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Cloud-based solutions for software development activities have been emerging in the last decade. This study aims to develop a hybrid technology adoption model for cloud use in software development activities. It is based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Technology–Organization–Environment (TOE) framework, and the proposed extension Personal–Organization–Project (POP) structure. The methodology selected is a questionnaire-based survey and data are collected through personally administered questionnaire sessions with developers and managers, resulting in 268 responses regarding 84 software development projects from 30 organizations in Turkey, selected by considering company and project sizes and geographical proximity to allow face-to-face response collection. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is used for statistical evaluation and hypothesis testing. The final model was reached upon modifications and it was found to explain the intention to adopt and use the cloud for software development meaningfully. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to identify and understand factors that affect the intention of developing software on the cloud. The developed hybrid model was validated to be used in further technology adoption studies. Upon modifying the conceptual model and discovering new relations, a novel model is proposed to draw the relationships between the identified factors and the actual use, intention to use and perceived suitability. Practical and social implications are drawn from the results to help organizations and individuals make decisions on cloud adoption for software development.

The use of project management (PM) is of immense value in achieving project success that ultimately assists businesses to thrive and contribute to the growth of an economy. This research has one main research question “How does the use of PM techniques have positive impact on project outcomes in New Zealand (NZ) businesses?”. The research adopted inductive approach to build theory and qualitative research methodology to address the main research question using four research objectives. This is an exploratory research using a case study research strategy that is coherent with the inductive qualitative research design. Two organisations representing the construction services and the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) services business in NZ were chosen. In-depth interviews were used to collect data, data analysis was completed through thematic analysis techniques. Findings were assessed through a theoretical construct mainly based on the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) PM framework. Findings indicated that the two organisations had strong focus on PM function supported by their organisational structures. Organisation A relied more on Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and Gantt chart technics while organisation B adopted an agile approach. Both considered designating project manager when deploying a formal PM function. While Company A has not implemented dedicated technology to support PM function, Company B has though not fully utilised. Hopefully, findings from this study will assist organisations in the construction and ICT services business sectors being significantly reliant on PM function to deliver project outcomes and to be successful in their businesses.

This paper examines the competencies that an environmental activist should develop to promote successful project management in the community. A systematic bibliometric review of the literature was carried out, recognizing the scientific production in relation to the competencies of the environmental activist for the management of successful projects in the community. A conceptual synthesis is presented in relation to the competencies of the environmental activist for the management of successful projects in the community; and approaches in the development of competencies of the environmental leader are identified. Twenty one research papers on environmental leadership and environmental project management were analyzed. The results show that this type of leader must have common characteristics in the development of any type of leadership, such as the ability to organize people, to influence changes in people’s behavior, and to generate action guidelines that can be replicated by followers. The environmental leader must have the ability to promote awareness of environmental problems in the communities, establishing himself as an example to follow, and strengthening the development of continuous spaces for participation in which the experiences, knowledge and expertise of all the people who are part of the community are considered.

The search for competitive advantages in today’s industry necessitates a shift in the approach to developing economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable products. A critical aspect of this approach is evaluating a product’s functions and linking them to its manufacturability to reduce costs and achieve a more balanced design that aligns with customers’ perceived value and actual manufacturing costs. Despite this, there is a lack of significant research on methods that connect the various stages of the integrated product development process. This paper begins by conducting a comprehensive review and content analysis of recent research to identify the current state of research in this field. Next, it proposes a model that aims to strike a balance between the value of a product’s functions and the cost of implementing solutions throughout the product development process. To test the proposed model, it was applied to a real-world example from the consumer goods industry. The results demonstrate the relevance of the gathered information, the feasibility of the method, as well as its specificities, impacts, and limitations.

This work presents approximation algorithms for scheduling the tasks of a parallel application that are subject to precedence constraints. The considered tasks are malleable which means that they may be executed on a varying number of processors in parallel. The considered objective criterion is the makespan, i.e., the largest task completion time. We demonstrate a close relationship between this scheduling problem and one of its subproblems, the allotment problem. By exploiting this relationship, we design a polynomial time approximation algorithm with performance guarantee arbitrarily close to for the special case of series parallel precedence constraints and for the special case of precedence constraints of bounded width. These special cases cover the important situation of tree structured precedence constraints. For arbitrary precedence constraints, we give a polynomial time approximation algorithm with performance guarantee .

In this paper, we present a "forward-looking" decision support framework that integrates timely metrics data with a simulation based defect model of the software development process in order to support software project management decisions regarding product quality. These predictions are evaluated using Outcome Based Control Limits (OBCLs) and Bi-Directional (both forward and reverse) simulation models of the software development process. The Bi-Directional models provide useful guidance to the program manager when evaluating possible corrective actions on a project that has gone outside the OBCLs. The forward model predicts the potential performance impacts of the proposed corrective actions. The reverse simulation models are new and take the desired system outcome as the starting point and represent the system as it evolves backward in time to identify the necessary starting point to achieve the desired outcome. The approach is presented using an illustrative example.

