcing Software Process Model

The word crowdsourcing, a compound contraction of crowd and outsourcing, was introduced by Jeff Howe in order to define outsourcing to the crowd. It is a sourcing model in which individuals or organizations obtain goods and services. These services include ideas and development of software or hardware, or any other business-task from a large, relatively open and often rapidly-evolving group of internet users; it divides work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. It has been used for completing various human intelligence tasks in the past, and this is an emerging form of outsourcing software development as it has the potential to significantly reduce the implementation cost. This chapter analyses the process of software development at a crowdsourced platform. The work analyses and identifies the phase wise deliverables in a competitive software development problem. It also proposes the use of Markov decision theory to model the dynamics of the development processes of a software by using a simulated example.

Disciplined or Agile?

Software requirements changes become necessary due to changes in customer requirements and changes in business rules and operating environments; hence, requirements development, which includes requirements changes, is a part of a software process. Previous studies have shown that failing to manage software requirements changes well is a main contributor to project failure. Given the importance of the subject, there is a plethora of efforts in academia and industry that discuss the management of requirements change in various directions, ways, and means. This chapter provided information about the current state-of-the-art approaches (i.e., Disciplined or Agile) for RCM and the research gaps in existing work. Benefits, risks, and difficulties associated with RCM are also made available to software practitioners who will be in a position of making better decisions on activities related to RCM. Better decisions can lead to better planning, which will increase the chance of project success.

Software Cost Estimation and Capability Maturity Model in Context of Global Software Engineering

Software cost estimation is the process of forecasting the effort needed to develop the software system. Global software engineering (GSE) highlights that software development knows no boundaries and majority of the software products and services are developed today by globally-distributed teams, projects, and companies. The problem of cost estimation gets more complex if the discussion is carried out in the context of GSE, which has its own issues. Temporal, cultural, and geographical distance creates communication and software process implementation issues. Traditional software process models such as capability maturity model (CMM) lacks the dynamism to accommodate the recent trends in GSE. The chapter introduces GSE and discusses various cost estimation techniques and different levels of CMM. A couple of GSE-based case studies having CMM-level projects from multiple organizations are studied to analyze the impacts of highly mature processes on effort, quality, and cycle time.

Application Mobile Design for Blind People

The team software process is a methodology focused on software development on gears, which at the end of the construction ensures product quality. This quality must be taken into account for people with disabilities like visual impairment. According to World Health Organization, in a study conducted in 2010, the number of people with visual impairment in the world is around 285,389 million people, and in America, it is around 26,612 million. This chapter focuses on using the TSP for the construction of an application for people with visual disabilities, resulting in a quality product that will help in memory and, in addition, the user learns about the city of Aguascalientes, Mexico, allowing the inclusion of these users in society.

The Moderator of Innovation Culture and the Mediator of Realized Absorptive Capacity in Enhancing Organizations' Absorptive Capacity for SPI Success

Software process improvement (SPI) is critical to information system development. In the context of successful SPI, this research focuses on a firm's dynamic learning ability to see how it facilitates an effective means of acquiring and utilizing external SPI knowledge in responding to changing software development environments. Specifically, the authors propose a research model to investigate how two mechanisms of absorptive capacity are incorporated with innovation culture as a contextual factor to enable successful software process improvement. A survey was conducted including 125 SPI certified firms in China and Taiwan to examine the model. The findings indicate that a firm's potential absorptive capacity significantly influences realized absorptive capacity, which has a significant impact on SPI success and acts as a partial mediator between potential absorptive capacity and SPI success. Moreover, the results suggest that the mediating effect of potential absorptive capacity on SPI success via realized absorptive capacity is amplified when innovation culture is imposed.

Remote Eye Gaze Tracking Research: A Comparative Evaluation on Past and Recent Progress

Several decades of eye related research has shown how valuable eye gaze data are for applications that are essential to human daily life. Eye gaze data in a broad sense has been used in research and systems for eye movements, eye tracking, and eye gaze tracking. Since early 2000, eye gaze tracking systems have emerged as interactive gaze-based systems that could be remotely deployed and operated, known as remote eye gaze tracking (REGT) systems. The drop point of visual attention known as point of gaze (PoG), and the direction of visual attention known as line of sight (LoS), are important tasks of REGT systems. In this paper, we present a comparative evaluation of REGT systems intended for the PoG and LoS estimation tasks regarding past to recent progress. Our literature evaluation presents promising insights on key concepts and changes recorded over time in hardware setup, software process, application, and deployment of REGT systems. In addition, we present current issues in REGT research for future attempts.