Global Software Development

The purpose of this study is to identify the effect of work overload on Job Satisfaction and effect of job satisfaction on employee performance and employee engagement. Literature supported the relationship between work overload and Job satisfaction, the relationship of job satisfaction with employees' performance and employee engagement. To measure this, data was collected with the help of questionnaires. The questionnaires distributed among the sample size of 207 employees of Public Sector University of Gujranwala Division including teaching faculty and non teaching staff. Data was analyzed by using SPSS software. This study revealed the relationship of work overload on job satisfaction of the employee which is most important thing of any organization. This study provided further guidance to organization for making strategies to cope with these prevailing. So this study is important to overcome the problem of work overload which affects the job satisfaction which ultimately affects employee performance and employee engagement.

Employee motivation is very important in organizations because it is basically the practice on which outcome depends. Motivated and committed employees are more innovative and often come up with creative ideas. Such employees become more engaged and involved and contribute in growth of organization. They may change the market conditions with positive actions. This paper was determined to explore the link between employee motivation, commitment, engagement and job involvement. For this study sample of 200 faculty members were selected from University of Gujrat. Questionnaire was used for the data collection. Data was analysed using s SPSS. Based on statistical result postulated hypotheses H1, H2 and H3 were accepted. Employee motivation is positively related to Employee commitment, Job involvement and Employee engagement. This paper discussed the implications of these findings on employee motivation, commitment, engagement and job involvement.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to quantify the impact of office design and reward system on the performance and motivation of the employees in banks both public and private sector of Gujrat. Office design such as lightening, furniture, noise, temperature etc and both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards are affecting the motivational and performance of employees. Design / Methodology / Approach: For data collection questionnaire method will be used. Questionnaire will be distributed among the respondents from the selected banks and SPSS will be used for data processing finding correlation and multiple regression analysis. Finding- Research Limitations: This study was conducted in district Gujrat only so there are chances that result may vary while moving to other geographical locations. Gujrat district is basically a smaller location where background of mostly workers is not well developed so priorities related to work environment many vary for them so in generalizing the results ...

Cloud-based infrastructure has been increasingly adopted by the industry in distributed software development (DSD) environments. Its proponents claim that its several benefits include reduced cost, increased speed and greater productivity in software development. Empirical evaluations, however, are in the nascent stage of examining both the benefits and the risks of cloud-based infrastructure. The objective of this paper is to identify potential benefits and risks of using cloud in a DSD project conducted by teams based in Helsinki and Madrid. A cross-case qualitative analysis is performed based on focus groups conducted at the Helsinki and Madrid sites. Participants' observations are used to supplement the analysis. The results of the analysis indicated that the main benefits of using cloud are rapid development, continuous integration, cost savings, code sharing, and faster ramp-up. The key risks determined by the project are dependencies, unavailability of access to the cloud, code commitment and integration, technical debt, and additional support costs. The results revealed that if such environments are not planned and set up carefully, the benefits of using cloud in DSD projects might be overshadowed by the risks associated with it.

Global software development -which is characterized by teams separated by physical distance and/or time-zone differences -has traditionally posed significant communication challenges. Often these have caused delays in completing tasks, or created misalignment across sites leading to rework. In recent years, however, a new breed of development environments with rich collaboration features have emerged to facilitate cross-site work in distributed projects. In this paper we revisit the question "does distance matter?" in the context of IBM Jazz Platform -a state-of-theart collaborative development environment. We study the ecosystem of a large distributed team of around 300 members across 35 physical locations, which uses the Jazz platform for agile development. Our results indicate that while there is a delay in communication due to geographic separation, teams try to reduce the impact of delays by having a large percentage of work distributed within same/few time zones and working beyond regular office hours to interact with distributed teams. We observe different communication patterns depending on the roles of the team members, with component leads and project managers having a significantly higher overhead than development team members. We discuss the practical implications of our findings in terms of some best practices that can help lessen the impact of distance.

In a global software development project, distributed teams need to have a consistent view of the system even in the face of frequently changing requirements. Thus how precisely requirements and changes therein are communicated to remote developers becomes a critical issue. In this position paper, we hypothesize that a test-driven methodology may help keep development across multiple sites consistent with changing requirements and with each other.

Teaching distributed software development (DSD) in project courses where student teams are geographically distributed promises several benefits. One main benefit is that in contrast to traditional classroom courses, students can experience the effects of distribution and the mechanisms for coping with distribution by themselves, therefore understanding their relevance for software development. They can thus learn to take more care of distribution challenges and risks when starting to develop software in industry. However, providing a sustainable environment for such project courses is difficult. A development environment is needed that can connect to different distributed teams and an ongoing routine to conduct such courses needs to be established. This article sketches a picture of the Software Factory, a platform that supports teaching distributed student projects and that has now been operational for more than three years. We describe the basic steps of conducting Software Factory projects, and portray experiences from past factory projects. In addition, we provide a short overview of related approaches and future activities.

