Improving software development project team performance: a Web-based expert support system for project control

A recent survey indicates that 53 % of software development projects are over budget, behind schedule, or deliver fewer features than originally specified. Statistics also show that 31 % of development projects end up being cancelled or terminated prematurely. Among those completed projects, only 61 % of them satisfy originally specified features and functions. In today's environment, one of the greatest challenges a project manager constantly face with is to keep the projects under control in terms of budget and development time frame. A successful software development project relies on many factors; it is not that easy to control all of them and continually keeping those entire factors all going well together. The goal of this paper is to introduce a mathematical model and prove that a software development team can rely on it to accurately predict, calculate the risks and their impacts on the success of the project. Our objective is to conceptualize the model into a scientific tool that can be used to understand and calculate the risks of a development project. Subsequently, the software development team can take appropriate actions to mitigate the risks, and as a result, the project manager have a better control of the budget and development time frame of the project. It is the author's believe that if we can identify and control problems at early stages, we can significantly increase the chance of success of the development project. The model and the software tool written by the author in this paper to calculate the risks and weight their impacts on a project can be used to identify problems and their potentials risk at early stage. The tool also allows a project manager to apply the model and obtain results without getting involved in too many mathematical calculations. Although the model introduced in this paper can generally provide an accurate picture of what, how, and when things may go wrong at the beginning of a typical software development project, there are areas need further fine tuned, especially when it is used for a particular industry or at later stages of software development cycle.

Context: It is known that men practitioners are predominant in software development teams over women. In recent years, researchers have investigated gender inequality from different perspectives, such as gender bias and suggestions to increase diversity in development teams. However, while most of the existing literature investigates the perception of women practitioners, the vast majority of the software development workforce – men – has received less attention. Goal: This work investigates men’s perceptions of gender inequality in software development teams and their experiences compared in software development to women. Method: Our study conducted a survey with 217 male practitioners, using a questionnaire consisting of 27 questions. The collected data was analyzed using a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques, including graphical representations, percentages, and the grounded theory methodology. Results: Our findings reveal that most men do not perceive any sexist behavior among their team members and they are satisfied with the performance of their functions. In addition, their main suggestions to increase their participation in software development projects are offering training courses and improving the interaction among team members. Conclusions: The barriers and challenges that men practitioners face in software development teams are not the same as those faced by women. In addition, they consider that women do not work in software development due to a lack of affinity and knowledge about coding.

Since the turn of the 20th century many leadership theories have emerged and evolved over time. Transformational leadership is one of the older, more prominent theories and has been used in organizations and in political arenas for many years. Complexity leadership theory, on the other hand, is relatively new in practice and academia. To date, there is very little literature addressing the similarities and differences between the transformational and complexity leadership theories as well as their comparative value in organizational contexts. Both the Complexity Leadership and Transformational Leadership theories are presented and the similarities and differences of each theory are discussed and evaluated. The purpose of this comparison and evaluation is present the theory’s foundations so that they may be applied to the challenges presented by IT software development teams. The application will result in determining and recommending the more effective leadership style for IT-based teams as well as presenting tips for successful IT software development projects. Understanding different leadership styles and their response to team challenges can ultimately contribute to the leader’s ability to effectively manage IT teams and successfully leading IT software development projects in organizations.

Knowledge-based expert system for optimal reactive power control in distribution system

Expert system has the least focus on requirement engineering. In facts, requirement engineering is important to get all the requirements needed for an expert system. If the requirements do not meet the clients' needs, the expert system is considered fail although it works perfectly. Currently, there are a lot of studies proposing and describing the development of expert systems. However, they are focusing in a specific and narrow domain of problems. Also, the major concern of most researchers is the design issues of the expert system. Therefore, we emphasize on the very first step of success expert system development - requirement engineering. Hence, we are focusing in the requirement engineering techniques in order to present the most practical way to facilitate requirement engineering processes. In this paper, we analyze expert system attributes, requirement engineering processes in expert system developments and the possible techniques that can be applied to expert system developments. Next, we propose the most appropriate techniques for the expert system developments based on the analysis. From this paper, a set of techniques for expert system development will be provided.

In project-based organizations knowledge is a critical resource used to develop and deliver products and services with a high level of quality. Therefore, a systematic and sustainable process is necessary to coordinate knowledge management, project management and product lifecycle. This scenario predominates in companies focused on the creation and maintenance of information systems. This article presents an exploratory study based on a framework that integrates cognitive, managerial, and operational processes in a public Brazilian organization that provides services in the area of information and communications technology, focusing on the construction and maintenance of information systems. Those processes are operationalized by three management models considering knowledge, project, and software development processes. Our proposal aims to understand the relationships between those three management models and their influence on the software development process in the organization under study. Our premise is based on the principle that cognitive management, project management, and software development management must be integrated to fulfill the demands of product development and service provision. The research data was composed of registers of working hours spent on software development and maintenance projects involving 244 people allocated to 5064 projects in the period from 2007 to 2013. The study resulted in the identification of the relationships among the three management models adopted by the organization, with emphasis on knowledge management activities, which were not directly identified, making it difficult to account for and measure them. We established a set of activities connected to each one of the knowledge management model phases. Since those activities were not visible before, our approach contributed to build a systematic process to register and relate activities linked to the dimensions of cognitive processes, project management, and software construction.

