Vulnerabilities involved in the development of software with high usability are important to be recognized as it describes possible situations that may lead to usability risks that can lead to a loss or an undesirable outcome which could impact the usability of software. By attaining knowledge of usability vulnerabilities, user can understand their environment that possibly contributes to usability risks and influence development of software with high usability. The objective of this paper is to identify usability vulnerabilities which increases usability risk of software. Usability vulnerabilities can be described as weaknesses that are exercised or exploited during software process development. For this purpose, a literature review technique called Keyword-In-Context was used to identify usability vulnerabilities from the literature studies. Previously identified usability risks were used as keyword in identifying usability vulnerabilities. These usability vulnerabilities were grouped into four main categories: Institutional Context, Software Project Content, People and Action, and Development Processes which influence software development outcomes. The identified usability vulnerabilities were then validated by four experts from the field of software development and/or risk management. From these studies, a total of 88 validated usability vulnerabilities was identified from literature for 42 usability risks. Identification of usability vulnerabilities provides guidelines and knowledge to the development team on situations that contribute to usability risk that influences the development of high usability software. Any efforts to reduce vulnerabilities during software development process could lead to the development of high quality software especially from the aspect of usability.

Aiming effective information extraction from textual documents, an important task is the Cross-document Coreference Resolution (CCR) in which co-referring entity mentions are resolved across multiple documents. The task of CCR, consists of multiple processing stages in which each stage plays a critical role in the whole process. In this paper, an overview of the CCR approaches which comprised of different methods and techniques for supporting one or more of these processing stages is presented. The analysis of such approaches presents the dimensions of the CCR task and its related research area to figure out the possible path for the future.

Recently, software development industry is one of the most rapidly growing businesses and is considered as worthy economic activity of which the SMEs take the main role in such business.Somehow, most of SMEs cannot afford or successfully implement SPI framework like CMMI officially as a result of the financial requirements and difficulties associated to experience, effort and time constraints.The objective of this study is to present a study that investigates some alterative frameworks for SMEs, which take the advantage of CMMI model and agile approach.This study identifies the alternative frameworksʼ advantages and limitations through a literature review.Additionally, a general comparison is provided to show the gap in this study area with some recommendations as guidelines for development of SPI framework for SMEs, based on CMMI and agile methodologies.

1 Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics, UiTM (Melaka) Jasin Campus, 77300 Merlimau, Melaka, Malaysia. 2 Advanced Informatics School, Level 5, Menara Razak, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Jalan Sultan Yahya Petra (Jalan Semarak), 54100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 3 Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, UiTM, Kedah, 08400 Merbok, Kedah, Malaysia. 4 Faculty of Science Computer and Mathematic, Universiti Teknologi MARA, 40450 Shah Alam, Malaysia.

Software traceability is one of the key quality factors in software development. However, many developers are still not putting enough effort and priority on traceability. In order to verify and validate the completeness and consistency with the requirement, traceability is crucial. This study aims to evaluate the developed traceability model and to compare it with other traceability model with respect to their abilities to support the test management. For this evaluation, the DESMET method will be used, and a feature analysis of the models will be conducted. The evaluation shows that each of the models has some strengths and some weaknesses. Based on the evaluation, it was found that the proposed model meets its expectations to support the test management and its traceability has achieved some promising output and remarkable understanding compared to existing models.

Grounded theory is an approach that can be used to analyse qualitative data. It is a systematic approach for data collection, handling and analysis. The objective of this paper is to present adapted grounded theory approach as data analysis strategy to identify value-based factors in software development. The grounded theory procedure started with data extraction and initial coding, memo writing and constant comparative analysis and finally identification of core categories and writing memos. Initial data extracted were 74 which were obtained from 28 sources generally related with software development. After constant comparison and memoing, the valid data (value-based factors) were reduced to 33 with six core categories (classification of value-based factors).

Software process tailoring is an approach to customise the existing software development process or model that able to meet the software project's needs. Software development project is unique and identical from one and another whereby the practices and decision should not be equally treated. Software process tailoring requires knowledge and intuition to make decision such as factors involved in the software project, selection of the suitable software process elements and tailoring operations. Software process tailoring practices focusing more on project characteristics factors and employs ad hoc approach in making the decision. In the absent of value-based factors and systematic method in software process tailoring, subjectivity is embedded in decision making process and the software development project suffers from satisfying the stakeholder. This study presents an integrated approach to formulate a Value-Based Software Process Tailoring Framework (VBSPTF) to overcome this problem. The framework is a combination of value-based factors, MoSCoW rules, Quality Functional Deployment (QFD), Activity-Based Costing (ABC), Priority Map, Value Index and Value Graph. This study perhaps can contribute to the software process tailoring practitioners to be exposed with a systematic method to conduct software process tailoring as well as improving the practices and reducing subjectivity in decision making.

