Software Engineering Commons^™

Role Of Requirements Engineering In Software Project’S Success, Sujatha Alla

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Despite considerable time and resources spent on the initiation phase of software projects, discrepancies often exist between formal project documentation, customer requirements, and final project specifications. Such discrepancies in the requirements management process can have a very negative impact on final project outcomes. A Business Requirements Document (BRD) constitutes the formal software requirements documentation, which typically includes stakeholders’ needs and expectations and project scope while providing a clear project roadmap and project plan. According to IEEE standards, a BRD should be a structured document that includes specific elements such as functional and technical requirements while incorporating certain traits such as …

Careermapper: An Automated Resume Evaluation Tool, Vivian Lai, Kyong Jin Shim, Richard J. Oentaryo, Philips K. Prasetyo, Casey Vu, Ee-Peng Lim, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The advent of the Web brought about major changes in the way people search for jobs and companies look for suitable candidates. As more employers and recruitment firms turn to the Web for job candidate search, an increasing number of people turn to the Web for uploading and creating their online resumes. Resumes are often the first source of information about candidates and also the first item of evaluation in candidate selection. Thus, it is imperative that resumes are complete, free of errors and well-organized. We present an automated resume evaluation tool called 'CareerMapper'. Our tool is designed to conduct …

Code Metrics For Predicting Risk Levels Of Android Applications, Akond A. Rahman

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Android applications pose security and privacy risks for end-users. Early prediction of risk levels that are associated with Android applications can help Android developers is releasing less risky applications to end-users. Researchers have showed how code metrics can be used as early predictors of failure prone software components. Whether or not code metrics can be used to predict risk levels of Android applications requires systematic exploration. The goal of this paper is to aid Android application developers in assessing the risk associated with developed Android applications by identifying code metrics that can be used as predictors to predict two levels …

Fusing Wifi And Video Sensing For Accurate Group Detection In Indoor Spaces, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Zaman Lantra, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Understanding one's group context in indoor spaces is useful for many reasons - e.g., at a shopping mall, knowing a customer's group context can help in offering context-specific incentives, or estimating taxi demand for customers exiting the mall. Group detection and monitoring using WiFi-based indoor location traces fails when users are invisible (either because they don't carry smartphones, or because their WiFi is turned OFF) or when location tracking is inaccurate. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal group detection system that fuses two independent modes: video and WiFi, for detecting groups with low latency and high accuracy. We present …

Demo: Smartwatch Based Shopping Gesture Recognition, Meeralakshmi Radhakrishnan, Sharanya Eswaran, Sougata Sen, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Archan Misra, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the current retail segment, the retail store owners are keen to understand the browsing behavior and purchase pattern of the shoppers inside the physical stores. Profiling the behavior of the shopper is key to success for any marketing strategies that can optimize or personalize shopping-related services in real-time. We envision that exploiting the knowledge of real-time behavior of shopper’s in-store activities enables novel applications such as: (a) targeted advertising or recommendations: based on longer term shopper profiles, (b) proactive retail help to assist the shoppers who are confused in choosing between two items, (c) smart reminders that can remind …

Iris: Tapping Wearable Sensing To Capture In-Store Retail Insights On Shoppers, Meera Radhakrishnan, Sharanya Eswaran, Archan Misra, Deepthi Chander, Koustuv Dasgupta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We investigate the possibility of using a combination of a smartphone and a smartwatch, carried by a shopper, to get insights into the shopper’s behavior inside a retail store. The proposed IRIS framework uses standard locomotive and gestural micro-activities as building blocks to define novel composite features that help classify different facets of a shopper’s interaction/experience with individual items, as well as attributes of the overall shopping episode or the store. Besides defining such novel features, IRIS builds a novel segmentation algorithm, which partitions the duration of an entire shopping episode into atomic item-level interactions, by using a combination of …

Gone In 200 Milliseconds: The Challenge Of Blocking Malvertising, Catherine Dwyer, Ameet Kanguri

Student and Faculty Research Days

Online advertising is a multi-billion dollar global industry that lets advertisers serve ads to specific customers of interest as they browse the web. Using real time bidding (RTB), as web visitors land on a site, advertising networks are alerted of space available and whatever profile information can be gleaned about the visitor. Ad networks then auction this combination of space and profile through ad exchanges, and the winning bid's ad content is served to the web visitor. The entire process, from a visitor landing on a publisher's page to ads being auctioned, takes 200 milliseconds--the time needed to snap your …

Automatically Defined Templates For Improved Prediction Of Non-Stationary, Nonlinear Time Series In Genetic Programming, David Moskowitz

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Soft methods of artificial intelligence are often used in the prediction of non-deterministic time series that cannot be modeled using standard econometric methods. These series, such as occur in finance, often undergo changes to their underlying data generation process resulting in inaccurate approximations or requiring additional human judgment and input in the process, hindering the potential for automated solutions.

