Search results for "Programming"

Seeking Technical Debt in Critical Software Development Projects : An Exploratory Field Study

2016

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…

Supporting Agile Development by Facilitating Natural User Interaction with Executable Formal Specifications

2011

Agile development benefits from fast feedback from various stakeholders. If implemented in a suitable way, formal methods can enhance the agile development process. With an executable formal specification, it is possible to analyse and simulate the behaviour of the target system before it is being built. However, for the users' and developers' natural participation in the development process, it is necessary to use a real end-user interface and bind it to the execution environment being used in the simulations and animations. This requires, though, that the execution model used to simulate the specification is appropriately changed to facilitate the use of these user interfaces. The authors…

Using a mobile application to support children's writing motivation

2013

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the use of the prototype of a mobile application for the enhancement of children's motivation for writing. The results are explored from students' and experts' perspectives.Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on a field trial and expert evaluations of a prototype of a mobile application. The field trial data consists of questionnaire data collected from elementary school students (n=25) who used the mobile prototype. The expert evaluations (n=8) of the prototype were conducted based on usability and pedagogical heuristics. The main research question is how the mobile application motivates children to learn creative writing.FindingsTh…

An Information system design product theory for the abstract class of integrated requirements and delivery management systems

2014

Information and Communications Technology-enabled international sourcing of software-intensive systems and services (eSourcing) is increasingly used as a means of adding value, reducing costs, sharing risks, and achieving strategic aims. To maximally reap the benefits from eSourcing and to mitigate the risks, providers and clients have to be aware of and build capabilities for the eSourcing life-cycle. China is in a position to become a superpower for eSourcing service provisioning, but most Chinese eSourcing service providers are small or medium-sized and typically work for larger intermediaries instead of end-clients, limiting their business and capabilities development. The extant litera…

A Cooperative Coevolution Framework for Parallel Learning to Rank

2015

We propose CCRank, the first parallel framework for learning to rank based on evolutionary algorithms (EA), aiming to significantly improve learning efficiency while maintaining accuracy. CCRank is based on cooperative coevolution (CC), a divide-and-conquer framework that has demonstrated high promise in function optimization for problems with large search space and complex structures. Moreover, CC naturally allows parallelization of sub-solutions to the decomposed sub-problems, which can substantially boost learning efficiency. With CCRank, we investigate parallel CC in the context of learning to rank. We implement CCRank with three EA-based learning to rank algorithms for demonstration. E…

E-NAUTILUS: A decision support system for complex multiobjective optimization problems based on the NAUTILUS method

2015

Interactive multiobjective optimization methods cannot necessarily be easily used when (industrial) multiobjective optimization problems are involved. There are at least two important factors to be considered with any interactive method: computationally expensive functions and aspects of human behavior. In this paper, we propose a method based on the existing NAUTILUS method and call it the Enhanced NAUTILUS (E-NAUTILUS) method. This method borrows the motivation of NAUTILUS along with the human aspects related to avoiding trading-off and anchoring bias and extends its applicability for computationally expensive multiobjective optimization problems. In the E-NAUTILUS method, a set of Pareto…

Open badge factory project consortium

2014

Understanding beginners' mistakes with Haskell

2015

AbstractThis article presents an overview of student difficulties in an introductory functional programming (FP) course taught in Haskell. The motivation for this study stems from our belief that many student difficulties can be alleviated by understanding the underlying causes of errors and by modifying the educational approach and, possibly, the teaching language accordingly. We analyze students' exercise submissions and categorize student errors according to compiler error messages and then manually according to the observed underlying cause. Our study complements earlier studies on the topic by applying computer and manual analysis while focusing on providing descriptive statistics of d…

Comparing the cost-efficiency of CoAP and HTTP in Web of Things applications

2014

Abstract Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) has been introduced as a simpler alternative to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for connecting constrained smart objects to the Web. The adoption of the protocol depends on its relative advantage, and the cost–benefit associated with the use of the protocol is a significant factor affecting a protocol adoption decision. This paper aims at deepening the understanding of the cost–benefits of CoAP and identifies the application scenarios where its use is likely to be economically justifiable. The paper analyzes the costs of using CoAP and HTTP in the Web of Things (WoT) applications, by identifying the components of the total cost of owne…

Guidelines for improving the contextual relevance of field surveys: the case of information security policy violations

2014

The information systems (IS) field continues to debate the relative importance of rigor and relevance in its research. While the pursuit of rigor in research is important, we argue that further effort is needed to improve practical relevance, not only in terms of topics, but also by ensuring contextual relevance. While content validity is often performed rigorously, validated survey instruments may still lack contextual relevance and be out of touch with practice. We argue that IS behavioral research can improve its practical relevance without loss of rigor by carefully addressing a number of contextual issues in instrumentation design. In this opinion article, we outline five guidelines – …