Cloud-based infrastructure has been increasingly adopted by the industry in distributed software development (DSD) environments. Its proponents claim that its several benefits include reduced cost, increased speed and greater productivity in software development. Empirical evaluations, however, are in the nascent stage of examining both the benefits and the risks of cloud-based infrastructure. The objective of this paper is to identify potential benefits and risks of using cloud in a DSD project conducted by teams based in Helsinki and Madrid. A cross-case qualitative analysis is performed based on focus groups conducted at the Helsinki and Madrid sites. Participants' observations are used to supplement the analysis. The results of the analysis indicated that the main benefits of using cloud are rapid development, continuous integration, cost savings, code sharing, and faster ramp-up. The key risks determined by the project are dependencies, unavailability of access to the cloud, code commitment and integration, technical debt, and additional support costs. The results revealed that if such environments are not planned and set up carefully, the benefits of using cloud in DSD projects might be overshadowed by the risks associated with it.

The adoption of Global Software Development (GSD) models by software development companies is growing continuously. A variety of challenges such as temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distance are hindering global organizations to achieve potential benefits. As a result, organizations need support in how to overcome the challenges. The emphasis in the literature to date has typically focused on overcoming the challenges by providing tool support, management guidelines and processes. This follows the assumption that a well-established and validated process results in high quality output, not taking the actors within the process into account. While recognized as an important factor for successful GSD, actors and their competences have been addressed from an organizational perspective focusing on organizational and team capabilities rather than from an individual perspective. In this article, we present the results of a literature review on competence-related challenges and competency related research for GSD. We extend existing GSD process models with functions of competence management. The resulting competence-based view allows the management of individual competences throughout the entire GSD process.

The adoption of Global Software Development (GSD) models by software development companies is growing continuously. A variety of challenges such as temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distance are hindering global organizations to achieve potential benefits. As a result, organizations need support in how to overcome the challenges. The emphasis in the literature to date has typically focused on overcoming the challenges by providing tool support, management guidelines and processes. This follows the assumption that a well-established and validated process results in high quality output, not taking the actors within the process into account. While recognized as an important factor for successful GSD, actors and their competences have been addressed from an organizational perspective focusing on organizational and team capabilities rather than from an individual perspective. In this article, we present the results of a literature review on competence-related challenges and competency related research for GSD. We extend existing GSD process models with functions of competence management. The resulting competence-based view allows the management of individual competences throughout the entire GSD process.

The global software development poses several challenges in software engineering, particularly in the elicitation stage, owing to the problems of communication and coordination which are caused when teams are geographically distributed. For a successful requirements elicitation in a global development environment, it is necessary to rely on professionals who are capable of confronting the challenges that arise in this environments such as: cultural differences, distributed communication and coordination. In order to develop in software engineers the skills suitable to face these challenges it is first necessary to discover which competencies or skills they should have or develop. In this work we describe an analysis carried out with this goal, therefore we propose a list of competencies desirable by a requirements elicitation specialist, which have been obtained from a review of the related literature. We also comment on certain useful strategies in the teaching of these competencies and propose the usage of a simulation environment for their development.

High student drop out and failure rates in entry-level computer science (CS) courses have contributed to a lower number of qualified CS graduates nationwide. Among various underlying causes that lead to this phenomenon, several unsatisfactory behavioral traits have been identified in CS students, including lack of motivation and combativeness towards the opinions of peers. Many CS educators have attempted to address these problems by developing learning tools to increase students' motivation through engaging educational activities. An alternative, and possibly better, solution is to combine learning activities with social activities to create an engaging learning environment that foster collaboration among student peers. In this work, we experiment with this idea by developing a peer review system as an integral component of an online social network that features many of the collaborative features found in popular websites, such as Facebook. Results from controlled experiments a...