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that significant benefits may be gained from augmenting current approaches to software development effort estimation, and indeed other project management activities, with models developed using fuzzy logic and other soft computing methods. The tasks undertaken by project managers early in a development process would appear to be particularly amenable to such a strategy, particularly if fuzzy logic models are used in a complementary manner with other algorithmic approaches, thus providing a range of predictions as opposed to a single point value. As well as providing a more intuitively acceptable set of estimates, this would help to reduce or remove the unwarranted level of certainty associated with a point estimate. Furthermore, such an approach would enable organizations to "store" their project management knowledge, making them less susceptible to employee resignations and the like. If fuzzy logic modeling is to be implemented in industry, however, managers must first believe it to be a realistic and workable option. This issue is addressed here by considering two related questions: one, what expectations do project managers have in relation to effort estimation? And two, what is their opinion of the methods that might be useful in this regard? This is followed by a discussion of the results of two surveys of project managers aimed at deriving membership functions using polling methods, the first using an interval declaration approach and the second using votes on fixed points. It is concluded that there is indeed support in the software engineering practitioner community for the use of methods based on the principles of fuzzy logic modeling.

New trends in software development, such as agile software development, have a difficulty in conventional document-based management. Executable software has a higher priority than development documents such as detail design documents and formal bug reports. If managers depend on development reports in order to determine the project progress and the product quality, they will miss the opportunity of determining the progress and quality in agile software development. Therefore, we proposed a project reliability growth model for determining the project state without development documents. This model is based on conventional software reliability growth models. The parameters related to bugs are replaced with communication topic parameters. The concept and procedure of the model are the same as those of the software reliability growth model. By applying this model to open source projects, it is possible to detect a significant change in the project state without development documents.

This study describes a new method of development visualization along with empirical evidence of its usefulness.

Typically, development activities such as program design, programming, and unit testing are not disclosed to the procurement organization (project owner). However, during integration and testing, various issues require collaboration between the procurement organization and developers. When this occurs, it is important to make the development process visible. Recent reports indicate the usefulness for project management of various in-process project measurements which allow visualization of the formerly invisible software project progress [1–6].

Based on this background, the authors investigated a case study where in-process measurement during the integration and test phase helped to make development issues visible. In this study, data obtained from the integration and testing phase were compared to a development process model.

This model was based on the author's experience, and provided a vivid picture of the development activity. By applying in-process measurements in collaboration during the integration test phase, the development activity was clearly visualized, and the procurement organization understood problems.

Software projects often fail, because they are not adequately managed. The establishment of effective and efficient project management practices still remains a key challenge to software organizations. Striving to address these needs, "best practice" models, such as, the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) or the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), are being developed to assist organizations in improving project management. Although not required, software tools can help implement the project management process in practice. In order to provide comprehensive, low-cost tool support for project management, specifically, for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), in this paper we compare the most popular free/open-source web-based project management tools with respect to their compliance to PMBOK and CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV). The results of this research can be used by organizations to make decisions on tool adoptions as well as a basis for evolving software tools in alignment with best practices models.

Organizational software processes improvement offers a key opportunity for organizations to be more efficient and effective. However, in most cases software process improvement initiatives in organizations become a path full of obstacles. As a consequence, organizations worldwide are adopting international standards and models in an effort to improve their software processes. Nevertheless, the difficulty of using multi-model improvement environments for the implementation of software processes improvements is well-known. In this context, effective integration of models and standards is a tool that enhances information sharing and communication. Integration can play a crucial role for the implementation of multi-model environments in order to be used as a reference model in software process improvements. This paper shows a methodology that enables organizations to establish a multi-model environment based on their business goals and on the results of a case study focused on implementing improvements in project management processes. Finally, results obtained after applying the methodology and future research line related to a platform for providing knowledge management and information sharing are included.

Although the factors that need to be focused on for a successful software project appear to be difficult to define, risk management has become one of the key activities for achieving such success because significant risk is involved in each software development phase. Software project failures are often a result of insufficient and ineffective risk information regarding the future. To overcome this, software risk prediction should be performed in advance to allow project managers insight into providing more valuable information for decision making, such as scope coverage, resource allocation, and schedule changes. In this research, we propose a risk prediction model from the perspective of quality using a software repository. We evaluated the risk threat level by mapping some defect attributes that exist in the defect lifecycle, defined their risk threat transition states, and applied a Markov chain for predicting the potential risk level. We evaluated the proposed approach using practical real-industry mobile software projects. The experimental results confirm that our approach is applicable to software threat risk estimation.

Today’s development environment has changed drastically; the development periods are shorter than ever and the number of team members has increased. Consequently, controlling the activities and predicting when a development will end are difficult tasks. To adapt to changes, we propose a generalized software reliability model (GSRM) based on a stochastic process to simulate developments, which include uncertainties and dynamics such as unpredictable changes in the requirements and the number of team members. We assess two actual datasets using our formulated equations, which are related to three types of development uncertainties by employing simple approximations in GSRM. The results show that developments can be evaluated quantitatively. Additionally, a comparison of GSRM with existing software reliability models confirms that the approximation by GSRM is more precise than those by existing models.

