Akram Salah’s research while affiliated with Cairo University and other places

Project management is important for the success of a software project. Enhancing software project management effectiveness measurements should lead the project manager to advance practices that contribute to the successful development of software projects. This study aims to enhance project management effectiveness measurements in the direction of increase the likelihood of software project success. An enhanced evaluation model of software project management effectiveness has been proposed in this study. Correspondingly, the model fed into a developed software project management effectiveness evaluation tool. This measurement tool helps software development managers to evaluate, monitor and improve project management effectiveness in software projects. The developed software project management effectiveness evaluation tool has been validated by a feedback survey. Feedback survey participants have been demonstrated the importance of the developed project management effectiveness measurement tool.

End-user feedback has an essential role in the requirement's identification, prioritization, and management of the software evolution process. Several approaches are proposed for utilizing user-pushed feedback collected from social media, forums, and review systems. The collected feedback via the online channels contains a variety of information. Thus, the researchers proposed analytical approaches to classify feedback according to the data it holds. Still, recent results indicate that no single classifier works best for all feedback types and information sources. Also, online feedback does not have a direct mapping to the requirements, and it does not contain user context data. This causes wasting in developers' effort in understanding and analyzing feedback. On the other hand, online feedback cannot be used to explore user satisfaction and acceptance of the implemented and planned requirements. Likewise, the developer cannot collect feedback from a specific segment of the users. To overcome the deficiency of online feedback, this paper proposes a novel approach that utilizes pulling feedback from users while using the software. The proposed approach consists of a model and process for structuring feedback requests, linking feedback to the requirements, embedding feedback with the user context information, specifying the target audience for the feedback request, analyzing collected feedback depending on predefined interpretation rules, which provide insights that support developers in release planning. The feedback request model and process are implemented by a tool called FeatureEcho which was evaluated in a software company by conducting a case study for upgrading a governmental internet portal. The results indicate that FeatureEcho is a valuable step towards increasing the understanding of the end-users needs which supports the decision-making procedure of software evolution.

Project management is vital for software project success. Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV), and other software project management models and practices established to assist software organizations, each of these models offers diverse focal points. Combined effective software project management practices remain a challenge to software organizations. In striving to raise the likelihood of software project success, this paper introduces a framework for software project management effectiveness which integrated a set of software project management practices based on the PMBOK guide processes, CMMI-DEV processes, and management areas that influence a software project. The proposed framework called 4PTRB which includes people, process, product, project, technology, risk, and business management areas. The 4PTRB software project management framework provides a whole comprehensive view to help software project managers to improve their project management effectiveness. The framework is validated by conducting a web-based survey of software professional practitioners around the world. A statistical analysis of twenty software projects has been conducted as a case study thereafter, spanning small to large development projects. The consistency of the case study and survey results shows the power of the 4PTRB framework as an inclusive software project management framework.