This position paper addresses the usefulness (or otherwise) of the Software Engineering Body of knowledge (SWEBOK) version 3 for software practitioners in industry, and the consequent need for the SWEBOK to evolve to better address current industry practice. The position taken in this paper is that agile and lean methods are now the predominant approach to software engineering, and that the limited and anachronistic coverage of agile methods in the SWEBOK, coupled with the absence of any acknowledgement of lean approaches, is undermining software engineering education, the career prospects of graduates, and the software industry as a whole. It is therefore proposed that the agile methods section of the SWEBOK is revised and expanded such that it provides a valid body of knowledge for contemporary software engineering

Studies have shown that offshore development of software projects is not without its challenges, as development teams try to make sense of the organisational artefacts sent to them from distributed sites. These challenges are associated with; lack of implicit knowledge related to the client's functional work processes, inadequate coordination and control mechanisms, and lack of trust across dissimilarities. This paper describes how a vendor's organisational structures have been used to overcome the struggle associated with knowledge sharing in a virtual environment. The vendor has developed workgroup structures involving new boundary roles for building relationships with clients and coordination of project schedules at offshore development sites. Vendor employees located at the client country interpret the implicit knowledge related to the client's functional work processes, which are then translated over a centralised organisational portal to offshore development locations. Regular updates are maintained in the organisational portal to provide information on current project tasks to both clients and distributed team members. English language training is also provided to developers to improve trans-global communications.

Offshore outsourcing across the world has triggered a new social structure in the way global businesses operate, resulting in emerging virtual social spaces between clients and vendors. These social structures involve understanding of cultural connections over space and time through telecommunication networks, as knowledge intensive tasks are being realized across national boundaries. Clients and vendors belonging to diverse cultures are required to take measures to build trust in relationships for sustained professional success. This paper looks at the trust building practice and experience of four small and medium sized software vendor organizations based in New Zealand and India. The case study data reveals how vendors are sensitized to client apprehensions in sharing knowledge across virtual social spaces. Some practices identified are face-to-face communication to bring visibility of social cue codes, documentation as a common thread of control, international accreditations to ...

This research aims to explore optimal strategies for fortified software, enhancing the implementation of secure software development practices. Software security involves crafting and designing software that guarantees the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of its code, data, and functionalities. Often, in prioritizing functionality, security takes a back seat when organizations embark on system development. Yet, it's imperative to embed security at every phase of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Numerous methodologies and models exist for addressing software security, but only a few substantiate creating secure software applications effectively. Despite advancements, software security remains inadequately addressed, posing a challenge to integrating security protocols into the SDLC seamlessly. This review advocates specific security measures to be integrated at each SDLC level, fostering a secure SDLC. Efficient amalgamation of these processes ensures the d...

Modern software development faces unprecedented complexity with distributed teams, AI-assisted coding tools, and increasingly modular architectures. Yet the foundational technical decisions that shape systems are often made implicitly or lost in transient discussions, leading to misalignment and architectural drift. We propose *Decision-Driven Software Engineering (DDSE)*, a new software development life cycle (SDLC) that centers on explicitly capturing, evolving, and operationalizing technical decisions as first-class artifacts. In DDSE, layered **Technical Decision Records (TDRs)** – including Architectural Decision Records (ADRs), Engineering Decision Records (EDRs), Implementation Decision Records (IDRs), Trade-off Decision Matrices (TDMs), and Major Design Decisions (MDDs) – provide a structured knowledge base of *why* and *how* key technical choices are made. We describe how DDSE integrates with AI-assisted development workflows, ensuring that generative AI coding assistants and automation tools work *within* the guardrails of recorded decisions rather than against them. The DDSE model is iterative and responsive like Agile, but introduces distinct control structures and alignment mechanisms focused on decision management. We position DDSE relative to Agile principles and highlight how explicit decision artifacts improve traceability, cross-team alignment, and architectural governance without reverting to big up-front design. A hypothetical workflow demonstrates DDSE in practice, incorporating emerging tools such as AI-enabled IDE assistants, continuous integration (CI) conformance checks, auto-prompting agents, and decision-aware CI/CD pipelines. We provide practical guidelines and heuristics for adopting DDSE – including roles, lightweight documentation practices, and cultural considerations – and discuss the benefits of reduced architectural drift and improved transparency alongside challenges like potential overhead and required mindset shifts. The paper concludes that DDSE offers a timely framework to harness AI’s power while maintaining technical integrity, positioning it as a candidate for the next evolution of software engineering methodology.

Assessing software engineering course projects should evaluate the achievement of proposed goals, as well as the compliance with mandated standards and processes. This might require the examination of a significant volume of materials, following a consistent, repetitive and effective procedure, even for small projects. Quality assurance must be performed according to similar requirements. This paper discusses the use of quality audits, a comprehensive quality assurance procedure, as a tool for the assessment of course projects.

