Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Florida, 2001. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xi, 144 p.; also contains graphics. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 139-143).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2007. / Description based on contents viewed Oct. 7, 2007; title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references (p. 160-172).

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Technology: Information Technology in the Faculty of Informatics and Design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology 2013 / The application of software systems in business organizations continue to increase as the Internet technology grows. Business processes that previously required manual interventions are becoming automated using software systems. The use of software systems is fundamental to electronic processing of business transactions. More business organizations, large and small, are utilizing information technology in order to have competitive advantage in the business arena. Software is ubiquitous. Among areas where software plays core roles are e-Banking where software systems are used to process banking transactions, e-Health where software systems are used to facilitate activities in the health sector, e-Commerce where software systems are used to facilitate online business transactions, e-Government where software system are used to facilitate government activities and e-Learning where software systems are used to facilitate the teaching and learning process. Nevertheless, the large number of failing software projects and the increase in software security problems coupled with shortage of skilled software developers are still major obstacles in the software development industry. Among others, the solution can be achieved by improving the competency of software developers so that software systems developed are of good quality, safe, robust, and support business objectives. Software companies and business organizations stand a big chance to increase their return on investment (ROI), if competencies of software developers are improved. A software developer plays critical roles in software development projects. A software developer, however, requires specific skills and knowledge in order to develop software systems that solve problems and deliver solutions. This research is about competencies of software developers. The research focuses on software development activities performed by software companies and business organizations within the Western Cape Province. The unit of analysis is software developers. Data pertaining to tasks performed by software developers, tools used by software developers and skills required were collected, examined and analysed. The objective of the research is to develop a competency framework for software developers. It can be used by institutions and the industry to provide better education. Most importantly, the industry will have access to competent software developers who can perform their job well. As justified in this research, knowledge of a competency framework for software developers is extremely essential.ÿ

The Agile methodologies have attracted the software development industry's attention due to their capability to overcome the limitations of the traditional software development approaches and to cope with increasing complexity in system development. Scrum is one of the Agile software development processes broadly adopted by industry. Scrum promotes frequent customer involvement and incremental short releases. Despite its popular use, Scrum’s requirements engineering stage is inadequately defined which can lead to increase development time and cost, along with low quality or failure for the end products. This research shows the importance of activity planning of requirements engineering in improving the product quality, cost, and scheduling as well as it points out some drawbacks of Agile practices and available solutions. To improve the Scrum requirements engineering by overcoming its challenges in cases, such as providing a comprehensive understanding of the customer’s needs and addressing the effects of the challenges in other cases, such as frequent changes of requirements, the Design Thinking model is integrated into the Scrum framework in the context of requirements engineering management. The use of the Design Thinking model, in the context of requirements engineering management, is validated through an in-depth scientific study of the IBM Design Thinking framework. In addition, this research presents an Items Prioritization dEcision Support System (IPESS) which is a tool to assist the Product Owners for requirements prioritization. IPESS is built on information collected in the Design Thinking model. The IPESS tool adopts Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique and PageRank algorithm to deal with the specified factors and to achieve the optimal order for requirements items based on the prioritization score. IPESS is a flexible and comprehensive tool that focuses on different important aspects including customer satisfaction and product quality. The IPESS tool is validated through an experiment that was conducted in a real-world project / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (PhD)--Florida Atlantic University, 2021. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This research develops a set of predictive measures enabling software testers and designers to identify and target potential problem areas for additional and/or enhanced testing. Predictions are available as early in the design process as requirements allocation and as late as code walk-throughs. These predictions are based on characteristics of the design artifacts prior to coding. Prediction equations are formed at established points in the software development process called milestones. Four areas of predictive measurement are examined at each design milestone for candidate predictive metrics. These areas are: internal complexity, information flow, defect categorization, and the change in design. Prediction equations are created from the set of candidate predictive metrics at each milestone. The most promising of the prediction equations are selected and evaluated. The single "best" prediction equation is selected at each design milestone. The resulting predictions are promising in terms of ranking areas of the software design by the number of predicted defects. Predictions of the actual number of defects are less accurate. / Master of Science

This study deals with a number of issues concerned with the derivation, use and interpretation of traditional software measures that are currently used as measures of program comprehensibility. One of the approaches that has been been suggested as a way of dealing with the software maintenance crisis is the use of software measures to assist in the management of software maintenance activities. The use of these measures has also been extended to the estimation of program comprehensibility - the level of effort needed to comprehend a program for maintenance purposes. In this thesis, it is argued that, despite the wide and continuous use of such program comprehensibility measures, they manifest a number of weaknesses that have been largely ignored despite their implications for both program comprehension and software maintenance activities. These concerns are inherent in the following characteristics of the measures: (i) inability to reflect the holistic nature of comprehension; (ii) insensitivity to the dynamic nature of the comprehension process, and (ill) insensitivity to software maintenance objectives. Furthermore, it is suggested that in order for these measures to become much more widely acceptable, valid and more representative of the phenomenon of program comprehension, these issues need to be addressed. This investigation talres the form of three studies. First, a survey of the literature and selection of measures currently used to estimate program comprehensibility. Second, a questionnaire survey of the impact of various factors on program comprehension. Finally, an observation and an experiment on programmers working on maintenance tasks, paying particular attention on the comprehension process and its outcome. The findings from these studies are discussed in the light of the weaknesses of traditional software measures as indicators of program comprehensibility. This thesis concludes by examining the wider implications of these findings and makes recommendations for further work in the area

