The software companies are practicing XP and Scrum models from last several years. XP lacks in management practices whereas Scrum is weak in engineering practices. Due to continually promising need of agile development, this research tackles the problems of XP and Scrum by integrating them to enrich the strengths of XP and Scrum and suppress their limitations. The previous attempts provide little effective empirical evidence regarding the integration of XP and Scrum. Therefore, there is a pressing need to provide empirical evidence for the integration of XP and Scrum to show its usefulness developing the software projects. The same is accomplished by proposing XScrum model. Another goal of this paper is to analyze the quality of proposed XScrum with existing XP and Scrum. The proposed XScrum is validated by performing three case studies for three industrial projects and the results are described in the paper. The results are presented using quantitative and qualitative data. The results provide empirical evidence that there is a significant improvement in quality of proposed XScrum as compared to the existing XP and Scrum.

Many design patterns are available in the existing literature. Due to the availability of the enormous quantity of design patterns, it is extremely hard for a developer to find the suitable design pattern to address the problem. An experienced developer can even face problem to select the appropriate pattern for a specific problem and it is no man's land for junior developers. This paper proposes a novel framework that will generate problem-related questions to a developer to find suitable design pattern using a repository. The answers to these questions can guide developers to select the suitable design patterns. This paper uses the questionnaire as a data collection instrument to conclude the results. The results are found supportive indicating that the proposed framework will solve the problem in hand.

IT companies are facing many difficulties and challenges when dealing with big data. These difficulties have surfaced due to the ever-expanding amount of data generated via personal computer, mobile devices, and social network sites. The significant increase in big data has created challenges for IT companies that need to extract necessary information and knowledge. Cloud computing, with its virtualized resources usage and dynamic scalability, is broadly used in organizations to address challenges related to big data and has an important influence on business in organizations. Furthermore, big data is changing the way organizations do business. This paper proposes novel cloud architecture to decrease problems related to big data. The proposed architecture is a combination of many big data infrastructures in the creation of a service. This architecture minimizes problems related to big data by improving performance and quality of service.

The increased demand of agile methods results in challenging and unique problems, one of which is the unsuitability of agile methods for software development companies, particularly those with multiple teams. Secondly, agile methods are silent regarding how to achieve long-term organizational goals within the umbrella of agile software engineering. Considering these software industry problems, a new contemporary learning-based adaptive framework is proposed in the domain of agile methods. The proposed framework will help software companies to achieve long-term organizational goals. It is anticipated that the proposed framework will increase employee satisfaction by improving their technical skills and interpersonal communication capabilities using contemporary learning and knowledge-sharing activities. A survey is conducted from multinational software companies to validate the proposed adaptive framework, and the results are notably supportive and encouraging.

Agile development gets more appreciation from the market due to its flexible nature and high productivity. Scrum provides better management of the processes as compared to other agile modes. Scrum model has several features and strengths but still it lacks in engineering practices and quality. This research deals with the improvement of Scrum processes for better management and quality of software using the infusion of different practices from internationally renowned capability maturity model integration (CMMI) quality standard. Survey is used as a research design to validate the proposed framework. Statistical analysis shows that there is a profound effect on Scrum model due to the proposed research developing high quality software.

Cloud computing as a new paradigm has grown from a promising idea to one of the fastest research and development paradigm in education sector. It is a hot research area that applies in all sectors where we require high performance and fast access to resources and services. Cloud computing usability in education is wide-ranging, as acknowledged by many educational institutions around the world. This paper attempts to address the need for utilizing cloud computing in higher education in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for all the disciplines to raise its level and solve the obstacles that faced the learning process. In addition, cloud computing facilitates educators and students to be more experienced in cloud computing and it prepares them to get benefits of usefulness to become more motivated and effective. Survey is used as a research design to validate the proposed solution. The results show that the proposal to improve higher education is highly supported by the professionals working in the industry and academia.