Genetic programming (GP) is a class of nature-inspired algorithms that aims to evolve a population of computer programs to solve a target problem. GP has been applied to time series prediction in finance and other domains. However, most GP-based approaches to …

Design, Programming, And User-Experience, Kaila G. Manca

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis is a culmination of my individualized major in Human-Computer Interaction. As such, it showcases my knowledge of design, computer engineering, user-experience research, and puts into practice my background in psychology, com- munications, and neuroscience.

I provided full-service design and development for a web application to be used by the Digital Media and Design Department and their students.This process involved several iterations of user-experience research, testing, concepting, branding and strategy, ideation, and design. It lead to two products.

The first product is full-scale development and optimization of the web appli- cation.The web application adheres to best practices. It was …

Maximizing Lifetime In Clustered Wsns With Energy Harvesting Relay: Profiling And Modeling, Pengfei Zhang, Hwee-Pink Tan, Gaoxi Xiao, Yi Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Inspired by clustering and energy harvesting techniques, we study multiple-cluster wireless sensor networks with energy harvesting (EH) sensors serving as relay for cluster heads. In this paper, we derive the model for realistic energy harvesting rate. Then we propose distributed matching algorithm for EHs to serve as relay for CHs. The proposed algorithm could find optimal/near-optimal CH-EH matching in short time and still achieve good performance. We evaluate the performance of our method through theoretical analysis as well as simulation.

Learning By Doing - Energy Systems Management, Nima Shahriari, Adrian V. Gheorghe

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Climate change concerns have confronted energy policy makers by unprecedented challenges in the 21st century. Revolution of renewable energy technologies, as well as more efficient energy systems, has been promising in the context of global warming. However, these technologies are not maturing and chaning. Consequently planning for development of these resources requires dealing with various multidisciplinary research questions such as financial feasibility of renewable energy projects. Nevertheless, there is considerable lack of education programs offering multidisciplinary approach for addressing the current energy challenges. Based on the 21st evolving energy landscape, an interdisciplinary graduate certificate course work was designed at Old …

Mydeal: A Mobile Shopping Assistant Matching User Preferences To Promotions, Kartik Muralidharan, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang, Narayan Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A common problem in large urban cities is the huge number of retail options available. In response, a number of shopping assistance applications have been created for mobile phones. However, these applications mostly allow users to know where stores are or find promotions on specific items. What is missing is a system that factors in a user's shopping preferences and automatically tells them which stores are of their interest. The key challenge in this system is twofold; 1) building a matching algorithm that can combine user preferences with fairly unstructured deals and store information to generate a final rank ordered …

An Ecological Model For Digital Platforms Maintenance And Evolution, Paolo Rocchi, Paolo Spagnoletti, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The maintenance of software products has been studied extensively in both software engineering and management information systems. Such studies are mainly focused on the activities that take place prior to starting the maintenance phase. Their contribution is either related to the improvement of software quality or to validating contingency models for reducing maintenance efforts. The continuous maintenance philosophy suggests to shift the attention within the maintenance phase for better coping with the evolutionary trajectories of digital platforms. In this paper, we examine the maintenance process of a digital platform from the perspective of the software vendor. Based on our empirical …

Exploring Variety Seeking Behavior In Mobile Users, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Robert J. Kauffman, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Understanding the personality traits and current attitudes of individual consumers is crucial for retailers and mobile advertisers. In this paper, we investigate the phenomenon of “variety seeking tendencies" in mobile users in their (1) online (represented by their App usage behavior), and (2) physical (represented by their location visits) worlds. We show that different categories of users exhibit different levels of variety. Further, by analyzing at various time scales, we show that there exists correlation between when a person is likely to visit new places in the real world and when he/she is likely to explore new Apps in the …

The Learning Curves In Open-Source Software (Oss) Development Network, Youngsoo Kim, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We examine the learning curves of individual software developers in Open-Source Software (OSS) Development. We collected the dataset of multi-year code change histories from the repositories for five open source software projects involving more than 100 developers. We build and estimate regression models to assess individual developers' learning progress (in reducing the likelihood they may make a bug). Our estimation results show that developer's coding experience does not decrease bug ratios while cumulative bug-fixing experience leads to learning progress. The results may have implications and provoke future research on project management about allocating resources on tasks that add new code …