Agile Software Development (ASD) has several limitations concerning its requirements engineering activities. Improving the quality of Software Requirements Specifications (SRSs) in ASD may help to gain a competitive advantage in the software industry. Based on the findings of a systematic mapping study, six industrial case studies in different contexts were conducted to investigate and characterize the requirements specification activity in ASD. Data collected from documents, observations, and interviews with software engineers were triangulated, analyzed, and synthesized using Grounded Theory and Meta-Ethnography. The analysis and cross-synthesis of the six case studies resulted in a model describing the phenomenon. This model defines the simplicity and objectivity as essential quality factors of SRSs in ASD. The main factors that affect the SRSs quality in ASD projects are related to their customer-driven nature that leads to prolix SRSs, hindering its understanding from the developer perspective. The emerged model is supported by explanations and provides a deeper understanding of the requirements specification activity in ASD. This creates opportunities for further studies and improvements in SRSs for ASD in industry.

This research paper investigated the awareness, the use and factors hindering the adoption of web 2.0 tools for academic knowledge creation and sharing in higher learning institutions in Tanzania. Structured questionnaires were used to collect data from the targeted respondents (i.e. lecturers and students). Findings from the study revealed that majority of both students and lecturers are very much aware of the different web 2.0 tools, however the academic use of web 2.0 tools is still very limited as opposed to developed nations. This implies that adoption and use of web 2.0 tools still have a long journey before holding its ground in higher learning institutions in Tanzania. Factors hindering the adoption and educational use of web 2.0 tools were established in the study whereby the critical issue identified was the lack of institutional support and strategies to use web 2.0 tools among the stakeholders. It was therefore recommended that institutions formulate policies and strategies that will guide and support the adoption and uses of web 2.0 tools in the higher learning environment because both students and lecturers were very much interested to learn and adopt web 2.0 tools for education use.

This article examines how commitment among individuals involved in a short term, virtual team projects influence the quality of the project outcome. Results indicate that forced and habitual commitment types had a negative impact on virtual team project quality but found no evidence of the hypothesized positive influences of affective, normative or economic commitment. Findings suggest that commitment in virtual teams, particularly those virtual teams that engage in short term projects, may not exert the influence observed in co-located teams involved in longer duration projects. Further, forced and habitual commitment may actually be destructive. As such, the findings of this study suggest that for project quality to be achieved, other forces may be necessary.

Global Software Development (GSD) involves multiple sites which comprise of different cultures and time zones apart from geographical locations. It is a common software development approach adopted to achieve competitiveness. However, due to multiple challenges it can result in misunderstandings and rework. Rework raises the chance of project failure by delaying the project and increasing the estimated budget. The aim of this study is to identify and categorize the rework causes to reduce its frequency in GSD. To identify the empirical literature related to causes of rework, we performed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). A total of 23 studies are included as a result of final inclusion. The empirical literature from the year 2009 to 2020 is searched. The overall identified causes of rework in GSD are categorized into 6 major categories which are communication, Requirement Management (RM), roles of stakeholders, product development/integration issues, documentation issues, and differences among stakeholders. The most reported rework causes are related to the category of communication & coordination and RM. Moreover, an industrial survey is conducted to validate the identified rework causes and their mitigation practices from practitioners. This study will help practitioners and researchers in addressing the identified causes and therefore reduce the chances of rework.

takeholders are the backbone of any organization and play a vital role in the completion of any product. Different stakeholders with different roles, skills, natures, and experiences are involved throughout the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Unlike other phases of SDLC, Requirement Engineering (RE) requires more stakeholders, active participation, focus, and collaboration. However, stakeholder involvement makes the RE phase more difficult and impacts other phases of Software Development. The inherent complexity of the RE phase is due to numerous factors, including diverse skill sets, language disparities, comprehension issues, and lack of interest, thereby rendering it particularly challenging for stakeholders. Literature also highlights some practices to resolve these issues, like enhancing communication and building trust among team members to overcome these challenges, but still, all these challenges affect software development in one way or another, and lead projects toward failure.

Global software outsourcing (GSO) is the outsourcing of software development to sub-contractors outside the client organisation’s home country. India remains the unquestioned leader, registering average annual growth of more than 40% over the last decade and developing some US$3.6bn-worth of software for foreign clients in 1999/2000 (Heeks, 2000). Advice for potential GSO clients counsels starting small, starting at home, and starting with programmers (McFarlan, 1996). Many client organisations have followed this advice, putting a toe into the GSO waters through small-scale body shopping: for example, having Indian sub-contractor staff come over to the client site to complete a minor, non-critical piece of coding/conversion work.

