The ability of healthcare information systems to share and exchange information (interoperate) is essential to facilitate the quality and effectiveness of healthcare services. Although standardization is considered key to addressing the fragmentation currently challenging the healthcare environment, e-health standardization can be difficult for many reasons, one of which is making sense of the e-health interoperability standards landscape. Specifically aimed at the African health informatics community, this paper aims to provide an overview of e-health interoperability and the significance of standardization in its achievement. We conducted a literature study of e-health standards, their development, and the degree of participation by African countries in the process. We also provide a review of a selection of prominent e-health interoperability standards that have been widely adopted especially by developed countries, look at some of the factors that affect their adoption in Africa, and provide an overview of ongoing global initiatives to address the identified barriers. Although the paper is specifically aimed at the African community, its findings would be equally applicable to many other developing countries.

Sudoku is a logical puzzle that has achieved international popularity. Given this, there have been a number of computer solvers developed for this puzzle. Various methods including genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, particle swarm optimization and harmony search have been evaluated for this purpose. The approach described in this paper combines human intuition and optimization to solve Sudoku problems. The main contribution of this paper is a set of heuristic moves, incorporating human expertise, to solve Sudoku puzzles. The paper investigates the use of genetic programming to optimize a space of programs composed of these heuristics moves, with the aim of evolving a program that can produce a solution to the Sudoku problem instance. Each program is a combination of randomly selected moves. The approach was tested on 1800 Sudoku puzzles of differing difficulty. The approach presented was able to solve all 1800 problems, with a majority of these problems being solved in under a second. For a majority of the puzzles evolution was not needed and random combinations of the moves created during the initial population produced solutions. For the more difficult problems at least one generation of evolution was needed to find a solution. Further analysis revealed that solution programs for the more difficult problems could be found by enumerating random combinations of the move operators, however at a cost of higher runtimes. The performance of the approach presented was found to be comparable to other methods used to solve Sudoku problems and in a number of cases produced better results.

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There appears to be a lack of knowledge on the phases South African (SA) organisations go through while adopting agile methods. As a means to address this gap, this study uncovered empirical evidence on the phases SA organisations go through whilst adopting agile methods as well as the disparities between agile prescriptions and the way SA organisations actually implement agile methods.
 
 The data collected using a case study approach was analysed through the lens of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). The results reveal that there is no structured process for adopting agile methods and organisations go through various phases in their attempts to adopt agile methods. During the various phases, organisations face challenges which are culture as well as people related.
 
 Through this study South African practitioners could now be aware that before adopting an agile methodology, there has to be a common understanding of the problems at hand and the envisioned solution. The findings also inform aspiring adopters in South Africa that adoption of the methods does not have to be as prescribed. They are free to adopt only those aspects the organisations need most.

The security of software applications is a major concern, especially for information owners, software developers and users. Increasingly, these stakeholders need to be confident that the software applications being developed are secure and can be trusted when used in the intended environment. However, a problem exists in terms of how to confidently address the security of software applications in order to protect the information to be stored, processed and transmitted by them, thereby increasing their associated levels of trust. The purpose of this paper is therefore to address some key aspects relating to the security and trustworthiness of a software application functioning within the intended environment. These key aspects include those relating to the security controls implemented and installed by the software developers and those involving the actual usage of the security controls implemented.

Small software companies make for the majority of software companies around the world, but their software development processes are often not as clearly defined and structured as in their larger counterparts. Especially the test process is often the most neglected part of the software process. This contribution analyses the software testing process in a small South African IT company, here called X, to determine the problems that currently cause it to deliver software fraught with too many defects. The findings of a survey conducted with all software developers in company X are discussed, and several typical problems are identified. We also discuss two prevalent test process improvement models that can be used to reason about the possibilities of process improvement. Solutions to those (or similar) problems often already exist, but a major part of the problem addressed in this contribution is the unawareness, or unfamiliarity, of many small industrial software developers and IT managers as far as the scientific literature on software science and engineering, and especially in our case: software testing, is concerned.

This exploratory study of introductory pre- and in-service teachers’ performance in object-oriented programming (OOP) assessments reveals important issues with regard to learning and teaching OOP, using java. The study is set against the backdrop of the country’s transition of its national IT curriculum from a procedural to an object-oriented programming language. The effect of prior programming experience and performances in different types of questions are examined. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods is used to analyse the data. The effect of prior programming experience of a procedural kind and the type of assessments given is shown to have a marked influence on the performance in programming assessments and teaching of OOP. Many introductory OOP courses are in effect taught procedurally as courses in the small. Therefore educating teachers how to teach programming is a significant educational challenge. Some implications for teaching are therefore suggested

An integration of traditional verification techniques and formal specifications in software engineering is presented. Advocates of such techniques claim that mathematical formalisms allow them to produce quality, verifiably correct, or at least highly dependable software and that the testing and maintenance phases are shortened. Critics on the other hand maintain that software formalisms are hard to master, tedious to use and not well suited for the fast turnaround times demanded by industry. In this paper some popular formalisms and the advantages of using these during the early phases of the software development life cycle are presented. Employing the Floyd-Hoare verification principles during the formal specification phase facilitates reasoning about the properties of a specification. Some observations that may help to alleviate the formal-methods controversy are established and a number of formal methods successes is presented. Possible conditions for an increased acceptance of formalisms in oftware development are discussed.