Scrum of scrums is an approach used to scale the traditional Scrum methodology to fit for the development of complex and large projects. However, scaling the roles of scrum members brought new challenges especially in distributed and large software projects. This paper describes in details the roles of each scrum member in scrum of scrum to propose a solution to use a dedicated product owner for a team and inclusion of sub-backlog. The main goal of the proposed solution is to optimize the role of product owner for distributed large projects. The proposed changes will increase cohesiveness among scrum teams and it will also eliminate duplication of work. Survey is used as a research design to evaluate the proposed solution. The results are found encouraging supporting the proposed solution. It is anticipated that the proposed solution will help the software companies to scale Scrum methodology effectively for large and complex software projects.

Software engineering (SE) field is considered as a backbone of software industry. Students suffer many problems and difficulties when they approach to industry due to the old contents of SE course, lack of practice and inability in the subject area. The main reason of the SE course problems is the lack of coordination or gap between software industry and academia. This paper proposed a novel solution to enhance SE curriculum to bridge the gap between industry and academia. The proposed solution will assist students at optimal level in their professional careers to achieve goals of SE course. Survey research methodology is used to evaluate the proposed solution and the results of data analysis are highly encouraging. It is anticipated that the universities will find this research helpful to improve the quality of SE course.

ERP systems projects have been spread widely across many organizations in general and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in particular. Regrettably, failures were the results for most of the ERP implementations. As a result of that, critical failure and success factors (CFFs & CSFs) have been identified with the help of large number of researches. Accordingly, data quality and user participation were categorized as two of the most critical factors that threaten the success of the ERP projects. In order to raise the success percentage of such projects, a data cleansing methodology and some guidelines for user participation have been proposed.

The level of complexity and risks associated with software are increasing exponentially because of competing environment especially in geographically distributed projects. Global software development (GSD) face challenges like distance, communication and coordination challenges. The coordination and communication challenges are the main causes of failure in GSD. Project Oriented Risk Management (PRORISK) is one of the models to address the importance of risk management and project management processes in standard software projects. However, existing model is not proposed to handle GSD associated risks. This warrants the proposal of new PRORISK model to manage the risks of GSD. Survey is used as a research design to validate the proposed solution. We anticipate that the proposed solution will help the software companies to cater the risks associated with GSD.

Many software development companies faced the challenge of coupling agile models and global software development in distributed projects. The challenges are related to the communication, management and control of the development process. These challenges emerged because global development involves developers from different geographical locations, time zones and with different cultures. Coupling agile models and global software development seems impossible at first glance, as they require frequent communications, rapid development, and resources management of distributed teams. However, researchers proposed several solutions and advices included tailoring of agile practices and addition of non-agile practices. Nevertheless, further efforts were needed to activate and unify these solutions. This paper introduces a new web based project management system for Scrum projects called global scrum management. It is a web application that manages Scrum process from planning phase to delivery of the last product increment. Moreover, the application features social networks functionalities to provide seamless communication, collaboration and knowledge transferring to the distributed team members. Also, developers' actions to the sprint tasks, including updating task status, will be reflected to the burn down charts of the sprint and product backlog instantly. Several diagrams are provided in this paper to explain the solution including UML diagrams.

Extreme programming is one of the commonly used agile methodologies in software development. It is very responsive to changing requirements even in the late phases of the project. However, quality activities in extreme programming phases are implemented sequentially along with the activities that work on the functional requirements. This reduces the agility to deliver increments continuously and makes an inverse relationship between quality and agility. Due to this relationship, extreme programming does not consume enough time on making extensive documentation and robust design. To overcome these issues, an enhanced extreme programming model is proposed. Enhanced extreme programming introduces parallelism in the activities' execution through putting quality activities into a separate execution line. In this way, the focus on delivering increments quickly is achieved without affecting the quality of the final output. In enhanced extreme programming, the quality concept is extended to include refinement of all phases of classical extreme programming and creating architectural design based on the refined design documents.