Software is created for and with a wide range of stakeholders, from customers to management, from value-added providers to customer service personnel. These stakeholders work with teams of software engineers to develop and evolve software systems that support their activities. All of these people and their interactions are central to software development. Thus, it is crucial to investigate the dynamic and frequently changing Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE), both before and after deployment, in order to understand current software practices, processes, and tools. In turn, this enables us to design tools and support mechanisms that improve software creation, software maintenance, and customer communication. Researchers and practitioners have long recognized the need to investigate these aspects, however, their articles are scattered across conferences and communities. This workshop will provide a unified forum for discussing high quality research studies, models, methods, and tools for human and cooperative aspects of software engineering. This will be the 8 th in a series of workshops, which continue to be a meeting place for the academic, industrial, and practitioner communities interested in this area, and will give opportunities to present and discuss works-in-progress.

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In order to meet the communication, coordination and control requirements of distributed Global Software Development (GSD) teams, it is necessary to define a proper software architecture. Designing a GSD architecture, however, involves a multitude of design decisions that are related in different ways. As such, it is not trivial for the architect to design a system that meets the different GSD concerns. To assist the architect in designing a suitable GSD architecture we propose the tool framework Global Architect. The tool framework is based on a common meta-model for GSD and a question framework, which includes a predefined set of questions that are related to abstract design rules for designing GSD systems. Based on the answers provided to the questions of the question framework, the tool automatically selects and instantiates the necessary rules and generates the GSD architecture. Global Architect has been applied to design the GSD architecture for a real industrial project of Cybersoft, a leading GSD company in Turkey.

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Effective communication and coordination across multiple sites is extremely important for global software development. An experimental simula- tion that mimics an interdependent software divi- sion working across multiple locations was designed to study this phenomenon. Six experi- ments were run, each with participants divided into four or five sites depending on the availabil- ity of participants. We found that simulated

Este trabalho apresenta o levantamento aerofotogramétrico de uma propriedade rural em Martinópolis, São Paulo, utilizando um drone DJI Air 2S e pontos de controle ajustados com GNSS RTK, para fins de georreferenciamento de acordo com a Lei 10.267/01 e as normas do SIGEF. O projeto, apoiado pelo Ministério do Desenvolvimento Agrário (MDA) e em colaboração com a Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC), visa auxiliar na regularização fundiária e ambiental de agricultores familiares, contribuindo para o desenvolvimento sustentável da propriedade. Os resultados demonstram a alta qualidade do levantamento, com GSD de 5,1 cm. O Modelo Digital do Terreno (MDT) permitiu a obtenção precisa da altura de vértices do tipo V, incluindo elementos artificiais (cercas, muros, estradas) e naturais (corpos d'água, linhas de cumeada). Os produtos gerados, como o ortomosaico e o MDT, são ferramentas importantes para o planejamento do uso do solo, gestão ambiental e segurança jurídica da propriedade.

This paper describes an innovative study undertaken in an undergraduate capstone software engineering course to give students exposure to the realities of global software development. In this study, students from Pace University in New York worked as part of an extended team with students from the Institute of Technology of Cambodia, developing software for Cambodian customers. This paper explains the goals of the study, describes the teams and their projects, and emphasizes the required logistics for a study of this nature. The findings are discussed, and some lessons for computer science education and global software development are provided. The paper finishes with a brief account of our continuing work in the area.

This paper describes lessons from running software development projects across three globally distributed educational institutions. What was innovative about this study was that two of the institutions were located in service providing countries, conventional onshore/offshore roles were reversed, and students were exposed to the realities of global supply chain management. Three teams of US students were tasked to develop three different software products for Cambodian clients, while subcontracting the database component to third-party teams of Indian students. This paper details the role of the three institutions, the prerequisites for planning and logistics for running such educational projects, and summarises the findings, while drawing broader parallels with the commercial world of offshore and outsourced development. It ends with recommendations for software engineering education to better reflect the needs and skills demanded of right sourcing in the global marketplace. These extend more generally to global software engineering.

This paper reflects upon three years of experience of running Global Software Development projects for students distributed across three countries. The paper focuses almost exclusively on the instructors' perspective of such projects and articulates the various Project Management concerns that instructors from the participating institutions need to consider and agree upon to both collaborate on such an international initiative and to run the constituent student projects. Each decision made has implications for instructor workload, institutional relationships and the kind of pedagogical experience that students will receive. The paper uses the Project Management Body of Knowledge as a framework through which to delineate the concerns and types of decision that need to be taken, to explain some of the challenges we faced and strategies we developed to overcome them. The paper seeks to provide guidance to other instructors who are considering the Global Software Development path for their student Software Engineering projects, based upon our experiences of uniting over one hundred students and seven instructors, and suggests critical questions that need to be examined a priori to any such new effort.

