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Publication Index: PubMedSubject: Software quality

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Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    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.
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    Article
    A User Task Design Notation for Improved Software Design
    (Peerj inc, 2021) Ozcan, Eda; Topalli, Damla; Tokdemir, Gul; Cagiltay, Nergiz Ercil
    System design is recognized as one of the most critical components of a software system that bridges system requirements and coding. System design also has a significant impact on testing and maintenance activities, and on further improvements during the lifespan of the software system. Software design should reflect all necessary components of the requirements in a clear and understandable manner by all stakeholders of the software system. To distinguish system elements, separation of concerns in software design is suggested. In this respect, identification of the user tasks, i.e., the tasks that need to be performed by the user, is not currently reflected explicitly in system design documents. Our main assumption in this study is that software quality can be improved significantly by clearly identifying the user tasks from those that need to be performed by the computer system itself. Additionally, what we propose has the potential to better reflect the user requirements and main objectives of the system on the software design and thereby to improve software quality. The main aim of this study is to introduce a novel notation for software developers in the frame of UML Activity Diagram (UML-AD) that enables designers to identify the user tasks and define them separately from the system tasks. For this purpose, an extension of UML-AD, named UML-ADE (UML-Activity Diagram Extended) was proposed. Afterwards, it was implemented in a serious game case for which the specification of user tasks is extremely important. Finally, its effectiveness was analyzed and compared to UML-AD experimentally with 72 participants. The defect detection performance of the participants on both diagrams with two real-life serious game scenarios was evaluated. Results show a higher level of understandability for those using UML-ADE, which in turn may indicate a better design and higher software quality. The results encourage researchers to develop specific design representations dedicated to task design to improve system quality and to conduct further evaluations of the impact of these design on each of the above mentioned potential benefits for the software systems.