The Context of IST for Solid Information Retrieval and Infrastructure Building

Development and progress mainly depends on education and its solid dissemination. Technologies as well as engineering solutions are important for the business and corporate houses. In this context, educational initiatives and programs play a vital role. Developing countries are suffering from many problems and therefore fostering new academic innovation and researches on economic development in today's context. Information Technologies and management science are important for solid business solutions. Therefore, education and knowledge dissemination play an important and valuable role. In many developing countries, gaps between industrial needs and the availability of skilled labor are limited. Information Sciences and Computing are the most valuable areas of study in today's knowledge world. The components, subsets, and subfields of Information Sciences and Technology are rapidly emerging worldwide. Among the emerging and popular areas, a few include Cloud Computing, Green Computing, Green Systems, Big-Data Science, Internet, Business Analytics, and Business Intelligence. Developing countries (like China, Colombia, Malaysia, Mauritius, India, Brazil, South Africa) depend in many ways on knowledge dissemination and solid manpower for their development. Thus, there is an urgent need to introduce such programs and the majority of these programs have been proposed here. Information Science and Technology (IST) with programs such as Bachelors, Masters, and Doctoral Degrees have been listed here with academic and industrial contexts. This article highlights these programs with proper SWOT analysis.

Effective Communication among Globally Distributed Software Development Teams

Global software development, an emerging software development methodology within a technology-enabled environment has recently received increased attention from scholars and practitioners. Despite the fact that the lack of effective communication is a major challenge of globally distributed teams, communication research related to the scale development is still very limited in existing literature. Considering the communication challenges and increasing need to measure the effectiveness of communication, this research is focused to develop a scale for “Effective Communication” for globally distributed software development teams. Systematic literature review is performed to identify the best practices of effective communication for the development of “Effective Communication” scale. A questionnaire survey consisting of 29 items is administered in globally distributed software development teams. Confirmatory factor analysis and statistical results depicted that the four-factor model (e.g. stakeholders' involvement, acculturation, usage of appropriate tools and technology, and information availability) is more parsimonious and an optimal model fit.

Contemporary Energy Management Systems and Future Prospects

The transformation of electric grid into smart grid has improved management of available resources and increased energy efficiency. Energy management systems (EMS) play an important role in enhancing user participation in control of energy management. Using such systems, consumers can obtain information about their energy consumption patterns and shape their energy consumption behaviors for efficient energy utilization. Contemporary EMS utilizes advanced analytics and ICT to provide consumers actionable feedback and control of energy management. These systems provide high availability, an easy-to-use user interface, security, and privacy. This chapter explores the contemporary EMS, their applications, classifications, standards, and frameworks. The chapter defines a set of requirements for EMS and provides feature comparison of various EMS. The chapter also discusses emerging trends and future research areas in EMS.

Secure Baseband Techniques for Generic Transceiver Architecture for Software-Defined Radio

Software Defined Radio (SDR) systems are the ones which can adapt to the future-proof solution and it covers both existing and emerging standards. An SDR has to possess elements of reconfigurability, intelligence and software programmable hardware. The main interest in any communication group is the sure sending of signals of info from a transmitter to a receiver. The signals are transmitted via a guide who corrupts the signal. To ensure reliable communication forward error-correcting (FEC) codes are the main part of a communication system. This chapter will discuss an SDR system built using LabVIEW for a Generic Transceiver. This chapter has covered emerging software radio standards and the technologies being used to specify and support them.

Factors Influencing the Adoption of ISO/IEC 29110 in Thai Government Projects

This paper presents the views of four Thai government organizations who had been awarded ISO/IEC 29110 Basic Profile Certification. Team ideas as to the success factors and barriers involved in implementations are explored. In-depth interviews with closed- and open-ended questions were conducted. The data collected was analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The results show two reasons for choosing standard, first, to enhance software development process, and second, because the financial support from the SIPA. The success factors were supportive organizational policy, staff participation, availability of time and resources for the improvement of the software process, consultations with the SIPA and team commitment and recognition. The barrier factors were time constraints, lack of experience, documentation load, unsynchronized means of communication and improper project selection. The findings were based on four diverse organizations. Other countries may take into account the variations e.g. working culture or organizational structure when seeking to apply these results.

