Practical Software Development: Leveraging AI for Precise Cost Estimation in Lump-Sum EPC Projects

The paper focuses on enhancing the current or modern software development practices in Information Technology (IT) organizations. The research paper aims to address the gap between various hybrid software development approaches and existing practices that contribute to software development practices. The methodology adopted here is to obtain data from software professionals and understand how the current practices in the software development industry have contributed to the productivity of the employees and the IT organization, which has been done with the help of a survey questionnaire and by analyzing existing research articles and papers on the software development practices. This research is a conceptual model focused on a modern hybrid approach for software development, rather than focusing on a single software development approach, which can help IT organization increase productivity and deliver business value beyond customer expectations. The cost to build and time to market a software product or a software service can reduce by integrating the required software development practices. Today, staying relevant in the competitive market can be made easier by choosing the best available software development practices, frameworks, and models to fit an organization’s value and knowledge system. The conceptual model aims to reduce the gap between various hybrid software development approaches and existing practices contributing to software development. The paper concludes by discussing the benefits of the hybrid software development approach and urge IT organizations to adopt it as per their software development requirements and customer requirements.

Many software development companies, especially small and medium-sized ones, still need to be more aware of and understand Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) values, methods, techniques, and concepts. Recent studies have shown that companies are demanding internal self-assessment of HCI practices within the software development industry. However, only a few models are available for assessing HCI practices, and they lack sufficient validation to be widely applicable. The models are mainly based on staged assessments by experts, but continuous representation models are more suitable for self-assessment. To bridge these gaps, we have developed a new process model, HCI Reflect—a self-assessment method, and structurally assessed it as a model encompassing four dimensions for self-assessing HCI practices in software development companies: human-centeredness, process and infrastructure, usability performance, and usability impact. In this article, we present the model’s theoretical foundation and the results from an international assessment study of the first version of the model, where 118 software development professionals evaluated the model’s four dimensions. The results demonstrated the significance of these dimensions, and based on this, we present a revised version. The development and assessment are the first steps towards the validation of the model, and we plan to test the underlying questionnaire for usability next. The model, when validated, would be helpful for self-assessing HCI practices in software development companies to foster knowledge and understanding of HCI practices in development teams. ACM CCS: Human-centered computing— > Human computer interaction (HCI)— > HCI design and evaluation methods.

Quality assurance tasks of software products typically take place throughout the entire software development life-cycle. Frequently, paper-based inspections methods are used to review software development documents (e.g. requirements specifications, design documents, test plans). Nevertheless, even though the quality of these documents has a major impact on the quality of the developed software product, they are often not as rigorously reviewed as source code. This paper presents a tool-based approach that facilitates the software inspection process in order to determine defects of generally accepted documentation best practices in software development documents. Moreover, we present results of a conducted empirical study and show how this tool-based approach helps to facilitate inspection tasks and to support gathering information on the quality of the inspected documents.

An analysis of factors affecting software reliability

In the first part of this paper we summarize the results of a questionnaire for software professionals which we, the Software Engineering Group at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, handed out to (local) small and medium-sized IT businesses. The questionnaire targeted the true state of the art in practical software development with a focus on questions regarding the benefits and drawbacks of standard methodologies and all forms of user participation in such an environment. Especially interesting for us was the degree of customer integration into the development process, the understandability of used notations from the developer and user perspective, and the possible reasons for difficulties in the interaction between customer and developer teams. In the second part we present a first look at the UPEX methodology which takes into account the results of the questionnaire

Problem statement: A study was conducted to investigate the current state of software development practice in Malaysia with regard to Component Oriented Software Development (COSD). The objectives of the study were to identify its potential application in Malaysia and to determine research areas that can be explored further to promote its application. Approach: Information required for the study was obtained through a survey, questionnaires were distributed to the software developers who are working at various software development companies in Malaysia. Software developers were generally divided into two categories; component users and non-component users. Information on current practices in software development, current practices of the component users, problems faced by the component users in applying COSD and reasons that hinder the non-component users from applying COSD was sought. Results: Results showed that current practice of software development in Malaysia is inclined towards software reuse, which is in line with the aim of COSD. Even though the component users face problems in applying COSD, they still believe that COSD is a better approach to develop software and majority of them will continue to apply COSD. The non-component users also believe that COSD is a better approach to develop software and majority of them will apply COSD in their future software development projects. Conclusion: Study concluded that the potential of COSD application amongst the software developers in Malaysia is high. List of COSD research areas formulated from the study can serve as a basis for the researchers to pursue research in this area that will further increase the potential.

We empirically examine the relationship between software design modularity and software quality in open source software (OSS) development projects. Conventional wisdom suggests that degree of software modularity affects software quality. An analysis of 203 software releases in 46 OSS projects hosted on SourceForge.net lends support for a more complex relationship between software modularity and software quality than conventional wisdom suggests. We find that software modularity is associated with reduced software complexity, an increased number of static software bugs, and a mixed relationship with the percentage of bugs closed. We do not find empirical evidence supporting any relationship between modularity and other measures of customer satisfaction. In addition to empirically testing the relationship between modularity and quality, we introduce new measures of software modularity and software quality. Implications are developed for the theory of modularity and the practice of software development.

