Search Results

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Review
    Citation - WoS: 3
    Citation - Scopus: 9
    An Empirical Evaluation of Software Quality Assurance Practices and Challenges in a Developing Country: a Comparison of Nigeria and Turkey
    (Springer international Publishing Ag, 2016) Sowunmi, Olaperi Yeside; Mısra, Sanjay; Misra, Sanjay; Fernandez-Sanz, Luis; Crawford, Broderick; Soto, Ricardo; Mısra, Sanjay; Computer Engineering; Computer Engineering
    Background: The importance of quality assurance in the software development process cannot be overemphasized because its adoption results in high reliability and easy maintenance of the software system and other software products. Software quality assurance includes different activities such as quality control, quality management, quality standards, quality planning, process standardization and improvement amongst others. The aim of this work is to further investigate the software quality assurance practices of practitioners in Nigeria. While our previous work covered areas on quality planning, adherence to standardized processes and the inherent challenges, this work has been extended to include quality control, software process improvement and international quality standard organization membership. It also makes comparison based on a similar study carried out in Turkey. The goal is to generate more robust findings that can properly support decision making by the software community. The qualitative research approach, specifically, the use of questionnaire research instruments was applied to acquire data from software practitioners. Results: In addition to the previous results, it was observed that quality assurance practices are quite neglected and this can be the cause of low patronage. Moreover, software practitioners are neither aware of international standards organizations or the required process improvement techniques; as such their claimed standards are not aligned to those of accredited bodies, and are only limited to their local experience and knowledge, which makes it questionable. The comparison with Turkey also yielded similar findings, making the results typical of developing countries. The research instrument used was tested for internal consistency using the Cronbach's alpha, and it was proved reliable. Conclusion: For the software industry in developing countries to grow strong and be a viable source of external revenue, software assurance practices have to be taken seriously because its effect is evident in the final product. Moreover, quality frameworks and tools which require minimum time and cost are highly needed in these countries.
  • Article
    Citation - WoS: 5
    Citation - Scopus: 8
    Solving the Software Project Scheduling Problem Using Intelligent Water Drops
    (Univ Osijek, Tech Fac, 2018) Crawford, Broderick; Soto, Ricardo; Astorga, Gino; Castro, Carlos; Paredes, Fernando; Misra, Sanjay; Rubio, Jose-Miguel
    Within the category of project scheduling problems, there is a specific problem within the software industry referred to as the software project scheduling problem. The problem consists in the correct allocation of employees to the different tasks that make up a software project, bearing in mind time and cost restraints. To achieve this goal, the present work first uses metaheuristic intelligent water drops illustrating; this is a recent stochastic swarm-based method increasingly used for solving optimization problems. Finally, the results and comparisons with experiments performed with other techniques are presented, demonstrating the solidity of the approach presented.
  • Article
    Citation - WoS: 7
    Citation - Scopus: 11
    Software Project Scheduling Using the Hyper-Cube Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm
    (Univ Osijek, Tech Fac, 2015) Crawford, Broderick; Soto, Ricardo; Johnson, Franklin; Misra, Sanjay; Paredes, Fernando; Olguin, Eduardo
    This paper introduces a proposal of design of Ant Colony Optimization algorithm paradigm using Hyper-Cube framework to solve the Software Project Scheduling Problem. This NP-hard problem consists in assigning tasks to employees in order to minimize the project duration and its overall cost. This assignment must satisfy the problem constraints and precedence between tasks. The approach presented here employs the Hyper-Cube framework in order to establish an explicitly multidimensional space to control the ant behaviour. This allows us to autonomously handle the exploration of the search space with the aim of reaching encouraging solutions.
  • Review
    Citation - WoS: 30
    Citation - Scopus: 43
    A Systematic Literature Review of Open Source Software Quality Assessment Models
    (Springer international Publishing Ag, 2016) Adewumi, Adewole; Misra, Sanjay; Omoregbe, Nicholas; Crawford, Broderick; Soto, Ricardo
    Background: Many open source software (OSS) quality assessment models are proposed and available in the literature. However, there is little or no adoption of these models in practice. In order to guide the formulation of newer models so they can be acceptable by practitioners, there is need for clear discrimination of the existing models based on their specific properties. Based on this, the aim of this study is to perform a systematic literature review to investigate the properties of the existing OSS quality assessment models by classifying them with respect to their quality characteristics, the methodology they use for assessment, and their domain of application so as to guide the formulation and development of newer models. Searches in IEEE Xplore, ACM, Science Direct, Springer and Google Search is performed so as to retrieve all relevant primary studies in this regard. Journal and conference papers between the year 2003 and 2015 were considered since the first known OSS quality model emerged in 2003. Results: A total of 19 OSS quality assessment model papers were selected. To select these models we have developed assessment criteria to evaluate the quality of the existing studies. Quality assessment models are classified into five categories based on the quality characteristics they possess namely: single-attribute, rounded category, community-only attribute, non-community attribute as well as the non-quality in use models. Our study reflects that software selection based on hierarchical structures is found to be the most popular selection method in the existing OSS quality assessment models. Furthermore, we found that majority (47%) of the existing models do not specify any domain of application. Conclusions: In conclusion, our study will be a valuable contribution to the community and helps the quality assessment model developers in formulating newer models and also to the practitioners (software evaluators) in selecting suitable OSS in the midst of alternatives.
  • Article
    Citation - WoS: 4
    Citation - Scopus: 6
    A Teaching-Learning Optimization Algorithm for the Weighted Set-Covering Problem
    (Univ Osijek, Tech Fac, 2020) Crawford, Broderick; Soto, Ricardo; Palma, Wenceslao; Aballay, Felipe; Astorga, Gino; Lemus-Romani, Jose; Rubio, Jose-Miguel
    The need to make good use of resources has allowed metaheuristics to become a tool to achieve this goal. There are a number of complex problems to solve, among which is the Set-Covering Problem, which is a representation of a type of combinatorial optimization problem, which has been applied to several real industrial problems. We use a binary version of the optimization algorithm based on teaching and learning to solve the problem, incorporating various binarization schemes, in order to solve the binary problem. In this paper, several binarization techniques are implemented in the teaching/learning based optimization algorithm, which presents only the minimum parameters to be configured such as the population and number of iterations to be evaluated. The performance of metaheuristic was evaluated through 65 benchmark instances. The results obtained are promising compared to those found in the literature.