Mobile learning (M-learning) becomes revolutionary way to educate the world with the mass advancement in information and communications technology (ICT). It is difficult to deal with m-learning due to increasing number of users, services, education contents and resources and modes to deploy. Cloud computing, with its dynamic scalability and virtualized resources usage, is widely deployed for several applications in many organizations. It has a significant impact in the educational and learning environment. This paper presents a new model for mobile learning system in cloud computing environment that is enriched with high performance computing (HPC) and graphical processing unit (GPU) cluster infrastructure. This model aggregates the power with new technologies to implement M-leaning process more effective with high performance and quick response.

Global Software Development (GSD) is the most recent and major trend in software engineering domain. It provides many benefits but also faces various challenges in control, communication and coordination due to socio-cultural, geographical and temporal distance. Scrum is increasingly being applied in GSD as it supports teamwork between developers and customers. Scrum method offers a distinctive feature to mitigate the effects of socio-cultural and geographical but not temporal distance on coordination in GSD projects. This paper explains how Scrum helps to mitigate the effects of temporal distance that includes increased coordination costs in GSD projects.

Distributed system development (DSD) is implemented by distributed development teams that are separated by long distances and different time-zones. Communication between distributed development teams in distributed software development applies a major and critical role in the success of process. Conflicts between distributed teams bring high risks to fail a development project due to poor communication. Therefore, it is important for distributed teams to communicate effectively to complete a successful project. In this paper, the authors propose an improved solution for effective communication among distributed development team by integrating administrative and technical procedures to successfully complete a project. Survey is used as a research design to validate the proposed solution. The results show that the respondents support the proposed solution that it will solve the industry problem by providing an effective means of communication in a DSD environment.

Global software development (GSD) is one of the emerging areas of software engineering. Stakeholders are distributed located that brings into several challenges to coordinate and collaborate effectively. Scrum is one the widely practiced agile methodologies. Majority of the software development companies showed a great interest from last few years to apply Scrum methodology in distributed development to solve the coordination and communication problems. Although Scrum contains good features and strengths but still there are improvement possibilities to solve the problems of coordination and collaboration in GSD. Majority of software development companies face the problems of coordination and communication in GSD projects. This paper proposes a novel solution to mitigate the coordination and communication challenges of GSD projects. The survey is used as a research methodology to evaluate the proposed solution. The proposed solution is supported by 62.24%. We anticipate that the proposed solution will help the software development companies to mitigate the coordination and communication challenges of GSD projects.

Majority of the software development companies are practicing agile methods to develop high quality products. SCRUM is one of the most widely used agile methods. Capability maturity model integration (CMMI) is one of the quality standards for software companies. In this research, we propose an implementation of risk management with SCRUM in order to make it compatible with CMMI. We conducted a survey to validate the proposed solution. Questionnaire includes 20 questions that are divided into three goals. The proposed solution is validated through survey with support of 70.94%. We anticipate that the proposed solution will enable software companies to achieve CMMI and it will also improve the quality of software products.

This paper mainly studies the effect of design patterns on the Software maintainability. Design patterns describe solutions for common design problems and they were introduced to improve software quality and accelerate software development. However, there are some difficulties to choose an optimal pattern adapted to a certain application and problem. So until now the results on the effect of design patterns on software quality are controversial. In this context, we propose a tool for design pattern guided that retrieves the appropriate pattern with respect to software maintainability from a repository of patterns. It measures the maintainability of design pattern by some metrics and candidate the more maintainable pattern to the designer or developer. It provides a support for decision making during system design and refactoring. As the results, the decision of applying a certain design pattern is usually a trade-off since the effect of design pattern on software maintainability is influenced by some factors such as the pattern size and the prior expertise of the developer.

Global Software Development (GSD) is the most recent and major trend in software engineering domain. It provides many benefits but also faces various challenges in control, communication and coordination due to socio-cultural, geographical and temporal distance. Scrum is increasingly being applied in GSD as it supports teamwork between developers and customers. Scrum method offers a distinctive feature to mitigate the effects of socio-cultural and geographical but not temporal distance on coordination in GSD projects. This paper explains how Scrum helps to mitigate the effects of temporal distance which includes increased coordination costs in GSD projects. A web application called (Distributed Scrum Web Application) provides various advantages for Scrum teams. The main advantage of this application is to facilitate communication among distributed team members.