Does Latitude Hurt While Longitude Kills? Geographical And Temporal Separation In A Large Scale Software Development Project, Patrick Wagstrom, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed software development allows firms to leverage cost advantages and place work near centers of competency. This distribution comes at a cost -- distributed teams face challenges from differing cultures, skill levels, and a lack of shared working hours. In this paper we examine whether and how geographic and temporal separation in a large scale distributed software development influences developer interactions. We mine the work item trackers for a large commercial software project with a globally distributed development team. We examine both the time to respond and the propensity of individuals to respond and find that when taken together, geographic …

Handling Location Uncertainty In Event Driven Experimentation, Kartik Muralidharan, Srinivasan Seshan, Narayan Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The wide spread use of smart phones has ushered in a wave of context-based advertising services that operate on pre-defined user events. A prime example is Location Based Advertising. What is missing though, is the ability to experiment with these services under varying event conditions with real users using their regular phones in real-world environments. Such experiments provide greater insight into user needs for and responsiveness towards context-based advertising applications. However, these event-driven experiments rely on data that arrive from sources such as mobile sensors which have inherent uncertainties associated with them. This effects the interpretation of the outcome of …

Cameo: A Middleware For Mobile Advertisement Delivery, Azeem J. Khan, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Dongsu Han, Archan Misra, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Srinivasan Seshan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Advertisements are the de-facto currency of the Internet with many popular applications (e.g. Angry Birds) and online services (e.g., YouTube) relying on advertisement generated revenue. However, the current economic models and mechanisms for mobile advertising are fundamentally not sustainable and far from ideal. In particular, as we show, applications which use mobile advertising are capable of using significant amounts of a mobile users' critical resources without being controlled or held accountable. This paper seeks to redress this situation by enabling advertisement supported applications to become significantly more "user-friendly". To this end, we present the design and implementation of CAMEO, a …

Communication Artifacts And Interaction Evaluation For Requirements Engineering, Miloslava Plachkinova

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This paper aims to answer an important question regarding the development of new information systems (IS): "What is the predominant factor for the selection of communication artifacts for requirements engineering (RE)?". Many researchers have focused on the RE and communication as separate disciplines, but little or no research addressed the RE communication issues. These problems are important because they often lead to misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the gathered requirements. We develop expectations about the RE communication process based on prior literature from both disciplines and we test them through several case studies. Our methodology consists of analysis of six case …

Senior Project Report - Doctest, Stephen Weessies

Computer Engineering

DocTest is a program that, simply put, allows a programmer or user to document STANAG 4586 (a standard for unmanned aerial vehicle interoperability) messages and test the vehicle system at Lockheed Martin [5]. The program is extensible to allow for further development aiding our software team to do what they do best and not get bogged down in tedious but necessary documentation. DocTest is also used to aid in testing, keeping track of the issues and bugs found and creating a document that captures each issue so an issue is not missed or forgotten. This program was made for use …

Mydeal: The Context-Aware Urban Shopping Assistant, Kartik Muralidharan, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang, Narayan Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A common problem in large Urban cities, of the sort seen in Asia, is the huge number of retail options available in the city. In particular, it is not uncommon to find multiple malls, each with hundreds of stores inside, just a short distance from each other in almost every part of these cities. These factors make it incredibly hard for consumers to identify stores of interest to them in any particular mall.In response, a number of shopping assistance applications have been created for mobile phones.However, these applications mostly just allow users to know which stores are where or to …

Deployment Evaluation Of Accounting Information Systems In Libyan Commercial Banks, Omar Sharkasi, Martin George Wynn

The African Journal of Information Systems

This article reports on the recent implementation and current deployment of accounting information systems in Libyan commercial banks. A case study approach is adopted that moves from an initial screening of the 14 main Libyan banks to a final in-depth study of just three banks. Business process modeling and systems profiling are used to assess the status of the banks in terms of systems use, process change and information systems strategy development. Libyan banks are well advanced in their installation of modern packaged software but could be used to greater effect to optimize business processes and improve efficiencies. Training and …

Towards Evaluating The Quality Of A Spreadsheet: The Case Of The Analytical Spreadsheet Model, Thomas A. Grossman Jr., Vijay Mehrotra, J Sander

Business Analytics and Information Systems

We consider the challenge of creating guidelines to evaluate the quality of a spreadsheet model. We suggest four principles. First, state the domain—the spreadsheets to which the guidelines apply. Second, distinguish between the process by which a spreadsheet is constructed from the resulting spreadsheet artifact. Third, guidelines should be written in terms of the artifact, independent of the process. Fourth, the meaning of “quality” must be defined. We illustrate these principles with an example. We define the domain of “analytical spreadsheet models”, which are used in business, finance, engineering, and science. We propose for discussion a framework and terminology for …

