Rodina Ahmad

University of Malaya | UM · Faculty of Computer Science & Information Technology

Due to specific advantages, the volume of Software Development Outsourcing (SDO) is rapidly increasing. Because of challenges arising from the Requirements Engineering (RE) process, the anticipated benefits of SDO are not achieved in case of several projects. The objective of this research work is to recommend RE practices for addressing the common...

The anticipated benefits of Software Development Outsourcing (SDO) are not achieved in case of several projects because of the issues that emanate from Requirements Engineering (RE) process. This research work presents a Requirements Engineering Practices (REP) model to cope with the customarily occurring issues of the RE process for SDO. To formul...

Software development is a critical task that depends on coordination among team members and organizational activities that bring team members together. The literature indicates various techniques that have been applied to control the coordination level among team members. Notable among these techniques is social-technical congruence (STC), which he...

Ample evidence in the literature emphasizes using socio-technical congruence (STC) to address coordination issues in distributed software development. The recent decades have shown a progressive growth in STC, resulting in an increasing number of research studies in the scientific corpora. However, no existing study has systematically analyzed and...

Gang of Four (GoF) design patterns are widely approved solutions for recurring software design problems, and their benefits to software quality are extensively studied. However, the occurrence of bad smells in design patterns increases the crisis of degenerating design patterns’ structure and behavior. Their occurrences are detrimental to the benef...

School leavers from the special education system have little knowledge of income generating skills. They may not be able to manage on their own; however, by working collectively with non-profit organisations (NPOs) in their local community, they can get assistance to generate income online. The objectives of this community project are: 1) to increa...

The demand for project success is increasing, while the number of failed projects are still high. Whilst Project Management Offices help in the governance of Information Technology projects, the trending issues and challenges in Agile projects need a great deal of attention. More organisations are embracing the agile method due to its popularity an...

Rapid increase in scholarly publications on the web has posed a new challenge to the researchers in finding highly relevant and important research articles associated with a particular area of interest. Even a highly relevant paper is sometimes missed especially for novice researchers due to lack of knowledge and experience in finding and accessing...

The demand for success in agile projects requires serious attention in addressing its issues and challenges, besides merely implementing suitable agile methods. A comprehensive number of factors have been discussed in the literature, but it does not reflect the crucial challenges confronted by the Information Technology industry. This study utilise...

The offline signatures are the most widely adopted biometric authentication techniques in banking systems, administrative and financial applications due to its simplicity and uniqueness. Several automated techniques have been developed to anticipate the genuineness of the offline signature. However, the recapitulate of the existing literature on ma...

Sign language is still the best communication mean between the deaf and hearing impaired citizens. Due to the advancements in technology, we are able to find various research attempts and efforts on Automatic Sign Language Recognition (ASLR) technology for many languages including the Arabic language. Such attempts have simplified and assisted the...

Software development outsourcing is becoming more and more famous because of the advantages like cost abatement, process enhancement, and coping with the scarcity of needed resources. Studies confirm that unfortunately a large proportion of the software development outsourcing projects fails to realize anticipated benefits. Investigations into the...

Researchers face difficulties in finding relevant papers to their research interest as the number of scientific publication is rapidly increasing on the web. Scientific paper recommenders have emerged as a leading solution to help researchers by automatically suggesting relevant and useful publications. Several approaches have been proposed on impr...

span>Evaluation in enterprise architecture (EA) project is crucial to provide comprehensive information of the developed EA artefacts. It may assist in accurate evaluation of implemented Information Systems (ISs) in order to realize the achievement of EA’s goals and support EA decision makers. This research aims to identify and elaborate the existi...

Software fault localisation (SFL) is recognised to be one of the most tedious, costly, and critical activities in program debugging. Due to the increase in software complexity, there is a huge interest in advanced SFL techniques that aid software engineers in locating program bugs. This interest paves a way to the existence of a large amount of lit...

Machine-Type Communication (MTC) plays an essential role in the mobile network society and it has demonstrated its effectiveness to generate significant revenues for mobile network operators. MTC has become the main communication paradigm for several emerging smart services, such as public safety, health-care, industrial automation, drones/robotics...

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) technologies are rapidly evolving the way we interact with computing devices and adapting to the constantly increasing demands of modern paradigms. One of the most useful tools in this regard is the integration of Human-to-Human Interaction gestures to facilitate communication and expressing ideas. Gesture recogniti...

Purpose E-learning is becoming mainstream due to its accessibility, state-of-the-art learning, training ease and cost effectiveness. However, the poor quality of e-learning systems is one of the major causes of several failures reported. Moreover, this arena lacks well-defined quality assessment measures. Hence, it is quite difficult to measure th...

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a holistic strategy that is commonly used to improve the alignment of enterprise’s business and Information Technology. Enterprise Architecture Implementation Methodology (EAIM) prepares a set of methods and practices for developing, managing, and maintaining an EA implementation project. There is ineffectiveness in...