Component based software engineering (CBSE) approach is used to develop a software system from pre-existing software components. It is difficult to select a suitable component from the library of components for the problem of CBSE. Appropriate software component selection plays an important role for the success of project. Many approaches are suggested to solve component selection problem. In this paper, the component selection is done by improving the integrated component selection framework by including the pliability metric to cut down the time and cost. Pliability is a flexible measure that assesses software quality. We anticipate that the proposed solution will solve the component selection problem of software industry.

Global software development (GSD) is one of modern trends in software engineering. The last years has witnessed a significant increase in the adoption of Agile in GSD .This paper considers the issue by examining whether Scrum practices used in mitigation of temporal distance-based GSD coordination challenges. We were used Cisco TelePresence tool in Synchronization communication for simulation of face to face meetings. We were designed a simple algorithm to help project managers in determining the appropriate strategies. This algorithm is based on the temporal difference between the sites. This is may be great or simple. Through temporal difference, we calculated number of working hours overlapping. Which are classified in the three cases and each case has number of strategies are sufficient to overcome this challenges.

Knowledge is the primary strategic resource of many organizations. Knowledge management system (KMS) is a process of knowledge extraction, storage, transformation, analysis, distribution and deployment. Strategic alliance plays an increasing role to a global scale in technology business competition. Organizations are able to use alliances to respond to new technology and deliver new products more efficiently. The relationship between knowledge management and strategic alliance is identified. Knowledge transfer and selecting suitable partner are critical factors in the success of strategic alliance of an organization. In this paper, a novel framework is proposed for KMS strategic alliance. By applying this framework, strategic alliance will be highly achievable in corporate companies.

Component adaptation becomes a critical problem in component-based software engineering (CBSE). This problem appears during assembling and reusing of components into new system. The interoperability among components needs to use adaptation technique to solve this problem. Usually, there are mismatches between interfaces of reusable components. This research will focus on detecting fully semantic component interface mismatch by proposing a solution including return value match next to other match such as operation name, method of operation and parameter type match. This research just explains return value mismatch that are not considered in other solutions. The proposed solution also concerns about system performance that is neglected in previous solutions by proposing a ‘Detector’ tool that is responsible to assign and delete unwanted functions from reusable component before integration.

Programming companies in last decades have started to depend more and more on software components in developing their systems in order to save development time and increase the productivity of the company. However, this led to dramatically increase in the number of components, and selecting the appropriate component becomes a tough task. In this paper the authors propose an expert system to help developers choosing the best component fit their requirements. A survey is done to evaluate the efficiency of this proposed solution.

Reuse of existing software components is the main goal of Component-Based Software Engineering. Different organizations designed different web-services as the most famous type of component. Adaptation is a critical issue when building new applications by reusing existing services. How to adapt these services to work correctly is the main goal of most of the proposed models and techniques in software component filed. Behavioral mismatches are one of the adaptation problems. Different solutions have been written to address this problem like adapter and some other techniques. Most of the papers focused on how to create the adapter to overcome the incompatibility problem. In this paper, the authors provide a simple integrated tool that can solves ordering mismatching. The results are concluded using a survey from thirty one respondents. The proposed solution needs further validation by conducting a case study.

Software engineering starts to be less linked to the development, but at the same time it tends to rely on using the component-based software. The community interested in software engineering has proposed what is called software reuse and offered some ways for component-based software development. The basic difficulty encountered when designing component-based systems is the process of searching for and selecting the appropriate set of the current software components. Selecting a component is considered a hard task in the Component Based Software Engineering (referred to as CBSE), particularly with the augmentation of the number of the component development. Hence, it is hard to select component for CBSE. Different ways and approaches were suggested to solve the problem related to software component selection. Validation of the proposed solution in this paper through collecting a sample of people who answer an electronic survey that composed of 15 questions. An electronic survey target distributed to specialists in software engineering through social sites such as twitter and Facebook also by email them. The result of the validation of the proposed solution proved using a new improvement CBR system to do select the suitable component.