A regression method desires to fit the curve on a data set irrespective of outliers. This paper modifies the granular box regression approaches to deal with data sets with outliers. Each approach incorporates a three-stage procedure includes granular box configuration, outlier elimination, and linear regression analysis. The first stage investigates two objective functions each applies different penalty schemes on boxes or instances. The second stage investigates two methods of outlier elimination to, then, perform the linear regression in the third stage. The performance of the proposed granular box regressions are investigated in terms of: volume of boxes, insensitivity of boxes to outliers, elapsed time for box configuration, and error of regression. The proposed approach offers a better linear model, with smaller error, on the given data sets containing varieties of outlier rates. The investigation shows the superiority of applying penalty scheme on instances.

Requirement prioritization are considered crucial towards the development of successful and high quality software. Nowadays, most software development project and people in software industries are confronted with the challenge of implementing a large scale, complex and dynamic software applications. Hence, the need to use a requirement prioritization technique which able to deliver a right set of requirement seems very crucial. The available techniques still suffer from several weaknesses. This motivate us to identify comprehensively what are the limitations and future directions of the existing requirement prioritization techniques. In this study, we conducted an in-depth software engineering based Systematic Literature Review, as it helps to execute a thorough and fair literature review due to its predefined review protocol. We gathered a list of 55 requirement prioritization techniques and investigate the limitation and weaknesses each one of this technique. Findings from this study later will be used to design a new effective and efficient requirement prioritization technique.

Change impact is an important issue in software maintenance phase. As retesting is required over a software change, there is a need to keep track of software impact associated with changes. Even a small software change can ripple through to cause a large unintended impact elsewhere in the system that makes it difficult to identify the affected functionalities. The impact after changes demands for a special traceability approach. This paper presents a new approach and prototype tool, Hybrid Coverage Analysis Tool (HYCAT), as a proof of concept to support the software manager or maintainers to manage impact analysis and its related traceability before and after a change in any software artifact. The proposed approach was then evaluated using a case study, On-Board Automobile (OBA), and experimentation. The traceability output before and after changes were produced and analyzed to capture impact analysis. The results of the evaluation show that the proposed approach has achieved some promising output and remarkable understanding as compared to existing approaches.

In this study, formal MDA approaches for describing Semantic Web Services (SWS) are discussed. Although syntactic approach is used for fulfill the web service task, the main concentration of this study is on SWS. Basically, MDA approaches for SWS are divided into four categories such as software methodology based, UML formalist based, formal-based and query-based. Each of these SWS approaches uses OWL-S, SAWSDL, or WSMO to construct the SWS description. Therefore, each MDA approach is fully discussed to provide comprehensive overview on SWS technology.

Successful implementation of software projects are completely depending upon successful monitoring and controlling mechanism. The ignorance of monitoring and controlling mechanism by the project managers and the team members in a software projects development, leading to inadequate decision with fruitless outcomes. One of the ways to monitor the software projects is by looking at the performance of the elements that involved in a software project development. Development of metrics for each element in a software project development will lead the software projects to complete its objectives. This paper presents on formulation of Metric based Software Project Performance Monitoring Model which consists of metrics for each software project elements. Generally, this model will be a guideline for project managers to monitor and manage software projects especially in the perspectives of the public sectors.

Requirements prioritization is one of process in requirement engineering which aim to manage the order of urgency and implementation a set of requirements. Requirement prioritization also used in software development project to cope with the limited resources allocated. Many research have been done at industrial and academic level in this particular area. There are many techniques applied by using several approaches. However, the evaluation towards the effectiveness and efficiency of these available techniques still can be examined. There is a need to identify the approaches used and the evaluation performed towards these techniques. A comprehensive and systematic exploration to distinguish the state-of-the-art approaches been used to develop, as well as methods used to evaluate those prioritization techniques is planned. The plan is elaborated in detail within this paper by using the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) protocol. Initial finding for this planning phase for SLR is a collection of scrutinized and significant research literatures. The extracted data from these literatures later will be used to summarize state of the art approaches to develop techniques for prioritizing requirement. Additionally, findings about the evaluations strategy will serve as a basis for researcher's perception in planning their research. It also will benefited the practitioners to choose a high quality and evaluated techniques. Furthermore, the findings will be useful for the researcher and academician to discover the knowledge gap for their future research and contribution.