Framework: Management of the software development project changes daily and increases day to day. Major benefits that attract firms to develop software some are a reduction on cost, delivery time reduction, the quality improvement well definition of the process, resource allocation and improvement in documentation. However, several problems have been documented in different methods of software development projects. But these problems can be solved by the use of agile practices. SCRUM is an agile methodology used to manage and control work during the development stages. The present documentation presents the comprehensive outward look of the effectiveness of scrum in the management of software development projects. This research aimed at exploring the extent to which this method is more effective than other methods. The focus of this paper is on the effectiveness of the stated method in accordance with real-life examples. In the scope of the dissertation investigation has been done on the effectiveness of the scrum methodology in the management of a software development project. Investigation of other project management challenges faced, different scrum practices used by organizations in software development. Moreover, benefits achieved and challenges faced during the implementation of the method in the organizations in order to address the management challenges of software development projects. Methods: literature review was carried out to understand different managerial problems in software development projects and how scrum methodology is being used to overwhelm the issues. The research was conducted using semi-structured interviews with ten managers from ten different software organizations and an online survey with sixty (60) participants. Collected data from the literature was analyzed using qualitative data analysis technique. MS Excel and IBM statistical tool SPSS was used in the input of data and its analysis. Quantitative data collected from 200 participants have been analyzed using statistical tools, the inclusion of the SPSS software Results: By a result of the study, the effectiveness of SCRUM practices was identified. Seemingly, the challenges of the SCRUM inclusion was highlighted. The used quantitative analysis offered accurate and ideal results that were meaningful in drawing conclusions concerning the SCRUM application.

Software quality has been an important issue since long. There are lots of disciplines related to the quality of software but we have focused towards the defect prevention for outsourcing projects. Nowadays, quality is considered to be the most important aspect which has direct impact on success of the software product. Significant research pertaining to quality of the software and its methodologies has been done earlier. Nevertheless, defect prevention is the key aspect to achieve quality of a product. Many organizations outsource their projects and as a result the quality issues arose. A number of quality models, metrics and standards have been development for the software to run on standalone and distributed environment. However, the issue of quality for the outsourced projects particularly for the projects which are partially outsourced still needs further research. In this paper, we propose a framework for effective monitoring the software quality for both fully and partially o...

Bottom of the pyramid Business Process Outsourcing -Information Technology Enabled Services CCK Communications Commission of Kenya EIA Environmental impact assessment EOI Expression of interest FTE Full-time employment/full-time equivalent GoK Government of Kenya IBM International Business Machines IEA Institute of Economic Affairs IS Impact sourcing KNBS Kenya National Bureau of Statistics KES Kenya Shillings KICTB Kenya ICT Board KIHS Kenya Integrated Household survey KKV Kazi Kwa Vijana MSA Mombasa MSE Medium and small enterprises MTP Medium-term plan NBI Nairobi NHIF National Hospital Insurance Fund NSSF National Social Security Fund PS Permanent Secretary SAP System Analysis and Programme Development (German company) SEZ Special economic zones TIVET Technical, industrial and vocational education training UNDP United Nations Development Programme USD United States Dollars