Object-oriented software metrics are important in software engineering field for measurement of the software quality, size estimation, complexity and effort. Object oriented software development is the most popular and best practice in software development. Object oriented software metrics can be used for measuring extend of object orientedness of a program. These quantities are important information indicators, that can be helpful for a software developer in take decisions for designing good software. It is proven that the software metrics provide quantitative information about the structure of the code, which can be used to determine the reliability of software. The design of the software is highly recommended to be object oriented in the software development environment. Software metrics specific to programs that have object oriented design can be used to measure the quality of the software like inheritance, assessing the effects of coupling, the complexity of the code, size aspects, etc, of the software developed in such an environment. Software measurement is a way for assessing the quality of software. Many attributes can define quality of a software, internal (size, complexity) as well as external (reliability)[14]. Often internal attributes are contributing factors to external attributes. Reliability as a term means the degree to which a component, product or system executes specified functions for a specific period of time under specified conditions. Software reliability is the software being trustworthy of the specifications. The aim of the work is to model the relationship between reliability of object oriented software to the object oriented design metrics and predict reliability of software.

A key challenge when producing usable and useful software is the lack of impact of usability work on software development. We aim at developing a more coherent and realistic understanding of this challenge and the possibilities of how to increase the impact from usability work when developing high quality software products. We present a workshop gathering usability practitioners and researchers in order to establish and thoroughly discuss a corpus of case studies covering a broad range of usability practices in software development. The result of the workshop will be summarized in a conference paper and an international recognized scientific publisher will publish the case studies.

Metrics for assessing adoption of good development practices are a useful way to ensure that software is sustainable, reusable and functional. Sustainabilitymeans that the software used today will be available - and continue to be improved and supported - in the future. We report here an initial set of metrics that measure good practices in software development. This initiative differs from previously developed efforts in being a community-driven grassroots approach where experts from different organisations propose good software practices that have reasonable potential to be adopted by the communities they represent. We not only focus our efforts on understanding and prioritising good practices, we assess their feasibility for implementation and publish them here.

Agile development processes and especially Scrum are changing the state of the practice in software development. Many companies in the classical IT sector have adopted them to successfully tackle various challenges from the rapidly changing environments and increasingly complex software systems. Companies developing software for embedded or cyber-physical systems, however, are still hesitant to adopt such processes. Despite successful applications of Scrum and other agile methods for cyber-physical systems, there is still no complete process that maps their specific challenges to practices in Scrum. We propose to fill this gap by treating all design artefacts in such a development in the same way: In software development, the final design is already the product, in hardware and mechanics it is the starting point of production. We sketch the Scrum extension Scrum CPS by showing how Scrum could be used to develop all design artefacts for a cyber physical system. Hardware and mechanical parts that might not be available yet are simulated. With this approach, we can directly and iteratively build the final software and produce detailed models for the hardware and mechanics production in parallel. We plan to further detail Scrum CPS and apply it first in a series of student projects to gather more experience before testing it in an industrial case study.

A growing number of articles describe the challenges of adopting DevOps for DoD software development. A recent paper in this journal discussed DevOps adoption challenges within the acquisition programs of the Navy. For embedded software, these challenges have been overwhelming to date. However, for standalone applications, the story is different, even though the lingering impact of DoD Instruction 5000 and other DoD cultural practices remains problematic. The HPCMP CREATE™ program, or simply CREATE in this paper, is part of the portfolio of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP). It has successfully adapted DevOps concepts and agile software development practices to develop a family of software applications that enable system-scale virtual prototyping and testing analysis for major DoD acquisition programs. This study describes the main enabling practices that made this possible.

Starting from the experience gained in organizing TAPSOFT'85, the paper discusses the place of formal methods in software development. It distinguishes two notions of theory: the mathematical science of computation and the treatment of computing as a human activity. An adequate software theory needs to take both theoretical perspectives into account. Therefore, the paper explores the borderline of formalization and human activity in several directions: concerning the role and scope of formalized procedures, the relation between formal models and situated use, the process of learning in software development and the ways computer programs become effective in use. Fundamental assumptions underlying formal methods and their relation to emancipatory approaches such as participatory design are discussed. The paper closes with calling for a dialogical framework for further pursuing these questions.

This paper reviews the introduction of factory concepts and practices, based on tools and methods from the evolving field of software engineering, at major software producers, in particular those that explicitly adopted the factory label to describe their software facilities or approach to software development: Hitachi, Toshiba, NEC, and Fujitsu in Japan, as well as System Development Corporation in the United States. The other United States firm discussed in detail is International Business Machines, which, without adopting the factory label, introduced numerous measures to organize and control software development, especially basic software. The paper emphasizes that the difficulty of the technology, shortages of skilled engineers, and large-scale projects have encouraged producers to become more systematic or factory-like in managing a series of projects, even though some characteristics of the technology and the industry have made software seem difficult to control and more suitable to a loosely structured project-centered or craft approach to development.

The principles of ethics are not a new topic in the area of Software Engineering; this term emerged in the 90s after the rise of computers due to incorrect practices in software development. This research aims to classify the ethical problems arising in the software development life cycle, for which a preliminary secondary study (PSS) was conducted. As a result of the PSS, 27 primary studies were obtained. These studies propose methodologies and solutions for some ethical issues in a specific phase. Therefore, we classified the ethical issues, but not all adversities can be included due to the variety of problems. We conclude that no research papers classify ethical issues arising in the phases of software development.