The purpose of this mixed-methods study is to explore the effectiveness of Agile methods in addressing inefficiencies within software development projects, related issues, delays, excessive defects, and concerns with improved collaboration among the teams. This paper seeks to measure the value that Agile brings to organizations and recommend the implementation of these methods as a way of addressing the challenges that organizations experience when using conventional systems in software development. No changes to the basic Agile concept were made here and thus the research is based on methods that are already implemented such as Scrum and Kanban. Measures of productivity including project completion time, number of defects, and satisfaction level of the software development teams were obtained over six months from three companies. This research is innovative in the sense that it uses both the quantitative and qualitative methods in conducting the assessment to determine whether or not the Agile methodologies improve software development effectiveness and team performance in contrast to the Waterfall model. The results of this study indicate that Agile techniques enhanced productivity combined with the quality of team relations and can be used for further expansion in the sphere of software engineering. Therefore, it is recommended that Agile practices be implemented as a way of fixing problems that are standard in software development.

This paper describes the application of an expert system to the control of a phased array radar. The goal of the research was to investigate operational radar control strategies which demonstrate gain in radar performance. A testbed, consisting of a prototype expert system controller and a phased array radar simulator, was built to conduct experimental runs of surveillance scenarios. The testbed was incrementally developed as a hybrid between conventional algorithmic programs and an expert system, taking advantage of the best features of each. We focus on a description of the testbed and a discussion of advanced A1 development environments and expert system runtime performance.

Project organization and management software development project management model is the best form of software development enterprises in China's understanding of software development project management has been greatly improved. Traditional software development projects have different characteristics, therefore how flexible application for software project management theory and strategies of the main research objectives of domestic software development project management. Our software in enterprise application software development project management, general shortcomings in implementation, this article on software research and development analysis and project management of implementation strategies.

The techniques and tools developed for the assurance of reliability and quality in conventional software may also be applied to the development of fuzzy expert systems. This article addresses the use of one of the techniques and tools of software engineering in the development of fuzzy-rule-based expert systems. Coverage analysis applied to the rules of the knowledge base in a fuzzy-rule-based expert system can provide a measure towards assuring reliability and quality in soft expert systems. Coverage analysis is a technique used for verification and validation in software engineering. A description of verification and validation in the development of conventional software and the role of coverage analysis within those approaches to software quality assurance are first presented. Then the use of coverage analysis in the development of fuzzy-rule-based expert systems is examined. Experience from the application of coverage analysis to a knowledge base for a fuzzy-rule-based expert system is also presented.

Managers recognize that software development project teams need to be developed and guided.Although technical skills are necessary, non-technical (NT) skills are equally, if not more, necessary for project success.Currently, there are no proven tools to measure the NT skills of software developers or software development teams.Behavioral markers (observable behaviors that have positive or negative impacts on individual or team performance) are beginning to be successfully used by airline and medical industries to measure NT skill performance.The purpose of this research is to develop and validate the behavior marker system tool that can be used by different managers or coaches to measure the NT skills of software development individuals and teams.This paper presents an empirical study conducted at the Software Factory where users of the behavior marker tool rated video clips of software development teams.The initial results show that the behavior marker tool can be reliably used with minimal training.

Development of a prototype expert system for identification and control of insect pests

Traditional software development organizations have rigid processes that can be difficult to change. One of the most critical challenges is the management processes that can ensure the customer’s desired level of quality and optimize the organization’s resources. Kanban represents one of the most well-known approaches that bring Lean principles, philosophies, and tools into software organizations. This study analyses the leadership behind the Lean methodology, based on which the Kanban software implementation method has been created, by doing a literature review focusing on lean leadership principles that can optimize the software delivery and implementation. Lean practices can be applied in almost any domain like accounting, services industry, product services, and even software development. Two basic concepts stay at the core of the Lean model that can be employed at any organization level. The first focuses on eliminating waste by optimizing processes and systems, and the second focuses on maximized customer value. Consequently, it can be affirmed that Lean is focused on maximizing customer value with a minimum amount of waste. Furthermore, a case study is presented that shows the Kanban implementation at a software development company. The practical case of the Kanban adoption is analyzed, highlighting the link between the leadership principles and the process development flow. Finally, key performance indicators are identified and instituted to guarantee the continuous improvement of the software delivery model. The software development projects driven by the Kanban project management approach reported essential improvements such as waste reduction, team communication, and collaboration enhancement, work in progress diminishment, productivity-boosting, better delivery predictability, and project visibility. Therefore, the type of leadership influences the software development projects’ performance. The findings suggest that Kanban effectively enhances the software development delivery model and team performance.KeywordsLeadershipKanbanLean practicesSoftware developmentSoftware implementationAgile transformation

The research aimed to develop expert system for helping lecturers to decide which courses to be taken by students in the next semester. The expert system contained specific pieces of knowledge to solve specific problems involved in the forms of system development and maintenance. This expert system was in the form of a website using the PHP programming language and MySQL database. The researcher used the Ripple Down Rules (RDR) method to identify the courses by putting forward the questions so that the system could decide which courses the students should take in next semester. The result shows that this web-based expert system can identify which courses that the students have to enroll after the students have answered questions generated by the system. The available data on the courses in the system adapt to the rules, so it is in line with the enrolled courses.

Plantation Coffee and coconut are superior export commodities that have a high investment value in maintaining the economy and balancing the balance of plantation commodities in Indonesia. One of the obstacles that is often experienced by managers of coffee and coconut cultivation is a lack of understanding in the diagnosis of plants that are deficient in macro and micro nutrients, as the main needs for quality of the results. On the other hand, the number of plantation crop experts is relatively small. Seeing these conditions, this study has built an expert system that is able to diagnose the symptoms of nutrient deficiency in coffee and coconut plants. The expert system is built by applying the certainty factor method, so that it can overcome the problem of uncertainty in diagnosing. The percentage level of certainty is obtained from the MB and MD assessment of an expert. This expert system was built using the Expert System Development Life Cycle method. The results of this study are a web-based expert system that is suitable for use by managers of coffee and coconut cultivation in diagnosing nutrient deficiencies, so that it can be known in detail independently and can reduce production costs.