Defect correction schemes as a class of nonoverlapping domain decomposition methods offer several advantages in the ways they split a complex problem into several subdomain problems with less complexity. The schemes need a nonlinear solver to take care of the residual at the interface. The adaptive-∝ solver can converge locally in the ∞-norm, where the sufficient condition requires a relatively small local neighbourhood and the problem must have a strongly diagonal dominant Jacobian matrix with a very small condition number. Yet its advantage can be of high signicance in the computational cost where it simply needs a scalar as the approximation of Jacobian matrix. Other nonlinear solvers employed for the schemes are a Newton-GMRES method, a Newton method with a finite difference Jacobian approximation, and nonlinear conjugate gradient solvers with Fletcher-Reeves and Pollak-Ribiere searching direction formulas. The schemes are applied to three nonlinear problems. The first problem is a heat conduction in a multichip module where there the domain is assembled from many components of different conductivities and physical sizes. Here the implementations of the schemes satisfy the component meshing and gluing concept. A finite difference approximation of the residual of the governing equation turns out to be a better defect equation than the equality of normal derivative. Of all the nonlinear solvers implemented in the defect correction scheme, the nonlinear conjugate gradient method with Fletcher-Reeves searching direction has the best performance. The second problem is a 2D single-phase fluid flow with heat transfer where the PHOENICS CFD code is used to run the subdomain computation. The Newton method with a finite difference Jacobian is a reasonable interface solver in coupling these subdomain computations. The final problem is a multiphase heat and moisture transfer in a porous textile. The PHOENICS code is also used to solve the system of partial differential equations governing the multiphase process in each subdomain while the coupling of the subdomain solutions is taken care of with some FORTRAN codes by the defect correction schemes. A scheme using a modified-∝ method fails to obtain decent solutions in both single and two layers case. On the other hand, the scheme using the above Newton method produces satisfying results for both cases where it can lead an initially distant interface data into a good convergent solution. However, it is found that in general the number of nonlinear iteration of the defect correction schemes increases with the mesh refinement.

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Over the years the computing industry has enjoyed increasing levels of integration within the software which it employs: data integration; tool integration; human computer interface integration; etc. as well as the environment in which the software is used, ie. integration across a heterogeneous environment. In fact, it is the case that environments have been developed to further enhance the development of integrated software. 1bese are generally referred to as software development environments, or software factories. However, until recent years no comparable effort had been placed upon the achievement of similarly high levels of integration relating to the process by which that software is developed. Whilst environments offer the ability to share data, utilise the same tools, and present a common interface for using the tools, little regard had been given to how such integrated environments would be used by the members of the software development team in order to realise an integrated end product. It is now recognised that integration is required in the actual process of software development. Whilst software development methods such as SSADM and Yourdon go some way to achieve this, by specifying the tasks and activities required of a software development process, they are not sufficient to realise an integrated development process and hence an integrated end product. Achieving such integration within the process of developing software is the subject of the research reported in this thesis. Investigations into effecting Activity Integration, by which it is referred, reveal that current thinking is to model the activities of the software development process, providing an accurate representation of how the activities specified within that software development process would be carried out within a specific development environment. In doing so accurately depicting: tasks which depend on the completion of others; tasks which are independent of those around it; in addition to features such as iteration and selection. The product of this activity is generally referred to as a Software Process Model. Software process models have the capability of guiding members of a software development team through the activities of the software development process. It is thought that such guidance endows software process models with an advantage over existing techniques. Traditionally manuals are created to instruct developers in the use of a particular tool. Consequently in an environment consisting of many tools, many manuals are required. Additional guidance is required in the actual process of software development, method support. Again this is traditionally in the form of a manual, typically written for the purpose of instructing on all aspects of the complete method. In reality an organisation is likely to tailor the method of software development to meet the needs of an individual software development project. Accordingly what currently exists may be summed up as a 'ragbag' of manuals in addition to instructions on a general method. It is not surprising that activity integration is rarely achieved.In this work the analysis phase of the approach to software development advocated by SSADM will be represented as an informally specified software process model. To illustrate fully this modelling activity the environment is assumed to be one in which development takes place in a distributed fashion, necessitating modelling of the features inherent within such an environment, namely: sequence; selection; concurrency and iteration. Software process models will be shown to offer the capability of providing an accurate representation of how the activities of the analysis phase of SSADM may be executed within a distributed development environment. Furthermore, they will be shown to offer the flexibility to tailor a general method to meet the needs of a specific development project, in doing so providing the capability for the realisation of activity integration. However, this informal modelling technique will be shown to be inadequate for the realisation of activity integration. Although the resultant software process model is able to add considerable visibility and clarity to the 1Mb of the software development process, due to its informal nature it is not able to offer guarantees that the modelled process will be adhered to, a requirement for effecting activity integration. To overcome this issue, formal specification techniques are investigated. It will be shown that formal specification techniques, as a result of their rigorous, mathematical basis, when used to specify the 1Mb and activities of a software process model, are able to provide guarantees that the modelled process will be adhered to, and hence that activity integration will be realised. Furthermore, the ability to reason about a design and to prove properties of it, offered by formal techniques, enables guarantees to be made that the eventual implementation will be able to meet its intended aims.