Spreadsheets Grow Up: Three Spreadsheet Engineering Methodologies For Large Financial Planning Models, Thomas A. Grossman Jr., O Ozluk

Business Analytics and Information Systems

Many large financial planning models are written in a spreadsheet programming language (usually Microsoft Excel) and deployed as a spreadsheet application. Three groups, FAST Alliance, Operis Group, and BPM Analytics (under the name “Spreadsheet Standards Review Board”) have independently promulgated standardized processes for efficiently building such models. These spreadsheet engineering methodologies provide detailed guidance on design, construction process, and quality control. We summarize and compare these methodologies. They share many design practices, and standardized, mechanistic procedures to construct spreadsheets. We learned that a written book or standards document is by itself insufficient to understand a methodology. These methodologies represent a …

Eliciting User Requirements Using Appreciative Inquiry, Carol Kernitzki Gonzales

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Many software development projects fail because they do not meet the needs of users, are over-budget, and abandoned. To address this problem, the user requirements elicitation process was modified based on principles of Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative Inquiry, commonly used in organizational development, aims to build organizations, processes, or systems based on success stories using a hopeful vision for an ideal future. Spanning five studies, Appreciative Inquiry was evaluated for its effectiveness with eliciting user requirements. In the first two cases, it was compared with traditional approaches with end-users and proxy-users. The third study was a quasi-experiment comparing the use of …

Software Engineering: Security Characterization For Evaluation Of Software Architectures Using Atam, Asad Raza, Haider Abbas, Louise Yngstrom, Ahmed Hemani

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Significant technological advancement in the current electronic era has influenced the work processes of private and government business entities. E-Government is one such area where almost every country is emphasizing and automating their work processes. Software architecture is the integral constituent of any software system with not only cumbersome modeling and development but require heedful evaluation. Considering this aspect we have highlighted in this paper, security evaluation of an ongoing e-society project ESAM using Architectural Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM). ESAM is a Web based system intended to provide e-services to the Swedish community residents. ATAM is primarily used for architectural …

Software Engineering: An Open Source Service Oriented Mobile Business Intelligence Tool (Mbit), Bushra Sajjad, A. Mir, A. Khawar, F. Bashir, A. Tariq

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Corporate executives require relevant and intelligent business information in real-time to take strategic decisions. They require the freedom to access this information anywhere and anytime. There is a need to extend this functionality beyond the office and on the fingertips of the decision makers. Mobile Business Intelligence Tool (MBIT) aims to provide these features in a flexible and cost-efficient manner. This paper describes the detailed architecture of MBIT to overcome the limitations of existing mobile business intelligence tools. Further, a detailed implementation framework is presented to realize the design. This research highlights the benefits of using service oriented architecture to …

The Lookup Technique To Replace Nested-If Formulas In Spreadsheet Programming, Thomas A. Grossman Jr., O Ozluk, J Gustavson

Business Analytics and Information Systems

Spreadsheet programmers often implement contingent logic using a nested-IF formula even though this technique is difficult to test and audit and is believed to be risky. We interpret the programming of contingent logic in spreadsheets in the context of traditional computer programming. We investigate the “lookup technique” as an alternative to nested-IF formulas, describe its benefits for testing and auditing, and define its limitations. The lookup technique employs four distinct principles: 1) make logical tests visible; 2) make outcomes visible; 3) make logical structure visible; and 4) replace a multi-function nested-IF formula with a single-function lookup formula. It can be …

Software Nightmares, Manoj Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To err is human, but to really foul things up, you need a computer. So states the remarkably insightful Murphy’s Law. And nowhere else does this ring truer than in our financial workplace. After all, it is the financial sector that drove the rapid progress in the computing industry – which is why the first computing giant had the word “business” in its name. The financial industry keeps up with the developments in the computer industry for one simple reason. Stronger computers and smarter programs mean more money — a concept we readily grasp. As we use the latest and …

A Primer On Spreadsheet Analytics, Thomas A. Grossman Jr.

Business Analytics and Information Systems

This paper provides guidance to an analyst who wants to extract insight from a spreadsheet model. It discusses the terminology of spreadsheet analytics, how to prepare a spreadsheet model for analysis, and a hierarchy of analytical techniques. These techniques include sensitivity analysis, tornado charts, and backsolving (or goal-seeking). This paper presents native-Excel approaches for automating these techniques, and discusses add-ins that are even more efficient. Spreadsheet optimization and spreadsheet Monte Carlo simulation are briefly discussed. The paper concludes by calling for empirical research, and describing desired features spreadsheet sensitivity analysis and spreadsheet optimization add-ins.