Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Africa’s mobile phone penetration has surpassed that of the United States of America and information communication technologies, according to the World Bank, contribute more to its gross domestic product than the global average. What has been the enabling environment for the development of software and mobile applications to sustain this information revolution? India, an affiliate of the family of economic nations consisting of Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa, has enjoyed remarkable success as a software developing country and thus could provide some guidelines in this respect. Ireland on the other hand, as a developed country, has also established a successful software industry. In this thesis, the key initiatives taken by both India and Ireland to establish their software industries were investigated. A grounded research approach, incorporating case studies of India, Ireland and South Africa, using a content analysis approach, was used to analyse cited literature about software development in these countries. India’s approach, which includes enabling policies, economic incentives, educational and human resource initiatives, attracting outsourced businesses from other countries and a combination of government and industry initiatives, has contributed to its software industry’s success. Ireland’s approach was industry initiatives, policies, software products and educational developments. Since India and South Africa share similar challenges and Ireland and South Africa have a common heritage, the initiatives by India and Ireland were juxtaposed with known initiatives in South Africa to determine what initiatives are needed for potential success of the software industry in the Western Cape region and in developing countries beyond. A better understanding of the software industry in the Western Cape Province of South Africa and the views of software practitioners in the region has been formulated. Recommendations on what needs to be done to promote the software industry in the Western Cape Province in terms of policy (local, provincial and national government), educational (school, tertiary), practice and other criteria are presented. / National Research Foundation (NRF)

Over the years the field of software development has undergone a series of mutations, particularly in the types of approaches and methodologies that are applied during the development process. One thing that has not been fully achieved by software development method engineers is to move the development process completely from the mechanistic functionalist paradigm to a neo-humanist romantic paradigm. Although many researchers claim to have introduced new development paradigms in software development, these are merely new methodologies that are grounded in old paradigms. There are three fundamental development approaches that lie in the hard systems approach: the traditional structured, object-oriented and the recently invented agile approaches that have been widely adopted by software practitioners. Few of these practitioners have embraced the soft systems approach and their development methods have not migrated from the syntactic processes of the hard-systems approach. Another problem that software developers continue to face is a lack of a method or tool that can augment current syntactic programming language technologies and software development methods by the addition of semantic-based tools to facilitate the construction of romantic, adaptive and evolvable software products. In fact, most of the problems encountered in software development can be attributed to deficiencies in the methodologies, that is: the approaches, methods, techniques and tools used during the development of the software product. This research study introduces the concept of ontologies in software development and motivates for an ontology-driven approach to software development that reduces the mechanistic nature of software products but increases their adaptability and usability. Although current industrial and academic research has focused at the semantic properties of ontologies in software development, researchers have not considered how the methodological process can be designed and used to develop romantic software products. This research study used one variant of GTM and followed an interpretive approach in the investigation of several issues that are known and documented but not addressed by the current software development approaches. The field of software development has been investigated and a framework of requirements that enables the development of romantic systems is presented. The ontology discipline, focusing on the semantic, pragmatic and contextual characteristics of ontologies, was also consulted. Starting from a set of differentiated ontological frameworks and from the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic nature of ontologies, the research then presents a framework of ontologies that can be co-opted into a software development approach to address the deficiencies in current software development approaches highlighted in the framework of software development requirements. As part of the research findings, a new definition of ontology, as well as a framework of components that make up the ontology and a theoretical translation model that is needed to develop romantic software products, are presented. The theoretical translation model comprises three parts: an ontology-driven software development framework, an ontological approach to software development and an ontology-based methodology for software development. Of note is the use of domain, method, process, intentional, and status ontologies at different stages of software development to cater for the semantic, pragmatic and contextual gaps that are not currently addressed by existing development approaches. However, in this study, a balance is reached between addressing the needs of current and future developers of software products, that is, one that reacts to an urgent market need, as well as addressing a software development approach need that is heavily grounded in the softer, neo-humanist paradigm. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Informatics / unrestricted

The increasing technological advancement and globalization has seen a rise in offshoring of IT-development, also known as Global Software Development (GSD). One of the most common countries for offshoring has been India with its increasingly competent population.The use of GSD to leverage highly skilled and low-cost labor also creates challenges in three main categories; Coordination, Control and Communication. These challenges arise due to socio-cul-tural, geographical and temporal distances.The use of the Scrum development framework is claimed by scholars to mitigate these issues. This study is grounded on Hossain, Bannerman & Jeffery’s (2011) research framework, which summa-rizes the current body of literature on Scrum’s mitigating effect on commonly occurring challenges in a GSD environment. Due to the scarcity of empirical data on the research framework, the authors of this thesis conducted an ethnographical study on location in India at Indpro, a company founded in Sweden and studied two projects. The purpose of this study is to both evaluate and provide suggestions for expansion of the Hossain et al. (2011) framework with ethnographically collected empirical support, which prior to this was primarily based on experience reports. This study also aims to identify GSD challenges and mitigation strategies that occur in the setting of an experi-enced organization conversant with Scrum methodology in a GSD context.The purpose of this study is to contribute to an increased empirical understanding of how Scrum is being used in a GSD environment, what challenges are prevalent in a distributed GSD environ-ment and how those challenges might be addressed or mitigated. In this study, parts of Hossain et al. (2011) framework are evaluated and suggestions for expanding it through mitigation strategies such as Planning, high quality ICT-Mediate Synchronous and asynchronous communication are specified. Implications for practitioners include the proposal to follow Scrum Practices more me-ticulously to receive all of Scrums inherent mitigating effects.

