This thesis is about an empirical study on the effects of using predominant security mechanisms for integration into Agile methodologies. Claims uncovered throughout our review of literature and research are presented along with our findings, analysis, and interpretation of the qualitative and quantitative phases which underscore the gap in the literature in the past few years. In this thesis the researcher uses the issues raised in the literature and incorporates empirical findings from practitioners working in the field to form a cohesive and complete investigation into the predominant security practices that are suitable to be included into Agile. Current security issues related to and applicable to popular Agile methodologies such as Scrum and eXtreme Programming (XP) are examined along with their effects on the process and the final product are researched, quantified, analyzed, interpreted, and summarized. This is done to gain a more practical and in-depth understanding of the security issues and effectiveness of methods proposed for use in the Agile software development field today. The research considered their potential for inclusion (and possible integration) into Agile methods from multiple perspectives utilizing a mixed method approach of in-depth empirical interviews, empirical surveys, and an academic experiment to test those findings. In this manuscript we present the research along with the findings obtained with our conclusions and the future direction of the research. The contribution of this work is to identify and empirically classify outstanding issues that were agreed upon by practitioners and experts in the field. The most popular of these turned out to be the addition of the security engineer or experienced developers to the Agile team to bolster the resulting software’s security assurance argument. Others aimed at modifying aspects of Agile that were deemed necessary for security include documentation, risk analysis, or the need for better tools. Building software with security in mind and the use of software security controls were also important findings from our qualitative phase of the study. This along with our own findings formed the basis of the comprehensive survey of practitioners to gauge the suitability and feasibility of those issues and solutions for possible inclusion into Agile. The significant findings from our survey suggested that the most suitable mechanisms are the addition of a dedicated Security Engineer and the use of more experienced developers to the Agile team, and the use of software security controls. Based on these results we put together an experimental trial to test the effect of more experienced developers on the Agile team on the process, the final product (which is the software produced), and the people involved (which are stakeholders in Agile projects). The statistically significant result of the experiment was in the affirmation of the hypothesis which stated that the inclusion of more experienced developer(s) to the Agile team increased the team’s overall awareness of security compared to the less experienced team(s).

Enterprise 2.0 refers to the use of networked social software in organizational practice. Blogs, wikis, social networking sites, and many other kinds of community-oriented computer applications, accessed primarily via the Web, are heavily promoted by software vendors and industry insiders, and are being implemented in organizations around the world. Enterprise 2.0 promoters make broad claims for benefits to be realized from uses of such tools—improvements in communication, collaboration, productivity, and worker satisfaction, for instance—but seldom offer evidence to support their claims. Such unsubstantiated claims suggest simplistic assumptions about the complex, contingent environments in which the tools are used. This thesis uses a mixed method approach to explore the influences of these tools on social and organizational behaviors and outcomes, and vice versa. The research question to be addressed is, “What shapes the uptake, uses, and effects of Enterprise 2.0 in everyday practice?” It applies social theoretics to explain how and why social media practices develop, primarily through the use of Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital, and habitus. Planned research contributions are: empirical evidence of Enterprise 2.0 effects from everyday uses; the analysis and evaluation of Enterprise 2.0’s impacts on differing organizational structures; understanding of the Web’s contributions to organizational communication via Enterprise 2.0; and deeper understanding of the social processes at the interplay of individuals, organizations, and social media.

In the preparation of a swimmer for a race, it is not currently possible to determine the race time impacts of changes to equipment or technique. This study addresses this problem, by modelling the resistive and propulsive forces experienced by a swimmer, throughout the various phases of a race, to predict race time. Swimming resistance is quantified for surface and underwater swimming, across a population of swimmers, using computational methods and bespoke measurement equipment. Due to the low repeatability, when measuring swimming resistance, statistical methods are utilised to quantify confidence in the measured data. For five repeat tests a 1.8% difference in swimming resistance can be resolved with 95% confidence. Arm propulsion is modelled, treating the arm as a single element moving through the water, producing drag. Leg propulsion is modelled using Large Amplitude Elongated Body Theory originally derived by Lighthill to predict the propulsion generated by fish. This enables freestyle flutter kick, when swimming on the surface, and underwater undulatory swimming, after the start and turn, to be modelled. Input motion for both arm and leg propulsion is determined from manual digitisation of video data, providing the body kinematics of a kick and the time accurate arm speed. Accurate swimming speed for a given stroke rate is achieved by comparing the simulated output with experimental data and scaling the arm and leg parameters. Using a race phase algorithm, the swimming speed for each phase of a swimming race is simulated. To simulate fatigue, metabolic energy sources are considered. Both maximum power and energy capacity, for aerobic and anaerobic energy sources, are determined from literature. Using PI control of stroke rate, swimming fatigue is simulated by ensuring the propulsive power does not exceed the total available power from the energy model. Therefore, as a swimmer progresses through a race, the available power depletes, causing stroke rate and hence swimming speed to decay. Combining these models, enables simulation of swimming speed and fatigue throughout a race, from which race time is predicted. The race time impact of changes to swimming resistance and propulsion are investigated. Resistance and propulsion changes from equipment, drafting and technique are quantified experimentally. A 9.5% reduction in swimming resistance, affecting the whole race or underwater phases only, has been found to improve a 100 m race time by 2.75s or 0.99s respectively.

