published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

Dissertation submitted for the fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Masters in Information Technology, Department of Information Technology, Faculty of Accounting and Informatics, Durban University of Technology, 2008. / Competitive pressure on the software industry encourages organizations to examine the effectiveness of their software development and evolutionary processes. Therefore it is important that software is measured in order to improve the quality. The question is not whether we should measure software but how it should be measured. Software measurement has been in existence for over three decades and it is still in the process of becoming a mature science. The many influences of new software development technologies have led to a diverse growth in software measurement technologies which have resulted in various definitions and validation techniques. An important aspect of software measurement is the measurement of the design, which nowadays often means the measurement of object oriented design. Chidamer and Kemerer (1994) designed a metric suite for object oriented design, which has provided a new foundation for metrics and acts as a starting point for further development of the software measurement science. This study documents theoretical object oriented cohesion metrics and calculates those metrics for classes extracted from a sample of open source software packages. For each open source software package, the following data is recorded: software size, age, domain, number of developers, number of bugs, support requests, feature requests, etc. The study then tests by means of association rules which theoretical cohesion metrics are validated hypothesis: that older software is more cohesive than younger software, bigger packages is less cohesive than smaller packages, and the smaller the software program the more maintainable it is. This study attempts to validate existing theoretical object oriented cohesion metrics by mining open source software data with association rules.

In the end of 2004 in Lithuania first big e-government projects financed by EU structural funds should start, and developing and implementation of software will constitute an integral part of these projects. Before starting the projects it must be determined how new and current information systems should be integrated and their interoperability ensured. Usage of commercial software system will lead to attachment to the sole producer, it will reduce competition and will deprive from choosing other software providers. Alternative solution would be to develop open source (OS) systems and as a consequence create better competition for the development of such systems. This work intends to analyze solutions for information system integration and interoperability through using open source software, open standards and their implementation for e-government services. Open source software and open standards are analyzed and major features defined to estimate their advantages for the usage at government institutions. Modern information system integration methods and open source realization possibilities overlooked. Lithuanian and foreign legislation on open source are reviewed. From research materials the analysis is given about the usage of the open source software, open standards at the governmental institutions, determining factors for the usage and opinion of institutions. As the review shows at the present time open source and commercial software have unequal positions with the... [to full text]

Software reuse is prevalent in software development. It is not uncommon that one software product may depend on numerous libraries/products in order to build, install, or run. Software reuse is difficult due to the complex interdependency relationships between software packages. In this work, we presented four approaches to retrieve such dependency information, each technique focuses on retrieving software dependency from a specific source, including source code, build scripts, binary files, and Debian spec. The presented techniques were realized by a prototype tool, DEx, which is applied to a large collection of Debian projects in a comprehensive evaluation. Through the comprehensive analysis, we evaluate the presented techniques, and compare them from various aspects. / Graduate

User needs for a given product type can be quite heterogeneous. Segmenting the market and providing solutions for average user needs in each segment is a partial answer that will typically leave many dissatisfied - some seriously so. We hypothesize that providing users with "toolkits for user innovation" to enable them to more easily design customized products for themselves will increase user satisfaction under these conditions. We test this hypothesis via an empirical study of Apache security software - "open source" software that is designed to be modifiable by skilled users. We find that heterogeneity of need is high, and that many Apache users are dissatisfied with standard security functionality on offer. We also find that users creating their own software modifications are significantly more satisfied than are non-innovating users. We conclude by suggesting that the "toolkits for user innovation" approach to enhancing user satisfaction might be generally applicable to markets characterized by heterogeneous user needs. (authors' abstract)

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Carleton University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 106-109). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Carleton University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 71-73). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Carleton University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-72). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio University, November, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Zugleich: Diss. Freiburg (Breisgau). / Literaturverz.