Hadoop is a Java-based open source programming framework, which supports the processing and storage of large volumes of data sets in a distributed computing environment. On the other hand, an overwhelming majority of organizations are moving their big data processing and storing to the cloud to take advantage of cost reduction – the cloud eliminates the need for investing heavily in infrastructures, which may or may not be used by organizations. This paper shows how organizations can alleviate some of the obstacles faced when trying to make Hadoop run in the cloud.

With the increasing popularity of portable devices, web applications correspondence to usability guidelines becomes one of the key factors in user satisfaction and application success. Manual usability evaluation is time and resource consuming. Automated usability evaluation is a solution to overcome aforementioned problems. Existing solutions address the automated usability evaluation mostly during the testing phase of development. That introduces a delay between the moment when the code has been changed and the feedback developer receives, increasing the time and as a result the cost for defect to be fixed. This is a gap we are addressing with Guideliner -- evaluating the conformance of web UI to the set usability guidelines and providing feedback to the developer immediately after the UI has been modified.

The diversity of smartphones and tablet computers has become an integral part of modern life. An essential requirement for web application development is following web usability guidelines, while designing web user interface (UI). Even a minor change in UI could lead to usability problems. Empirical evaluation methods like interviews and questionnaires with user-tests and card sorting are effective in finding such problems. Nevertheless, there are multiple obstacles preventing the application of these methods especially for evaluating minor UI changes, for instance, due to the time and human-resources they require, and the amount of data to be processed. The purpose of this current publication is to present Guideliner – a tool for implementation-time automatic evaluation of web UI conformance to predefined usability guidelines. The main contribution of the presented solution is enabling immediate cost-efficient and automated web UI evaluation that conforms to available and set standards.

With the increasing popularity of portable devices, web applications correspondence to usability guidelines becomes one of the key factors in user satisfaction and application success. Manual usability evaluation is time and resource consuming. Automated usability evaluation is a solution to overcome aforementioned problems. Existing solutions address the automated usability evaluation mostly during the testing phase of development. That introduces a delay between the moment when the code has been changed and the feedback developer receives, increasing the time and as a result the cost for defect to be fixed. This is a gap we are addressing with Guideliner -- evaluating the conformance of web UI to the set usability guidelines and providing feedback to the developer immediately after the UI has been modified.

Cloud architectures are being used increasingly to support Big Data analytics by organizations that make ad hoc or routine use of the cloud in lieu of acquiring their own infrastructure. On the other hand, Hadoop has become the de-facto standard for storing and processing Big Data. It is hard to overstate how many advantages come with moving Hadoop into the cloud. The most important is scalability, meaning that the underlying infrastructure can be expanded or contracted according to the actual demand on resources. This paper presents a scalable Hadoop-based infrastructure for Big Data analytics, one that gets automatically adjusted if more computing power or storage capacity is needed. Adjustments are transparent to the users – the users seem to have nearly unlimited computation and storage resources.

The diversity of smartphones and tablet computers has become intrinsic part of modern life. Following usability guidelines while designing web user interface (UI) is an essential requirement for each web application. Even a minor change in UI could lead to usability problems, e.g. changing background or foreground colour of buttons could cause usability problems especially for people with disabilities. Empirical evaluation methods such as questionnaires and Card Sorting are effective in finding such problems. Nevertheless, these methods cannot be used widely when time, money and evaluators are scarce. The purpose of our work is to deliver a tool for design-time automatic evaluation of UI conformance to category-specific usability guidelines. The main contribution of this solution is enabling immediate cost-efficient and automatic web UI evaluation that conforms to available and set standards. This approach is being integrated into the Estonian eGovernment authority in order to automate usability evaluation of web applications.

The rapid development of the Internet and associated technologies for content delivery has led to a situation where the Web can be accessed on a multitude of different platforms - from desktop computers, laptops and tablets to smart-phones, which have become a crucial part of our lives, raising the question of usability on this plethora of devices. Testing and validating user experience (UX) throughout the whole development process is costly. However, some of this work done by humans could be executed automatically starting in early development. In this paper we address web user interface (UI) automatic evaluation and in particular discuss the ontology design for capturing knowledge of web usability domain for UI evaluation.

The developing of Estonian eGovernment components started approximately at the beginning of the century. In this article, we discuss our experience of how the main components of Estonian eGovernment are managed in this period. The administration system RIHA is developed for realizing this management. The objective of the RIHA is to guarantee the transparency of the administration of the state information system, planning for information administration and supporting the interoperability of databases of the state, local governments and persons in private law performing public duties.

Each day new applications are developed and extra features are added to the existing ones. This means establishment of new program code or introducing modifications to the existing code. To ease up new modifications, software design should be constantly improved to cope with the vast changes added. The quality of software architecture plays an important role, it determines the time to market new features, maintainability and extensibility of applications and readability of the source code. Sustaining overall quality of architecture requires refactoring phases for the design to cope with new changes, which also restores source code readability and extensibility. More experienced developers conduct code reviews in different phases of application development to pin point places that need improvements. Several code refactoring steps can be applied to source code, to recover maintainability and extensibility of it. Refactoring is playing an important role, not only in software development, but also in other fields. In this article the authors give an overview, what can be achieved by refactoring and point out some success stories. Several aspects of refactoring process are studied, and a refactoring strategy proposed.