Competitive swimming has always been a traditional sport, with performance being governed by athlete instinct and feel, the coaches’ experience and time spent in the water. However in recent years the introduction and subsequent banning of the ‘super’ suits has opened the eyes of the sport to what science and engineering can achieve. The focus of improvement is often on generating more propulsive force; however increases in swimming speed can be achieved for the same propulsive power if the resistance is reduced. The resistance acting on a freestyle swimmer is governed by the complex unsteady flow regime, featuring significant body and arm motions, large separated regions and interactions with the free surface. Physically simulating all these aspects within a CFD methodology is computationally very expensive. However it is unclear which unsteady flow features need to be included to accurately represent the active resistance of a freestyle swimmer. The unsteady fluid flow around a freestyle swimmer has be investigated numerically through the use of a combine free surface RANS methodology with the impact of the arms represented using a generic body force model. A detailed analysis of a passive swimmer on the surface has been conducted identifying that free surface interactions have a significant effect on the resistance components of a freestyle swimmer and should be included within future research aimed at reducing resistance. The impact of the arms in the propelled simulations produced a significant variation in total resistance due to free surface interactions, highlighting the importance of the arm entry phase of the stroke. However the arms caused no significant change in the mean resistance and the impact of the arm induced velocities on the resistance is very small. Therefore it is concluded that the effect of the arms are not required in an assessment of mean propelled resistance in freestyle swimming.

Numerous studies and reported cases have established the seriousness of the frequency and impact of user-generated spreadsheet errors. This thesis presents a structured methodology for spreadsheet model development, which enables improved integrity control of the models. The proposed methodology has the potential to ensure consistency in the development process and produce more comprehensible, reliable and maintainable models, which can reduce the occurrence of user-generated errors. An insight into the nature and properties of spreadsheet errors is essential for the development of a methodology for controlling the integrity of spreadsheet models. An important by-product of the research is the development of a comprehensive classification or taxonomy of the different types of user-generated spreadsheet errors based on a rational taxonomic scheme. Research on the phenomenon of spreadsheet errors has revealed the need to adopt a software engineering based methodology as a framework for spreadsheet development in practical situations. The proposed methodology represents a new approach to the provision of a structured, software engineering based discipline for the development of spreadsheet models. It is established in this thesis that software engineering principles can in fact be applied to the process of spreadsheet model building to help improve the quality of the models. The methodology uses Jackson structures to produce the logical design of the spreadsheet model. This is followed by a technique to derive the physical model, which is then implemented as a spreadsheet. The methodology’s potential for improving the quality of spreadsheet models is demonstrated. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, the various features of the proposed structured methodology are tested on a range of spreadsheet models through a series of experiments. The results of the tests provide adequate evidence of the methodology’s potential to reduce the occurrence of user-generated errors and enhance the comprehensibility of the models.