On the surface, one might think that revealing the factors that impact on software product usability and the success of an entire project would be relatively simple; however, reported evidence from practitioners and scholars frequently shows the opposite. The aim of this study was to determine factors with a positive (negative) impact on delivering usability in a software product and the success (failure) of an entire project. This paper presents the results of our study, where 11 factors were identified and described, along with an outline of 11 goal-oriented rules incorporating the expertise and knowledge of project managers. The elaborated body of knowledge, positively evaluated by IT professionals, would seem to be a valuable asset during the risk analysis performed before the kick-off of a project as well as in understanding the notion of usability.

Software development in project teams has become more and more complex, with increasing demands for information and decision making. Software development in projects also hugely depends on effective interaction between people, and human factors have been identified as key to successful software projects. Especially in this context, managing and analyzing social networks is highly important. The instrument of social network analysis (SNA) provides fine-grained methods for analyzing social networks in project teams, going beyond the traditional tools and techniques of project management. This paper examines the importance of the application of SNA in software development projects. We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of research on software development projects and social network data published between 1980 and 2019. We identified and analyzed 86 relevant studies, finding that research on software development projects spans the topics of project organization, communication management, knowledge management, version and configuration management, requirement management, and risk management. Further, we show that most studies focus on project organization and that the most common method used to gather social data relies on automated extraction from various software development repositories in the SNA context. Our paper contributes to the software development literature by providing a broad overview of published studies on the use of social networks in helping software development projects. Finally, we identify research opportunities and make suggestions for addressing existing research gaps.

Atanassov’s intuitionistic fuzzy sets (AIFSs), characterized by a membership function, a non-membership function, and a hesitancy function, is a generalization of a fuzzy set. There are various intuitionistic fuzzy hybrid weighted aggregation operators to deal with multi-attribute decision making problems which consider the importance degrees of the arguments and their ordered positions simultaneously. However, these existing hybrid weighed aggregation operators are not monotone with respect to the total order on intuitionistic fuzzy values (AIFVs), which is undesirable. Based on the Łukasiewicz triangular norm, we propose an intuitionistic fuzzy hybrid weighted arithmetic mean, which is monotone with respect to the total order on AIFVs, and therefore is a true generalization of such operations. We give an example that a company intends to select a project manager to illustrate the validity and applicability of the proposed aggregation operator. Moreover, we extend this kind of hybrid weighted arithmetic mean to the interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy environments.

Software reliability growth models (SRGMs) are widely used to estimate software reliability by analyzing failure dataset throughout the testing process. A large number of SRGMs have been proposed on a regular basis by researchers since the 1970s. They are represented with a set of assumptions and a set of parameters. One major problem in SRGMs is that the uncertainties surrounding the assumptions and parameters are generally not taken into account by most of them. Therefore, sometimes, the predicted reliability on testing phase significantly varies in actual operational phase. This paper presents a logistic growth model that incorporates a special parameter to consider the effects of all possible uncertainties. A systematic analysis is carried out to identify the major uncertain factors and their impacts on the fault detection rate. The applicability of the model is shown by validating it on two different real datasets that are commonly used in various studies. The comparisons with nine established models in terms of mean square error (MSE), variance, predictive-ratio risk (PRR), $R^2$and AIC have been presented.

Due to the separation of project management systems and workflow management systems, there is a gap between project plans and process support used to implement them. Often, managers could not see what was going on in their businesses until it was too late to react. In this paper, a cooperative hypermedia approach and an integration framework are developed to provide an integrated support for project planning, workflow management, information management and teamwork. The cooperative hypermedia-based process model has many desirable computational properties. The cooperative hypermedia tools built on this model can support distributed project teams to create, analyze, execute, monitor and adapt a project plan cooperatively. Case studies and user experiences of the cooperative hypermedia system demonstrate that the cooperative hypermedia approach can facilitate team members to identify emerging problems, to discuss and adapt the plan cooperatively. It is a promising approach to bridge the gap between project management and workflow management systems so as to support flexible business processes of real-time project teams.

The application and management system of scientific research projects adopts the mature B/S mode, and uses the technologies of jqGrid, Layui, jQuery, PHP and MYSQL to design and realize the function modules of project application, online evaluation, project process management and project query statistics. At present, as a comprehensive management system of Weinan science and technology business, the system has been officially put into use, and has completed the application and evaluation of Weinan science and technology plan projects since 2018. The system is stable, beautiful interface, easy to operate, and can meet the daily needs of science and technology project management. It has produced certain economic and social benefits, and the system has certain application and promotion value in colleges and universities, scientific research institutes, science and technology management departments and other similar units.

This paper shows that underlying parameters of perceived complexity in the development of a technical platform in the mobile telecommunications industry can be presented in a model consisting of four parameters, divided into three levels. The parameters refer to the number of interrelated parts, type of dependency among these parts, uncertainty in goals, and uncertainty in methods. These complexity parameters can further be found on different levels — external organization, internal organization, and product.

The study also shows that these underlying parameters come into play differently in different settings, e.g. how these parameters are perceived is highly dependent on the specific situation. The settings analyzed in this paper concern two technical platform projects of mobile phones at Ericsson Communication Systems (ECS), Sweden.