Dedico este trabalho a meus pais José e Leonor por sempre ter acreditado, apoiado e conduzido sem medir esforços, por me dar amor, exemplo e cuidar de minha educação sempre. iii Agradecimentos Aprendi, mais do que posso imaginar, sobre muitas coisas da vida ao realizar o mestrado. Essas coisas não cabem neste documento, mas nele estão registrados parte desse aprendizado e meus profundos agradecimentos: Agradeço primeiro a Deus por sempre me acompanhar e me proteger, me dando forças nos momentos difíceis da vida e a meus pais José e Leonor por me permitir e me dar à oportunidade de demonstrar-lhes que tudo é possível nesta vida através de esforço e dedicação, eles sempre me deram exemplo, ajuda e o apoio para que eu crescera como profissional e como ser humano. Um agradecimento especial ao meu Orientador o Prof. Dr. Sergio Takeo Kofuji por toda a sua dedicação, apoio, entusiasmo, capacidade intelectual, disponibilidade e por confiar em mim. Foram fatores importantes para que este trabalho de mestrado se realizasse. Agradeço também aos membros da banca de mestrado, pela paciência em ler meu trabalho e pelas suas valiosas sugestões e comentários. Agradeço ao grupo PAD, do LSI, da Escola Politécnica da USP por seu companheirismo e amizade. À equipe de HumanLab do Grupo PAD por seu apoio em tudo momento. Um agradecimento os meus irmãos Duberly e Lizbeth que sempre estiveram comigo em todos meus passos neste projeto, por seu apoio espiritual e moral muito importante para meu desempenho. Agradeço a meu querido esposo Edwar por participar de mais uma jornada a meu lado, passamos por bons momentos e também por momentos difíceis durante o mestrado. Graças a ele, os momentos difíceis foram enfrentados com sabedoria e os bons momentos foram comemorados com muita alegria. E um agradecimento especial a todas aquelas pessoas que deram seu apoio incondicional com seu tempo, seu conhecimento e sua experiência. Nos últimos anos, o volume de dados e de informações disponíveis pelas RSSF cresceu consideravelmente por ser uma tecnologia que permite o desenvolvimento de aplicações em diversos tipos de ambientes (pervasivos, ubíquos, ambientes controlados e de difícil acesso), fazendo com que a preocupação em gerenciar esse conteúdo se tornasse maior. Dentre as propostas apresentadas, um grande número utiliza ontologias como forma de organizar e categorizar dados; existem duas questões chaves na gerência de dados nas redes de sensores sem fio: o armazenamento de dados e o processamento da consulta. O presente trabalho propõe uma abordagem semântica para o gerenciamento dos dados dinâmicos e estáticos da rede, oferecendo um serviço de metadados sobre as RSSF e suas aplicações; esta técnica baseia-se na construção de ontologias que permitem escalabilidade, incremento de eficiência das atividades do ambiente e reusabilidade. Verificou-se mediante testes realizados baseados em consultas sobre a ontologia que o modelo proposto é apropriado, e que a busca baseada em semântica resulta na obtenção de dados das RSSF de forma mais adequada, quanto comparada com as abordagens tradicionais. Palavras chaves: redes de sensores sem fio, semântica, ontologias, conhecimento, computação pervasiva.

A number of companies have employed Global Software Development (GSD) methodology as a useful tool for their software development practices. GSD is a contractual relationship between client and vendor organizations in which a client outsources all or some part of its software development activities to a vendor. The vendor in return provides the agreed services in lieu of certain amount of remuneration. The main reasons to select the GSD technique include reduced cost, faster development and access to skilled manpower. Though GSD is emerging as an effective technique, but it suffers from many challenges like poor communication, lack of trust and coordination. These challenges pose serious risk to the smooth execution of the GSD projects. In this paper, we present a comparative study on GSD to highlight its merits and demerits. Our findings reveal that much of the research in this area has been focused on addressing issues faced by client organizations, however, vendor side in the GSD relationship is much ignored due to which this area is still immature; and, hence, further research work is required to be undertaken to address the issues faced by the vendor organizations.

Localisation action can be defined as a social action conducted by social “agents” to create a “Glocal” (global and local), market by producing creative, remarkable products and services with technology in a way that is socio-culturally appropriate for a locale and presenting these products and services to glocal circulation. Since localisation is a multilayered, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary phenomenon that extends to different fields from translation to marketing, from technology to sociology, from commerce to creativity, the field of localisation is a dynamic, ever-changing and transforming field that is in a hurry to keep up-to-date.
This thesis aims to describe the field by examining the roles, functions, positions, transformations, conversions and investments of localisation actants from the lens of the Sociology of Translation by consulting Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Bourdieu’s Field Theory, and their respective concepts of “actors”, “actants”, “networks”, “forms of capital”, and “conversion”.
The fieldwork consists of three phases: The Interview Phase, The Questionnaire Phase, and The Micro-Scaled Qualitative Corpus Phase consisting of job postings that posted on the LinkedIn network in the period between November 2023 and April 2024.
Within the scope of the thesis, it has been determined that the agents in the localisation field prioritise 4 types of skill sets, namely linguistic competence,techn(olog)ical competence, communicative competence and creativity. Furthermore, actants, networks, capitals and investments within the localisation network are in a constant state of changes and conversions. These findings are the best indicators that the localisation network is a social and 'living' network.
Keywords: Localisation, Sociology of Translation, Actor-Network Theory (ANT), Forms of Capital, Conversions.

During the last decade software process simulation has been used to address a wide diversity of management problems. Some of these problems are related to strategic management, technology adoption, understanding, training and learning, and risk management, among others. In this work a dynamic integrated framework for software process improvement is presented. This framework combines traditional estimation static models with an intensive utilization of dynamic simulation models of the software process. The aim of this framework is to support a qualitative and quantitative assessment for software process improvement and decision making to achieve a higher software development process capability according to the Capability Maturity Model. The paper describes the concepts underlying this framework, its implementation, the dynamic approach followed to systematically develop the dynamic modules, and an example of its potential use and benefits.