The rapid development of information and communication technologies has made the Internet to become the main source of information, not to say a platform to share knowledge and information on a daily basis, consumed on various devices and platforms. This information consumption on the other hand produces data that can be used to measure user engagement into content and has been used for various purposes, e.g., for advertising and web personalization. The most common metric used has been click through rate. However, a simple click does not necessarily mean user engagement, although it can be one of the metrics applied. In this paper we focus on user engagement aspects and propose a framework to evaluate user engagement towards sites and provided web content. To demonstrate and prove the framework, we have conducted an extensive study on several websites in academic domain.

More and more web applications are being migrated from desktop platforms to platforms for smartphones and tablets. Usability and User experience are highly different on desktop and portable devices. Every minor modification of user interface (UI) could lead to violations of usability guidelines, e.g. changing the link color or font size could lead to lower usability for people with disabilities. Empirical usability evaluation methods are the approaches that help to verify the usability conformance to guidelines. Nevertheless, there are number of obstacles preventing from using such methods widely. The purpose of our study is to propose a conceptual model and corresponding framework with methodology including category specific metrics for immediate automatic usability evaluation of web application user interfaces during design and implementation phase. We address the gap between usability evaluation and development stage of UI by providing immediate feedback to developers.

More and more web applications are being migrated from desktop platforms to mobile platforms. User experience is extremely different on desktop and portable devices. Changes in user interfaces (UI) could lead to severe violations of usability rules, e.g. changing the text color could lead to decrease of accessibility for users with low vision or cognitive impairments. Manual usability inspection methods are the approaches that help to verify the usability conformance to guidelines. Nevertheless, there are number of difficulties why the aforementioned approaches could not be always applied. The purpose of our research is to develop a conceptual model and corresponding framework including category specific metrics with methodology for immediate automatic usability evaluation of web application user interfaces during design and implementation phase. We address the gap between usability evaluation and development stage of user interface by providing immediate feedback to UI developers.

Current paper attempts to identify and categorise the most prominent software development concepts at present time. To achieve that, we employed the method of text mining on weblogs written by software development practitioners. Large volume of text extracted from the most popular professional blogs provided basis for frequency analysis of relevant concepts. These concepts were then categorised using a recognised ontology of software development. The results of this study can be used for updating an existing software development ontology, for constructing checklists to be used by both technical specialists and inexperienced clients prior to starting a software project and, finally, for constructing relevant courses and trainings for non-technical clients.

The developing of Estonian eGovernment components started approximately 15 years ago. In this article, we discuss our experience how the main components of Estonian eGovernment like public key infrastructure, data exchange layer and governmental portal have developed and changed within this period. Estonian ID-card is the best representative of our public key infrastructure technology. The project X-Road realizes the idea of connecting all government information systems over the Internet. The governmental portal is the largest eServices provider in Estonia. All these systems are quite different from the first versions that appeared at the beginning of the century.

Software engineering has undergone a remarkable progress in more than 40 years. New technologies and methodologies are established ever faster, making the management of the latter a challenging task. This has also set high expectations on domain conception both on developers' and also on customers ordering software. Several factors play a crucial role in success of developing custom-made software, driving its success or postponing product release, or even invoking its disastrous failure. In this paper we propose an ontology to manage software engineering competences on a team and customer level. This ontology describes and organizes domain concepts and through it delivers essential domain knowledge. It is applicable in the process of detecting customer and team competences.

With the increasing popularity of portable devices and the variety of platforms for such devices web applications correspondence to critical user requirements becomes one of the key factors in user satisfaction and application success. More and more applications are being migrated from desktop to mobile platforms. Due to the different screen resolutions and device usage behavior, user experience can be extremely different on desktop and portable devices. Flexible and responsive frameworks, mobile development guidelines and best practices are the solutions that help to migrate smoothly from one platform to another. Nevertheless, these solutions mostly do not consider enough the migration of knowledge about the application structure and navigation to a new platform. The main focus of current research is on the effective reuse of user previous experience in the context of porting the same web application onto different platforms. Web application users mostly do not need to feel any difference between application usages on different devices; for them it should be smooth and intuitive. After using a web application on a desktop device, users should be able to reuse gained experience and knowledge on a new platform, i.e., mobile platform. In this paper we show how users accustom to the same web application on different platforms. Moreover, the results demonstrate that some users apprehend the difference of application user interfaces in a way that they do not have feeling of using the same web application. For the latter, user tests with eye tracking support were performed in order to analyse the process of accustoming to the new platforms. The paper also delivers solutions to the explicit problems of adaption of web applications user interfaces.