The aim of this qualitative research study was to develop an understanding of the lived experiences of game designers from the particular vantage point of intersomatic awareness. Intersomatic awareness is an interbodily awareness based on the premise that the body of another is always understood through the body of the self. While the term intersomatics is related to intersubjectivity, intercoordination, and intercorporeality it has a specific focus on somatic relationships between lived bodies. This research examined game designers’ body-oriented design practices, finding that within design work the body is a ground of experiential knowledge which is largely untapped. To access this knowledge a hermeneutic methodology was employed. The thesis presents a functional model of intersomatic awareness comprised of four dimensions: sensory ordering, sensory intensification, somatic imprinting, and somatic marking.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are integrated application software packages that meet most of the information systems requirements of business organisations. ERP, or more simply enterprise systems (ES), have constituted the majority of investment in information technology by global businesses over the last two decades and have had a profound impact upon the way these businesses have been managed. Yet there is not a good understanding of how the business success, as opposed to the implementation project success, of enterprise systems projects can be evaluated. Of the two success concepts, extant literature places more emphasis upon project success rather than business success. This research is directed at exploring the relationship between planned business success, generally included in ERP project business cases, and subsequent, empirical, post-implementation measures of business success. The study involved the interviewing of 20 key informants from both ERP adopting companies and ERP consulting firms to answer the research question of ‘how do businesses evaluate the business success, as opposed to the project implementation success, of enterprise systems?’ Using 10 a priori categories derived from the literature, 100 correlated categories were identified from interview data by use of a three stage coding process; 25 categories were selected from this larger group to identify relationships that were the most pertinent to the central research question. The key findings of the research were that the strength of the ERP system business case was generally determined by three main categories of business driver; strategic business change, a lower cost business model and business survival. These categories of business driver then determined the criteria for business success applied to the project in post-implementation stages. Where lower cost business models, often involving shared service centres and outsourcing of these centralised functions, were the driver, the business case metrics were more likely to be used for measurement of business success. Otherwise there was generally either a dissociation of benefits estimates in business cases from subsequent success measurement or simply an absence of estimated benefits. This framework for the evaluation of the business success of enterprise systems has advantages over the delivery of estimated, a priori, business benefits because: (1) The assumptions underlying the initial estimates of benefits will generally be invalidated because of the changed business environment prevailing after the lengthy implementation of a systems project. This makes comparisons with empirical post-implementation measures of business success of reduced value. Further, measures of business success based upon delivered benefits assume a degree of causality between the new ERP system and business benefits. However, it is often difficult to disentangle benefits from new business processes enabled by the enterprise system from benefits derived from other business initiatives. (2) Actual, realised business benefits of a new IT system are often not measured for organisational and behavioural reasons. For example, there may be a lack of continuity of project stakeholders over the implementation period. Or more simply, people are reluctant to study what are viewed as past and irreversible events. (3) A final factor is the absence of accounting or other measurement systems to evaluate actual benefits, often the result of the replacement of legacy accounting systems used to estimate the initial planned benefits. This research also adds considerably to current literature on the implementation of enterprise systems, which has generally studied project success rather than business success because of the relative ease of measurement of project implementation success.

The string matching problem has attracted a lot of interest throughout the history of computer science, and is crucial to the computing industry. The theoretical community in Computer Science has a developed a rich literature in the design and analysis of string matching algorithms. To date, most of this work has been based on the asymptotic analysis of the algorithms. This analysis rarely tell us how the algorithm will perform in practice and considerable experimentation and fine-tuning is typically required to get the most out of a theoretical idea. In this thesis, promising string matching algorithms discovered by the theoretical community are implemented, tested and refined to the point where they can be usefully applied in practice. In the course of this work we have presented the following new algorithms. We prove that the time complexity of the new algorithms, for the average case is linear. We also compared the new algorithms with the existing algorithms by experimentation. " We implemented the existing one dimensional string matching algorithms for English texts. From the findings of the experimental results we identified the best two algorithms. We combined these two algorithms and introduce a new algorithm. " We developed a new two dimensional string matching algorithm. This algorithm uses the structure of the pattern to reduce the number of comparisons required to search for the pattern. " We described a method for efficiently storing text. Although this reduces the size of the storage space, it is not a compression method as in the literature. Our aim is to improve both space and time taken by a string matching algorithm. Our new algorithm searches for patterns in the efficiently stored text without decompressing the text. " We illustrated that by pre-processing the text we can improve the speed of the string matching algorithm when we search for a large number of patterns in a given text. " We proposed a hardware solution for searching in an efficiently stored DNA text.

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In this thesis, a new systematic approach is introduced for developing software systems from domain-oriented components. The approach is called Domain Oriented Object Reuse (DOOR) which is based on domain analysis and Generic Software Architectures. The term 'Generic Software Architectures' is used to denote a new technique for building domain reference architectures using architecture schemas. The architecture schemas are used to model the components behaviour and dependency. Components dependencies describe components behaviour in terms of their inter-relationships within the same domain scope. DOOR uses the architecture schemas as a mechanism for specifying design conceptions within the modelled domain. Such conceptions provide design decisions and solutions to domain-specific problems which may be applied in the development of new systems. Previous research in the area of domain analysis and component-oriented reuse has established the need for a systematic approach to component-oriented development which emphasises the presentation side of the solution in the technology. DOOR addresses the presentation issue by organising the domain knowledge into levels of abstractions known to DOOR as sub-domains. These levels are organised in a hierarchical taxonomy tree which contains, in addition to sub-domains, a collection of reusable assets associated with each level. The tree determines the scope of reuse for every domain asset and the boundaries for their application. Thus, DOOR also answers the questions of reuse scope and domain boundaries which have also been raised by the reuse community. DOOR's reuse process combines development for reuse and development with reuse together. With this process, which is supported by a set of integrated tools, a number of guidelines have been introduced to assist in modelling the domain assets and assessing their reusability. The tools are also used for automatic assessment of the domain architecture and the design conceptions of its schemas. Furthermore, when a new system is synthesised, components are retrieved, with the assistance of the tools, according to the scope of reuse within which the system is developed. The retrieval procedure uses the components dependencies for tracing and retrieving the relevant components for the required abstraction.