"পিস ডিপ্লোম্যাসি প্ল্যাটফর্ম (PDP)" হলো একটি AI-ভিত্তিক রাজনৈতিক ও কূটনৈতিক সমাধানমূলক প্রযুক্তি, যা বাংলাদেশ ও অন্যান্য দেশের রাজনৈতিক ও সামাজিক অস্থিরতা দূর করতে সহায়তা করবে। এটি একটি ব্লকচেইন-ভিত্তিক নিরপেক্ষ মিডিয়েশন প্ল্যাটফর্ম, যেখানে বিরোধপূর্ণ দল, ছাত্র সংগঠন, রাজনৈতিক নেতারা এবং সাধারণ জনগণ শান্তিপূর্ণ সমাধানের জন্য আলোচনা করতে পারবেন।

এই প্ল্যাটফর্মের মূল লক্ষ্য হলো রাজনৈতিক দলগুলোর মধ্যে ভুল বোঝাবুঝি কমানো, বিরোধ দূর করা এবং শান্তিপূর্ণ সংলাপের পরিবেশ তৈরি করা। এটি নোবেল শান্তি পুরস্কার জেতার মতো একটি বৈপ্লবিক আইডিয়া হতে পারে, কারণ এটি রাজনৈতিক অস্থিরতার মধ্যে একটি মধ্যস্থতাকারীর ভূমিকা পালন করবে এবং কোনো পক্ষপাত ছাড়াই সমাধান খুঁজবে।

There are numerous challenges in teaching software engineering courses, as such courses typically cover multiple technical, managerial and social topics. Within software engineering, software quality assurance (SQA) is a complex area to teach, because it involves aspects from all these three types of topics. Given the complexity of the area and the limited amount of time available to teach a software engineering course educators need to ask the question "How can we effectively teach some of the most important SQA issues and techniques, highlighting the critical relationship between quality and the time and cost of software development?". Here, we present a survey of the literature on checklists and our experiences using defect checklists in software engineering classes at both graduate and undergraduate levels. The study involves 11 teams, who used the checklists to collect defect data on technical deliverables, in both internal (peer) reviews and external (instructor) reviews. Using an iterative waterfall model, students were required to correct the defects discovered in internal and external reviews; the purpose of this was to reinforce the relationship between the quality of the deliverables and the time and effort required for correcting defects. The defect data are analyzed with respect to five conjectures; the strengths and limitations of the approach are discussed using the results. Improvements to the approach and alternatives are suggested, which could aid educators in teaching this important area of software engineering.

Software development projects have become a challenge for both industry and academia regarding the performance evaluation of teams. Recently, a Stochastic Automata Networks (SAN) model was proposed as theoretical representation for performance prediction of software development teams. In this paper, we present an exercise of such SAN analytical modeling for a practical case study from an Information Technology company that has multiple sites and different participants' roles and expertises. We present the matching of our model predictions with the actual project observations. Then, we focus our attention on the central entity varying its availability and the level of provided support in order to observe the impact on the participants' performance. We summarize our study with further discussions of numerical results and possible model extensions.

Coordination of global software development is particularly difficult as it involves teams that are distributed across different locations and time zones. One of the key issues is a lack of understanding of how activities of different teams (and team members) relate to one another. To provide situational awareness for distributed teams, software cockpits, at-a-glance computer-controlled displays of data collected from multiple sources, have been proposed. In this paper, we introduce a set of design decisions that need to be considered for building software cockpits, present our approach to realizing such a cockpit based on three exploratory visualizations of distributed software development projects, and conclude with a discussion of lessons learned so far.

During 10 years experience with the assignment of lectures at the University TH Köln the author analyzed 16 case studies (of about 100 which were not any more available at time of this calculations) of teams of students with an average of 3.75 Team members. Results were „calculated optimal team size“ and „a Function Point Experience Curve“ for the estimation of these Case Studies.

Sourcing of services related to development of information systems calls for a set of specific skills among all parties involved. To cater the needs for managing geographically distributed, sourced projects, a business model with an intermediary company has emerged to facilitate the cooperation between a client's local (in-house) and external (outsourced) resources. This paper explores the skills of a group of so-called 'Delivery Managers', where practice shows a growing need for other skills than the traditional system development related programming competences such as project planning, diagramming and testing. By applying the concepts of soft and hard skills, inspired by contemporary discourse on the 4.0 Industrial Revolution, the paper contributes to theory by a model classifying the soft skills that are in need and to emphasize the importance of communicative skills, team building, and time management skills as well as emotional intelligence in the context of distributed environment across time, space, and cultures.