Adaptation software component is a crucial problem in component-based software engineering (CBSE). Components that assembled or reused sometimes cannot perfectly fit one another because of the incompatibility issues between them. The focus today is on finding adaptation technique, to solve the mismatch between component interfaces and to guarantee that the software components are able to interact in the right way. This paper will focus on detecting mismatch, which considers as an important step through adaptation process. We propose a solution to detect mismatch, by suggesting improvement in Symbolic Transition Systems that used in representing component interface, and synchronous vector algorithm to deal with parameters data type mismatch.

The need to accurately estimate time and cost for effective planning of software projects is becoming crucial driven by the escalating demands of the software market. Several models proposed in the history of Software Engineering discipline to estimate time, costs associated with planning and managing software projects as Line of Code (LOC), Function Point (FP) and Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO). This paper focuses upon the COCOMO Model. It is further consisted of its two sub models called COCOMO I and COCOMO II. The primary objective of this research is to use an appropriate case study to evaluate the accuracy of the sub models COCOMO I and II and ascertain the variation of the realistic resource effort, staff and time. The findings to date show that the Application Composition Model of COCOMO II is more accurate in determining time and cost for the successful conclusion of a software project than the other two COCOMO I and II Models for a similar application for example Task Manager.

Component-based technology can increase reuse and productivity, but high-quality component-based systems are often difficult to implement. Component developers do not know the systems where the components will be used, while software engineers must develop new systems with limited knowledge on available components. We propose a new testing technique that generates, at the time of component development, integration test cases from the specification of the behavior expected from other components of the system. The technique presented in this paper supports both the component developer, who can early test the integration of the components with the system, and the software engineers, who can test concrete components at deployment time, simply re-using existing test cases.
The technique presented in this paper supports both the component developer, who can early test the integration of the components with the system, and the software engineers, who can test components at deployment time. We used questionnaires to validate the proposed solution.

A large number of projects failed because of concentrating on developing new software. The Main drawbacks of new software development are more costly, and need maintenance. Reuse is solution of these problems that caused the widespread usage of object oriented (OO) development. Object oriented development is the backbone of component-based development (CBD). CBD facilitates reuse of the existing components (by customizing) with the new ones. Main advantages of reusable components are more reliable, saved time and reduced cost. CBD approach is different from traditional/new software development. Several models have been proposed for traditional software development such as Waterfall, Rapid Application Development (RAD), Evolutionary, Rational Unified Process (RUP) and agile. Whereas the popular CBD models, for customized development, are V, Y, Umbrella and W. Almost all software development companies, both the new software and customized software have to be developed. Therefore majority of the software development companies face problem to select and implement an appropriate process model for the both kinds of developments. To address this problem, the existing RUP and CBD models do work to some extent but the authors intend to propose an extended CBD model that it equally offers its benefits for new and customized developments. The experimental data is taken from a case study to develop IP Multimedia Sub System (IMS)-based examination application using iPhone to evaluate the proposed model. The results provide evidence that the extended CBD model can be equally beneficial for the development of both new and customization components for IMS-based applications.

Scrum model always welcome the new requirements from customer at any stage of software development. This situation creates problem for development team to meet estimated timelines. The Scrum development team is always under heavy workload and stress because of this situation. A high level of coordination among team members is required in order to overcome this work pressure and meet quality demands within estimated time and cost. Scrum model emphasis to coordinate through communication to cope with changing requirements. Scrum development is facing new challenges to meet high quality demands with critical timeline environment. The ability of a team to act intelligently in such situation is gaining key position for the survival and success of an organization. The goal of this paper is to highlight the role of implicit coordination helping the software development team members to act intelligently in time demand environment to achieve common goals. Implicit coordination among team members during sprint zero development can show significant improvement in team performance. This will help to achieve high quality product under heavy workload within estimated time period. A survey is conducted to validate the research i.e., implicit coordination has strong impact for successful implementation of Scrum methodology.

Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) are frequently used models among all agile models whereas Rational Unified Process (RUP) is one of the widely used conventional plan driven software development models. The agile and plan driven approaches both have their own strengths and weaknesses. Although RUP model has certain drawbacks, such as tendency to be over budgeted, slow in adaptation to rapidly changing requirements and reputation of being impractical for small and fast paced projects. XP model has certain drawbacks such as weak documentation and poor performance for medium and large development projects. XP has a concrete set of engineering practices that emphasizes on team work where managers, customers and developers are all equal partners in collaborative teams. Scrum is more concerned with the project management. It has seven practices namely Scrum Master, Scrum teams, Product Backlog, Sprint, Sprint Planning Meeting, Daily Scrum Meeting and Sprint Review. Keeping above mentioned context in view, this paper intends to propose a hybrid model naming SPRUP model by combining strengths of Scrum, XP and RUP by eliminating their weaknesses to produce high quality software. The proposed SPRUP model is validated through a controlled case study.

Scrum does not provide any direction about how to engineer a software product. The project team has to adopt suitable agile process model for the engineering of software. XP process model is mainly focused on engineering practices rather than management practices. The design of XP process makes it suitable for simple and small size projects and not appropriate for medium and large projects. A fine integration of management and engineering practices is desperately required to build quality product to make it valuable for customers. In this research a novel framework hybrid model is proposed to achieve this integration. The proposed hybrid model is actually an express version of Scrum model. It possesses features of engineering practices that are necessary to develop quality software as per customer requirements and company objectives. A case study is conducted to validate the proposal of hybrid model. The results of the case study reveal that proposed model is an improved version of XP and Scrum model.

This research is carried out to develop IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) based Mobile Mass Examination (MoMEx) System. MoMEx system is intended to improve on management of examination process for large number of examinees. IMS based application is considered to be the next generation mobile applications that enable developers to take advantage of mobile networks resources. IMS-based application is attributed with robustness and improved Quality of Experience (OoE) for mobile users. Such quality is needed to ensure users reliabilities on the system. In This paper, we cover the analysis and design phase of MoMEx system. We have designed set of questionnaires aimed to gathering insights how much the concept of mobile exam and assessment will be accepted among the students and faculty members. Based on the results obtained, we concluded the functional requirements of MoMEx system prior to implementation phase.

Software design is one of the most important and key activities in the system development life cycle (SDLC) phase that ensures the quality of software. Different key areas of design are very vital to be taken into consideration while designing software. Software design describes how the software system is decomposed and managed in smaller components. Object-oriented (OO) paradigm has facilitated software industry with more reliable and manageable software and its design. The quality of the software design can be measured through different metrics such as Chidamber and Kemerer (CK) design metrics, Mood Metrics & Lorenz and Kidd metrics. CK metrics is one of the oldest and most reliable metrics among all metrics available to software industry to evaluate OO design. This paper presents an evaluation of CK metrics to propose an improved CK design metrics values to reduce the defects during software design phase in software. This paper will also describe that whether a significant effect of any CK design metrics exists on total number of defects per module or not. This is achieved by conducting survey in two software development companies.

A new approach, to measure normalization completeness for conceptual model, is introduced using quantitative fuzzy functionality in this paper. We measure the normalization completeness of the conceptual model in two steps. In the first step, different normalization techniques are analyzed up to Boyce Codd Normal Form (BCNF) to find the current normal form of the relation. In the second step, fuzzy membership values are used to scale the normal form between 0 and 1. Case studies to explain schema transformation rules and measurements. Normalization completeness is measured by considering completeness attributes, preventing attributes of the functional dependencies and total number of attributes such as if the functional dependency is non-preventing then the attributes of that functional dependency are completeness attributes. The attributes of functional dependency which prevent to go to the next normal form are called preventing attributes.