Games with educational purposes usually follow a computer-assisted instruction concept that is predefined and rigid, offering no adaptability to each student. To overcome such problem, some ideas from Intelligent Tutoring Systems have been used in educational games such as teaching introductory programming. The objective of this study was to advanc...

Far-edge Analytics refers to the enablement of data mining algorithms in far-edge mobile devices that are part of Mobile Edge Cloud Computing (MECC) systems. Far-edge analytics enables data reduction in mobile environments, hence reducing the data transfer rate and bandwidth utilization cost for mobileedge communication. In addition, far-edge analy...

Measuring developer coordination is a fundamental challenge and complex task in software development organizations. One way used to conceptualize and measure developer coordination is known as 'Socio-Technical Congruence (STC)', which is fit between the coordination requirements established by the dependencies among tasks and the actual coordinatio...

In this research, a solution-based multi-agent system (SMAS) is proposed, which benefits from a novel automatic text-to-flowchart conversion approach in order to improve students' problem solving skills. The aim is to introduce the early stages of learning programming (CS1). By using SMAS, students can focus on solution designing activities in the...

Requirements Engineering (RE) is the most crucial process within software development projects. In order to prepare skilled requirements engineers, Requirements Engineering Education (REE) needs to be provided to students at the university level before they become software engineers and part of the workforce. However, RE is considered the most diff...

Evaluating Enterprise Architecture (EA) projects is crucial to providing comprehensive information of the developed EA artefacts and assisting with the accurate evaluation of implemented Information Systems (ISs) in order to realize the achievement of EA goals and support EA decision makers. EA evaluation involves assessing the appropriateness and...

The objective of inspection process is to reduce the cost by finding and removing defects earlier. In recent years, there have been a number of attempts to further increase inspection efficiency by the introduction of tool support and resulting in a number of prototype systems. However, many software engineers suffer from lack of background knowled...

With the recent paradigm shift towards Cloud computing and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Service selection and evolution have emerged as significant challenges for service integrators and maintainers. Service selection process involves both subjective and objective factors based on user feedback and performance assessment, along with inheren...

Enterprise Architecture (EA) implementation evaluation provides a set of methods and practices for evaluating the EA implementation artefacts within an EA implementation project. There are insufficient practices in existing EA evaluation models in terms of considering all EA functions and processes, using structured methods in developing EA impleme...

Coordination plays a significant role in Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) models. However, coordination varies between SDLC models. Relatively, little research has been conducted to analyze coordination in different SDLC models. This paper presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of coordination in different SDLC models. Among the range o...

In learning systems and environment research, intelligent tutoring and personalisation are considered the two most important factors. An Intelligent Tutoring System can serve as an effective tool to improve problem-solving skills by simulating a human tutor’s actions in implementing one-to-one adaptive and personalised teaching. Thus, in this resea...

Nowadays, intelligent tutoring systems are considered an effective research tool for learning systems and problem-solving skill improvement. Nonetheless, such individualized systems may cause students to lose learning motivation when interaction and timely guidance are lacking. In order to address this problem, a solution-based intelligent tutoring...

In software development, release planning is performed to select important features and requirements based on resource and technical constraints and the relationships between requirements. Release planning focuses on finding an optimal solution by seeking various states. This kind of solution finding reveals two remarks. First, it shows that there...

The first part of this chapter presents the results of a systematic literature review on Agile Software Development (ASD) challenges as are reported in implementation and adoption cases. The data only considers the concrete evidences of surfaced problems mainly according to work experience and case study articles. The results are analyzed so that t...

This paper presents a pilot Systematic Literature Review (SLR) study which examined the limitations of Agile methods in the software industry based on primary research. The study investigated IEEE conferences and journal papers published between 2007 and 2012. 29 papers were identified as the most relevant. While the SLR findings brought to light l...

The objective of inspection process is to reduce the cost by finding and removing defects earlier. In recent years, there have been a number of attempts to further increase inspection efficiency by the introduction of tool support and resulting in a number of prototype systems. However, many software engineers suffer from lack of background knowled...

Game-based learning is considered as a very motivational tool to accelerate active learning of students. As such learning environments usually follow a computer-assisted instruction concept that offers no adaptability to each student, some idea from Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) are borrowed and applied in educational games to teach introducto...

E-learning is becoming the new paradigm of learning and training, especially in Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) around the globe. HEIs in developing countries are struggling to shift to this new paradigm that would facilitate accommodating increasingly more learners in their own places and with their own time constraint choices. E-learning i...

This paper identifies high perceived-value requirements engineering (RE) practices specifically for outsourced software development projects. This is part of a study that aims to develop a framework for critical requirements engineering (RE) practices for outsourced software development projects. We used a survey questionnaire as the primary approa...

The adoption of Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Management (BPM) is fairly recent. The major concern is now shifting towards the maintenance and evolution of service-based business information systems. Moreover, these systems are highly dynamic and frequent changes are anticipated across multiple levels of abstraction. Impa...