Ample of research has been carried out on the topic software metrics. Lots of metrics have been projected and validated in the field of software engineering especially for software development. However, metrics that related to software project management are still need to explore more especially from the industrial or practitioners. Identification of metrics for software project management may guide the project managers to manage and control the software projects. This is indirectly may reduce the software project failures in the industrial. This paper presents the processes and activities that used to identifying the performance criteria and the related metrics that can be used to monitor the performance of software projects. The aim of this paper is to identify the performance criteria and related metrics from the perspectives of practitioners. We carried out structured interview sessions among project managers from Malaysian Public Sector to accomplish this task. The results of this study are a set of performance criteria and metrics that can be a guideline to manage and control the software projects development towards to its success.

This paper aims at estimating the extant uranium by soft computing approach. The rising contribution of this resource in the energy cycle is the reason to this research. Untidy relations and uncertain values in geological data increase the complexity of estimating extant uranium, and thus it requires a proper approach. This paper applies artificial neural networks (ANNs), in both crisp and fuzzy concepts, with the exploit of genetic algorithms (GAs). Artificial neural networks (ANNs) trace the untidy relations even though under uncertain circumstances by fuzzy artificial neural networks (FANNs), where GAs can explore the best performance of these networks. We use the type-3 of FANNs against the conventional ANNs to reveal the results, where the Lilliefors and Pearson statistical tests validate them for two geological datasets. The results showed the type-3 of FANNs is preferred for desired outcome with uncertain values, while ANNs are unable to deliver this particular.

Customer satisfaction is a measure of how a company meets or surpasses customers' expectations. It is seen as a key element in business strategy; and therefore, enhancing the methods to evaluate the satisfactory level is worth studying. Collecting rich data to know the customers' opinion is often encapsulated in verbal forms, or linguistic terms, which requires proper approaches to process them. This paper proposes and investigates the application of fuzzy artificial neural networks (FANNs) to evaluate the level of customer satisfaction. Genetic algorithm (GA) and back-propagation algorithm (BP) adjust the fuzzy variables of FANN. To investigate the performances of GA- and BP-based FANNs, we compare the results of each algorithm in terms of obtained error on each alpha-cut of fuzzy values.

Web services composition is the act of combining several Web services in order to create a new service. The composition process includes planning service sequence, discovering services, selecting services and executing the plan. During service selection, it is important that the selected service not only meets the functionality of the required tasks, the selected service must also match the behavior of its client. This paper proposes an approach to test the interaction or choreography of the Web service by leveraging on transition rules that represent the behavior of the services. A Finite State Machine representation of the choreography is extracted using elements of the choreography. Test cases are then generated based on the Finite State Machine model using existing test generation approach.

Software process tailoring is the act of customising the existing software process to suit the specific software project. Current practices in software process tailoring consider project characteristics as the sole input to tailor the software process. In addition, it maintains the traditional approach whereby all the project characteristics factors are treated as being equally important. There is a need to shift the traditional software process tailoring approach to a value-centric approach by using a value-based software engineering concept. This study aims to propose a value-based software process tailoring framework to tailor the software process. A review was conducted to analyse the components embedded and input factors in the selected prior studies on software process tailoring. The framework proposed in this study uses value-based factors as input factors to tailor the software process. The framework also considers value prioritisation component, which rank the process elements according to value priority.

The software engineering domain has witnessed the emergence of the concept of Value-Based Software Engineering (VBSE), which intends to change conventional software engineering practices to become value-centric, and produce valuable products. However, there is an absence of a main list of value-based factors that focus on software development. This paper aims to investigate the value-based factors in the literature review which will be used to develop a value-based factors profile in software development. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method is adopted to systematically record the value-based factors that are utilised in the software development process. A total of 347 papers were extracted by using the defined key search. The extracted papers were further filtered according to the determined criteria. Twenty eight (28) final papers were then included for detailed assessment. The findings showed that 33 value-based factors are utilized in software development. These value-based factors can be classified into six main classifications, which are: success-critical stakeholder, resources, business strategy, organization, project and product. These findings can be used as a useful reference for software development teams to develop and produce value-centric software products, and can also be used to support other researchers in the software development process in the value-based software engineering domain.

Using the internet, as a dynamic environment thanks to its distributed characteristic, for web service deployment has become a crucial issue in QoS-driven service composition. An accurate adaption should be undertaken to provide a reliable service composition which enables the composited services are being executed appropriately. That is, the critical aspect of service composition is the proper execution of combination of web services while the appropriate service adaption performed with respect to predetermined functional and non-functional characteristics. In this paper, we attempts to deliberate the optimization approaches to devise the appropriate scheme for QoS-based composite web service selection.