0000000000526406
AUTHOR
Hadi Ghanbari
Strategic Design Towards Platform Collaboration in The Newspaper Industry: A Design Science Research Study
The newspaper industry is challenged by unsustainable business models. To stabilize dwindling revenue streams, publishers opted for digital subscriptions as one avenue for generating additional revenue streams. Large publishers have indeed benefited from rising subscription numbers. However, smaller publishers are challenged to achieve the same results. Some of the root causes are high churn rates, adoption costs and lock-in effects of subscription services. News aggregator platforms may promise newspaper publishers a large pool of paying readers. But platform fees and the loss of direct customer relationships enact commercial barriers among publishers. This study proposes design science re…
Error messages in relational database management systems: A comparison of effectiveness, usefulness, and user confidence
Abstract The database and the database management system (DBMS) are two of the main components of any information system. Structured Query Language (SQL) is the most popular query language for retrieving data from the database, as well as for many other data management tasks. During system development and maintenance, software developers use a considerable amount of time to interpret compiler error messages. The quality of these error messages has been demonstrated to affect software development effectiveness, and correctly formulating queries and fixing them when needed is an important task for many software developers. In this study, we set out to investigate how participants ( N = 152 ) …
Moral sensitivity in information security dilemmas
Activities that undermine information security such as noncompliance with information security policies raise moral concerns since they can expose valuable information assets. Existing research shows that moral reflection could play an inhibitory role in one’s decision to undermine information security. However, it is not clear whether users interpret such decisions from a moral standpoint to engage in moral reflection in the first place. Users have to be morally sensitive before they engage in moral reflection. Moral sensitivity involves perceiving a situation as morally relevant, identifying the parties involved and perceiving possible courses of action. We examine moral sensitivity in se…
The state of research on software engineering competencies: A systematic mapping study
Considering the critical role of software in modern societies, we face an urgent need to educate more competent software professionals. Software engineering competencies (SEC) are considered the backbone of successfully developing software products. Consequently, SEC has become a hotspot for software engineering research and practice. Although scientific literature on SEC is not lacking, to our knowledge, a comprehensive overview of the current state of SEC research is missing. To that end, we conducted an extensive and systematic review of the SEC literature. We provide an overview of the current state of research on SEC, with a particular focus on common SEC research areas. In addition to…
The Essential Competencies of Software Professionals : A Unified Competence Gate Framework
Context Developing high-quality software requires skilled software professionals equipped with a set of basic and essential software engineering competencies (SEC). These competencies and the satisfaction levels derived from them change over a project's lifecycle, or as software professionals move from one project to another. Objective Previous studies suggest a lack of means enabling SEC stakeholders to identify and assess competencies suitable for different projects. Additionally, previous research has mainly portrayed SEC to be static and overlooked their evolution over time and across projects. We investigate how we could effectively identify and match the competencies of software profe…
Towards a Secure DevOps Approach for Cyber-Physical Systems
With the expansion of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) across critical and regulated industries, systems must be continuously updated to remain resilient. At the same time, they should be extremely secure and safe to operate and use. The DevOps approach caters to business demands of more speed and smartness in production, but it is extremely challenging to implement DevOps due to the complexity of critical CPSs and requirements from regulatory authorities. In this study, expert opinions from 33 European companies expose the gap in the current state of practice on DevOps-oriented continuous development and maintenance. The study contributes to research and practice by identifying a set of needs…
Looking for Peace of Mind? Manage your (Technical) Debt : An Exploratory Field Study
Background: In the last two decades Technical Debt (TD) has received a considerable amount of attention from software engineering research and practice. Recently, a small group of studies suggests that, in addition to its technical and economic consequences, TD can affect developers’ psychological states and morale. However, until now there has been a lack of empirical research clarifying such influences. Aims: In this study, we aim at taking the first step in filling this gap by investigating the potential impacts of TD and its management on developers’ morale. Method: Drawing from previous literature on morale, we decided to explore the influence of TD and its management on three dimensio…
The Design Towards a News Aggregator Subscription Service: Results from An Online Experiment
The newspaper industry is on a quest to discover sustainable business models. Digital subscriptions are stable revenue generators for most publishers. That being said, smaller publishers face challenges. By not having the same resource base to offset costs compared to larger ones, small publishers are in a constant state of financial unpredictability. Another persistent problem among them is the high churn rate of subscriptions (i.e., the cancelation rate), which suggests a value misalignment between readers and service. New services like news aggregators may promise publishers a large pool of paying readers, as readers have access to diverse content by different publishers and are willing …
A root cause analysis method for preventing erratic behavior in software development: PEBA
Measures taken to prevent faults from being introduced or going undetected can secure development of highly reliable software systems. One such measure is analyzing root causes of recurring faults and preventing them from appearing again. Previous methods developed for this purpose have been reactive in nature and relied heavily on fault reporting mechanisms of ogranizations. Additionally, previous efforts lack a defined mechanism for innovating corrective actions. In this study, we strive to complement the existing methods by introducing a proactive and qualitative method that does not rely on fault data. During the course of the research, in addition to an extensive literature search, an …
Utilizing online serious games to facilitate distributed requirements elicitation
Online serious games are used to facilitate distributed requirements elicitation.Interactive games enhance collaboration and communication between project members.Serious games raise individuals' confidence to engage in requirements elicitation.Using serious games can improve both quality and quantity of software requirements.Serious games specially enhance the performance of less-experienced stakeholders. Requirements elicitation is one of the most important and challenging activities in software development projects. A variety of challenges related to requirements elicitation are reported in the literature, of which the lack of proper communication and knowledge transfer between software …
Seeking Technical Debt in Critical Software Development Projects : An Exploratory Field Study
In recent years, the metaphor of technical debt has received considerable attention, especially from the agile community. Still, despite the fact that agile practices are increasingly used in critical domains, to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies investigating the occurrence of technical debt in critical software development projects. The results of an exploratory field study conducted across several projects reveal that a variety of business and environmental factors cause the occurrence of technical debt in critical domains. Using Grounded Theory method, these factors are categorized as ambiguity of requirement, diversity of projects, inadequate knowledge management, and res…
Investigating the causal mechanisms underlying the customization of software development methods
Over the last four decades, software development has been one of the mainstream topics in the Software Engineering and Information Systems disciplines. Thousands of methods have been put forward offering prescriptions for software development processes. The goal of these methods is to produce high-quality software in a systematic manner. However, it is widely known that these methods are rarely followed as prescribed – developers often modify or skip different steps, practices, or quality rules recommended by software development methods. While a group of previous studies suggests that maximizing the flexibility and leanness of software development processes is the key driver of such custom…
Omission of Quality Software Development Practices : A Systematic Literature Review
Software deficiencies are minimized by utilizing recommended software development and quality assurance practices. However, these recommended practices (i.e., quality practices) become ineffective if software professionals purposefully ignore them. Conducting a systematic literature review (n = 4,838), we discovered that only a small number of previous studies, within software engineering and information systems literature, have investigated the omission of quality practices. These studies explain the omission of quality practices mainly as a result of organizational decisions and trade-offs made under resource constraints or market pressure. However, our study indicates that different aspe…