The aim of this paper is to employ the guidelines of Android, iOS, Blackberry and Windows Phone to analyze the usability compliance of free blood donation (BD) apps. An analysis process based on a ...systematic review protocol is used to select free BD apps. An assessment is conducted using a questionnaire composed of 13 questions concerning the compliance of free BD apps with Android, Blackberry, iOS and Windows Phone usability guidelines. A total of 133 free BD apps have been selected from the 188 BD apps identified. Around 63 % of the free BD apps selected have a good compliance with mobile OS usability recommendations. Around 72 % of Android, 57 % of Windows Phone, 33 % of iOS and 33 % of Blackberry BD apps have a high usability score. The aspect of BD app behavior should be improved along with some style components: the use of pictures to explain ideas and the adaptation of the app to both horizontal and vertical orientations. Structure patterns should also be used to improve the structure aspect of a BD app. Usability is a quality aspect that should be improved in current BD apps. Our study provides smartphone users with a list of usable free BD apps and BD app developers with recommendations.
Ensemble methods overcome the limitations of single machine learning techniques by combining different techniques, and are employed in the quest to achieve a high level of accuracy. This approach has ...been investigated in various fields, one of them being that of bioinformatics. One of the most frequent applications of ensemble techniques involves research into cardiovascular diseases, which are considered the leading cause of death worldwide. The purpose of this research work is to identify the papers that investigate ensemble classification techniques applied to cardiology diseases, and to analyse them according to nine aspects: their publication venues, the medical tasks tackled, the empirical and research types adopted, the types of ensembles proposed, the single techniques used to construct the ensembles, the validation frameworks adopted to evaluate the proposed ensembles, the tools used to build the ensembles, and the optimization methods employed for the single techniques. This paper reports the carrying out of a systematic mapping study. An extensive automatic search in four digital libraries: IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, PubMed, and Scopus, followed by a study selection process, resulted in the identification of 351 papers that were used to address our mapping questions. This study found that the papers selected had been published in a large number of different resources. The medical task addressed most frequently by the selected studies was diagnosis. In addition, the experiment-based empirical type and evaluation-based research type were the most dominant approaches adopted by the selected studies. Homogeneous ensembles were the ensemble type that was developed most often in literature, while decision trees, artificial neural networks and Bayesian classifiers were the single techniques used most frequently to develop ensemble classification methods. The weighted majority and majority voting rules were adopted to obtain the final decision of the ensembles developed. With regard to evaluation frameworks, the datasets obtained from the UCI and PhysioBank repositories were those used most often to evaluate the ensemble methods, while the k-fold cross-validation method was the most frequently-employed validation technique. Several tools with which to build ensemble classifiers were identified, and the type of software adopted with the greatest frequency was open source. Finally, only a few researchers took into account the optimization of the parameter settings of either single or meta ensemble classifiers. This mapping study attempts to provide a greater insight into the application of ensemble classification methods in cardiovascular diseases. The majority of the selected papers reported positive feedback as regards the ability of ensemble methods to perform better than single methods. Further analysis is required to aggregate the evidence reported in literature.
Context: Software development has always been characterised by certain parameters. In the case of global software development, one of the important challenges for software developers is that of ...predicting the development effort of a software system on the basis of developer details, size, complexity, and other measures. Objective: The main research topics related to global software development effort estimation are the definition and empirical evaluation of a search-based approach with which to build new estimation models and the definition and empirical evaluation of all available early data. Datasets have been used as a basis to carry out an analogy-based estimation using similarity functions and measures. Method: Many of the problems concerning the existing effort estimation challenges can be solved by creating an analogy. This paper describes an enhanced analogy-based model for the estimation of software development effort and proposes a new approach using similarity functions and measures for software effort estimation. Result: A new approach for analogy-based reasoning with which to enhance the performance of cost estimation in distributed or combined software projects dealing with numerical and categorical data. The proposed method will be validated empirically using The International Software Benchmarking Standards Group dataset as a basis. Conclusion: The proposed estimation model could be a useful approach for early stage effort estimation on distributed projects.
The management of global and distributed software projects is a very difficult task further complicated by the emergence of new challenges inherent in stakeholder dispersion. Software cost estimation ...plays a central role to face challenges in the context of Global Software Development (GSD). The objective of this study is to identify software cost attributes related to GSD context to present an integrative framework encompassing these attributes. Thirty cost attributes were identified using a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and later compiled into a framework inspired by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) taxonomy.
Global software development is nowadays becoming a priority for software industry. The actual global software engineering research has mainly focused on challenges and methodologies. Research on the ...cost attributes and the software development was fundamental to emphasize on the application of these attributes in the overall software development. A major research to explicit how global companies practicing global software development are undertaken to address those cost attributes. In this paper, a descriptive survey is conducted to define the position of cost attributes in global software development. This survey is a data collection from an empirical strategy through an online questionnaire targeting 30 practitioners with practical software engineering experience. Moreover, results of 26 questions, chosen with major care, are analyzed and discussed. The results show that interest in cost attributes for global software development projects is a critical topic for distributed software development. The control and the evaluation of cost attributes allow companies principally to save cost and also to remain focused on development of projects.
Software cost estimation plays a central role in the success of software project management in the context of global software development (GSD). The importance of mastering software cost estimation ...may appear to be obvious. However, as regards the issue of customer satisfaction, end-users are often unsatisfied with software project management results. In this paper, a systematic mapping study (SMS) is carried out with the aim of summarising software cost estimation in the context of GSD research by answering nine mapping questions. A total, of 16 articles were selected and classified according to nine criteria: publication source, publication year, research type, research approach, contribution type, software cost estimation techniques, software cost estimation activity, cost drivers and cost estimation performances for GSD projects. The results show that the interest in estimating software cost for GSD projects has increased in recent years and reveal that conferences are the most frequently targeted publications. Most software cost estimation for GSD research has focused on theory. The dominant contribution type of software cost estimation for GSD research is that of models, while the predominant activity was identified as being software development cost. Identifying empirical solutions to address software cost estimation for GSD is a promising direction for researchers.
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