A Systematic Snapshot of Small Packaged Software Vendors' Enterprises

This article describes how small packaged software vendors' enterprises (SPSVEs) have played a massive role in a software environment and contributed dramatically to economies. The purpose of this article is to investigate and categorize the most recent of literature addressing small packaged software vendors' enterprises through a systematic snapshot research in order to identify current research topics and highlight some areas needing more consideration. The pattern of the authors' systematic approach is based on developing a classification scheme which targets a collection of papers published within the period of 2007-2017. The authors analysed one hundred and one papers from peer-reviewed conferences, journals, and workshops to examine the current state of SPSVE's research in order to provide systematic snapshot mapping (SSM) that includes the small packaged software life cycle, research methods used, and country of study. The systematic snapshot of 101 papers reveals that the majority of the literature has focused on the planning and implementation phases of SPSVEs. Figuring out a new model of packaged software life-cycle in SMEs will occur by applying the model of categorizations with regard to the life cycle with its factors and sub factors. Moreover, it will contribute to finding research methods, regions, top ten citation, articles type classifications, and other kinds of classifications. This research is targeted to small packaged software vendors' enterprises (SPSVEs). The authors' finding is intended for software research areas more than economic research areas. This article has presented a high degree of benefits in order to assist researchers in evidence-based decision making in terms of investigating hot research areas in line with the small packaged software vendors' enterprises (SPSVEs).

From Teaching Software Engineering Locally and Globally to Devising an Internationalized Computer Science Curriculum

Software development is the process to produce an information technology solution to a real-world problem. Teaching and integrating non-technical software engineering skills into the curriculum is considered one of the most challenging tasks in an academic environment. This becomes even more challenging when the curriculum is supposed to be internationalized and applied in different countries because of the cultural difference, policy difference, and business model difference. In this chapter, the authors present their experience of teaching a software engineering course both locally and globally, where two universities of USA and China are chosen for this study. Specifically, they describe how they adjust homework assignments and student performance evaluations to reflect different government policies, different business environment, and different real-world customer requirement. The chapter shows that it is possible to create an internationalized computer science curriculum that contains both common core learning standards and adjustable custom learning standards.

Systems Engineering Concepts with Aid of Virtual Worlds and Open Source Software

Technology is changing the landscape of learning and teaching in America. The use of virtual worlds enable engineering and technology programs to implement software programs such as Second Life and Open Simulator to enhance what they may currently already have. Additionally, virtual worlds can add a more dynamic environment in the online classroom for multiple platforms such as the Personal Computer (PC), wearables, and mobile devices. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a review of these programs to include how to implement these items into an engineering course. Further detailed in this submission is how to incorporate Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) documentation and other engineering guidelines into the projects. Included in this chapter is a detailed layout of a simulated environment as well as various approaches of structuring and organization for classroom activities.

Maximizing the Value of Packaged Software Customization

Organizations that purchase packaged application software – for example, an Enterprise Resource Planning system – must make choices about customization. Packaged software vendors and practitioners recommend that organizations customize software as little as possible, and instead adapt their processes to meet the “best practices” of the software. However, organizations continue to exceed their budgets on implementing and maintaining customized software. This suggests that either these organizations are making poor decisions, or that the conventional wisdom about customization is incorrect. In this paper the author models the primary factors in the customization decision, most notably the “fit” between desired processes and the procedures inherent in the packaged software. The author then consider costs related to development, maintenance, and technical corrections due to poor integration and performance; and benefits related to increased fit, technical corrections, and user acceptance. This paper extends prior work by (1) modelling nonlinear relationships between the amount of time spent on custom development and the resulting benefits, (2) modelling nonlinear relationships between development costs and maintenance costs, and (3) modelling corrective development as a function of development related to fit and user acceptance. The author uses simulation techniques to illustrate the conditions under which customization is likely to provide value to the organization, as well as conditions under which customization should be avoided.

Fusion of Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making Approaches for Discriminating Risk with Relate to Software Project Performance

The prediction and estimation software risks ahead have been key predictor for evaluating project performance. Discriminating risk is vital in software project management phase, where risk and performance has been closely inter-related to each other. This chapter aims at hybridization of fuzzy multi-criteria decision making approaches for building an assessment framework that can be used to evaluate risk in the context of software project performance in following dimensions: 1) user, 2) requirements, 3) project complexity, 4) planning and control, 5) team, and 6) organizational environment. For measuring the risk for effectiveness of project performance, we have integrated Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making (FMCDM) and Fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) approaches. Moreover the fusion of FMCDM and TOPSIS has not been adequately investigated in the exiting studies.