The proliferation of collaborative computer applications in the past decade has resulted in a corresponding increase in the need for multi-user interfaces. The current research seeks to contribute to the design of a user-centered multi-user interface for a group ranking task. User requirements were identified by observing groups perform the ranking task in a non-computer environment. A design was proposed based on these identified requirements. The user-centered design was compared to preliminary designs based on the intuitions of programmers. The conclusions indicate that an analysis of observations in the non-computer environment does yield insight beyond the initial intuition of programmers. A prototype based on the user-centered design was implemented. Informal user evaluation was performed by observing users working with the prototype and obtaining verbal feedback both on the ease of use of the system and on possible improvements. The informal user evaluation provides evidence for the usefulness of user-centered design. The evaluation also suggests that not all features identified were found useful and not all features necessary were identified. / Business, Sauder School of / Management Information Systems, Division of / Graduate

M.Sc. / The Configurable Security Architecture (ConSA) describes an architecture that may be used to implement a wide variety of security policies. The architecture supports application and system security, unlike traditional security systems. ConSA allows for various degrees of security and efficiency determined by the implementation of the system. Arbitrary security policies may be implemented and possibly changed even if the system is running. If such an architecture were adopted by the industry, a wide variety of security policies could be assembled with off the shelf components. Such a situation is clearly desirable. This text describes the implementation of a ConSA prototype system. The prototype demonstrates that a configurable security system is possible and that the goals specified above can be met. The prototype is implemented in the Linux operating system due to the large number of UNIX based machines used by corporations. To begin a discussion of a security architecture, classic security models must be revisited. Chapter 2 introduces these models. Chapter 4 describes Linux security features, and how classical security models may be implemented in Linux. As well as an introduction to the environment of the prototype, these chapters will also serve to highlight the abilities of the ConSA model. Various obstacles are encountered in the implementation of a new security architecture. An implementation must strive to support existing applications (with little or no modification to the application) while supporting new features that increase the value of the system. The obstacles that are encountered in the implementation of a ConSA system are investigated and solutions for these obstacles are presented. The ConSA architecture is revised to provide a specification that supports the implementation of the architecture, and specifies the operation of each of the ConSA components sufficiently for an implementation on various platforms. The prototype supports three different implementations of ConSA that demonstrate the ease with which the system can be moved to different architectures, operating environments or security requirements. There have been several extensions to the UNIX security model. Many of these are implemented in the Linux operating system. The ConSA system must improve on these extensions to be a viable security alternative for Linux. Chapter 15 introduces a few of these extensions, many of which provide innovative approaches to security not present in classical models. The implementation of these extensions in the ConSA architecture is provided theoretically to illustrate that ConSA can indeed fulfil the role of these extensions. A prototype must be evaluated to determine if the system is of value. The final chapter investigates the shortcomings of the prototype and together with chapter 4 illustrates the benefits of the ConSA architecture.

In the fast-growing software development market, where there is a lack of software developers, they need to be as efficient as possible with their time. Low Code platforms growing fast, and there is considerable interest from industry and science. Therefore this report’s goal is to shine some light on the topic of Low Code platforms, especially Camunda, and how further development in Camunda compares to traditional Java development. Can the Low Code platform Camunda be a better alternative than Java for software development? This report will show significant benefits, such as increased development speed and easy interpretation in comparison to Java development. Camundadevelopment is not as flexible as Java and is not a replacement but a tool to make development faster and easier.

The diploma thesis deals with implementation of Agile Project Management Approach for smaller software projects of the department ATS of the office HTS CZ of the corporation Honeywell. The ATS department is a part of the Aerospace division, focused at aviation. For implementation of new approach there was used the agile methodology Scrum and the project management standard PMBoK.

Agile software development methodologies are very popular for their efficiency and flexibility. This thesis focuses on agile software development methodology called Scrum. Basic description and comparison of traditional and agile methodologies is mentioned at first. Attention is paid to methodology Scrum which is shown on an example of usage by a specific company. It is convenient to use some software tool for organization of Scrum methodology. Therefore, an overview of the most common tools and basic comparison of software tools for organizing this methodology is presented. Conclusion of this thesis is recommendation for improvements for the investigated team, based on issues which were identified.

This diploma thesis deals with proposals for improving particular project management phases and their implementation into project management tools. The resulting proposals are based on a theoretical background and analysis of a specific project from a company Proof & Reason and are implemented into its environment.

In a world where software systems are essential for our everyday life, a vast amount of software errors have led to severe consequences, almost causing a nuclear war. Ensuring the quality of software systems has increasingly come into demand due to the rising complexity of technologies used in today´s solutions such as cloud computing, internet of things (IoT). Companies strive to ensure the quality of their softwares and have different approaches to do so. Some companies follow an industry standard such as ISO 9000, others develop their own standards and implement a software to ensure conformance. Quality Assurance (QA) has traditionally been implemented in the later stages of the development process. Research suggests however that early or constant implementation of QA is more likely to provide better end results. Current studies explore the stages of implementation for QA, the effects of QA and approaches for QA. Few studies however investigate how QA is approached within private companies. This study investigates the implementation of QA within private companies, the use of QA and which stage of the development process QA should be implemented. The investigation was done through suggesting a suitable approach to achieve QA for the case company Sogeti. The challenge that Sogeti faced was to ensure the quality of their PaaS components configurations. To further understand the problem, a QA plan was developed with the use of Robert P. Elliots ten steps of developing a QA specification. The QA plan indicated that a software would be a suitable approach due to the specific demands that Sogeti provided, the software would then implemented in the later stages of the QA development process before the components reach the end customer. The final prototype of the software helped discovering the amount of improper configurations that exists (38,46% components with improper configurations). Early QA might have been a better approach, assuming that the problems were discovered early. When the problems are dicovered late, the stage of QA implementation might not matter as the approach for QA is reactive. In order to draw that conclusion however, further research is needed where multiple companies are analyzed to visualize the qualitative and quantitative effects of QA.