The effect of education on children with autism serves as a relative cure for their deficits. As a result of this, they require special techniques to gain their attention and interest in learning as compared to typical children. Several studies have shown that these children are visual learners. In this study, we proposed a Visual Hybrid Developmen...

The goal of software process improvement (SPI) is to improve software processes and produce high-quality software, but the results of SPI efforts in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that develop software have been unsatisfactory. The objective of this study is to support the prolific and successful CMMI-based implementation of SPI in SMEs...

There is a misconception of what programming is at the early stages of learning programming for Computer Science (CS) minors. More researches in this field have revealed that the lack of problem-solving skills, which is considered as one of the prominent shortcomings that novices deal with, is exacerbated by language syntax that the novices employ....

Intelligent tutoring and personalization are considered as the two most important factors in the research of learning systems and environments. An effective tool that can be used to improve problem-solving ability is an Intelligent Tutoring System which is capable of mimicking a human tutor’s actions in implementing a one-to-one personalized and ad...

The goal of software process improvement (SPI) is to improve software processes and produce high-quality software, but the results of SPI efforts in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that develop software have been unsatisfactory. The objective of this study is to support the prolific and successful CMMI-based implementation of SPI in SMEs...

The increase in world population has led to a significant increase in food demand throughout the world, so agricultural policy makers in all countries try to estimate their annual food requirements in advance in order to provide food security for their people. In order to achieve this goal, this study developed a novel predictive model based on the...

From the time of early exploration in the area of programming languages, many tools have been employed to introduce novice programmers to programming. The most common tools entail flowchart-based notation as well as programming environments based on icons. More research in this field has revealed that the lack of problem-solving skills, which is co...

Context: Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a strategy to align business and Information Technology (IT) within an enterprise. EA is managed, developed, and maintained throughout the EA Implementation Methodology (EAIM). Objective: The aims of this study are to identify the existing effective practices that are used by existing EAIMs, identify the fac...

In this study a new approach was proposed to determine optimum parameters of a protective spur dike to mitigate scouring depth amount around existing main spur dikes. The studied parameters were angle of the protective spur dike relative to the flume wall, its length, and its distance from the main spur dikes, flow intensity, and the diameters of t...

This study presents a review of the current constraint handling strategies that are being employed in evolutionary computation. The strategies can be as simple as a reject strategy or as sophisticated as decoding or multi-objective approaches. In this study, however, only the prominent methods and previous works are considered. The Evolutionary alg...

In the early stages of learning computer programming, Computer Science (CS) minors share a misconception of what programming is. In order to address this problem, FMAS, a flowchart-based multi-agent system is developed to familiarize students who have no prior knowledge of programming, with the initial stages in learning programming. The aim is to...

Novice programmers have a misconception of what programming is in the early stages of learning programming. A Flowchart-based Programming Environment (FPE) is developed in this research with the aim of introducing the early stages of learning programming to clarify matters. An attempt is made to introduce the basic programming algorithms prior to s...

From the time of early exploration in the area of programming languages, many tools have been employed to introduce novice programmers to programming. The most common tools entail flowchart-based notation as well as iconic based programming environments. More research in this field has revealed that the deficiency in problem-solving skills, which i...

Agile Software Development has been around for more than a decade. Over this period, the focus of applications, problems and consequently research themes has been changed dramatically. However, the main efforts have been arguably yielded to employ agile development in large and distributed environments. This imposes sophisticated needs to deal with...

The outsourcing of software development processes has become a common practice in the IT market due to its reported benefits in terms of cost reduction, process improvement, and optimal resource usage. However, a considerable proportion of outsourcing projects fail to materialize the anticipated results. The failure reasons are often traced back to...

E-learning provides an effective way of learning. The purpose of e-learning is to facilitate learners by providing an efficient way using appropriate information and communication tool. This study explores the effects of e-learning on society including learners and trainees. Data is collected using questionnaire from students of Public Sector Unive...

Requirements Engineering (RE) is the most crucial process within software development projects. In order to prepare skilled requirements engineers, Requirements Engineering Education (REE) needs to be provided to students at the university level before they become software engineers and part of the workforce. However, RE is considered the most diff...

WebSTUIRE, presented in this paper, is a software engineering tool provided user interface requirements elicitation and specification with combining scenario-based approaches and prototyping approaches in a multi-user environment. The main idea of the approach is to elicit user interface requirements from UML interaction diagrams in order to genera...

The volume of software development outsourcing is growing enormously owing to the associated benefits of outsourcing and limitations of organizations. However, a large number of the projects outsourced for software development are failed to achieve anticipated results. In most of such cases, the reasons for failure are traced back to the Requiremen...

The discipline of requirements engineering (RE) is hard for students to understand and challenging for lecturers to teach due to its complex and theoretical nature. In the literature, researchers have presented a number of requirements engineering education (REE) problems in universities, as well as those RE problems in industry that can be address...