Human factors in successful software projects have always been a critical element in software engineering, however, it has always been overshadowed by focusing more on technology and underlying ...processes. This work is inspired by the recent increasing interest from the software engineering research community in human factors and software development by leveraging and understanding some examples of human factors such as Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) which were not given due research consideration earlier. We performed a systematic literature review (SLR) to review the state-of-the-art literature on practicing EDI in software development teams despite of country or culture. We found that evidence of comprehensive research about practicing EDI in software development teams is limited, the up-to-date majority focus is on the topic of diversity, whereas research on topics of practicing equity and inclusion in software development teams is sporadic. It is expected that investigating the impact of human factors in the context of EDI's triangle will generate new knowledge. This will allow software practitioners to understand the benefits of practicing EDI in managing software development teams as well as provide opportunities to incorporate them into the core development process activities. In the end, future research directions for EDI practices in software development teams are also identified.
The growth of the software game development industry is enormous and is gaining importance day by day. This growth imposes severe pressure and a number of issues and challenges on the game ...development community. Game development is a complex process, and one important game development choice is to consider the developer’s perspective to produce good-quality software games by improving the game development process. The objective of this study is to provide a better understanding of the developer’s dimension as a factor in software game success. It focuses mainly on an empirical investigation of the effect of key developer’s factors on the software game development process and eventually on the quality of the resulting game. A quantitative survey was developed and conducted to identify key developer’s factors for an enhanced game development process. For this study, the developed survey was used to test the research model and hypotheses. The results provide evidence that game development organizations must deal with multiple key factors to remain competitive and to handle high pressure in the software game industry. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate empirically the influence of key developer’s factors on the game development process.
Due to the rapid development of Internet technologies and social media, sentiment analysis has become an important opinion mining technique. Recent research work has described the effectiveness of ...different sentiment classification techniques ranging from simple rule-based and lexicon-based approaches to more complex machine learning algorithms. While lexicon-based approaches have suffered from the lack of dictionaries and labeled data, machine learning approaches have fallen short in terms of accuracy. This paper proposes an integrated framework which bridges the gap between lexicon-based and machine learning approaches to achieve better accuracy and scalability. To solve the scalability issue that arises as the feature-set grows, a novel genetic algorithm (GA)-based feature reduction technique is proposed. By using this hybrid approach, we are able to reduce the feature-set size by up to 42% without compromising the accuracy. The comparison of our feature reduction technique with more widely used principal component analysis (PCA) and latent semantic analysis (LSA) based feature reduction techniques have shown up to 15.4% increased accuracy over PCA and up to 40.2% increased accuracy over LSA. Furthermore, we also evaluate our sentiment analysis framework on other metrics including precision, recall, F-measure, and feature size. In order to demonstrate the efficacy of GA-based designs, we also propose a novel cross-disciplinary area of geopolitics as a case study application for our sentiment analysis framework. The experiment results have shown to accurately measure public sentiments and views regarding various topics such as terrorism, global conflicts, and social issues. We envisage the applicability of our proposed work in various areas including security and surveillance, law-and-order, and public administration.
Sedentary behaviour is increasing due to societal changes and is related to prolonged periods of sitting. There is sufficient evidence proving that sedentary behaviour has a negative impact on ...people's health and wellness. This paper presents our research findings on how to mine the temporal contexts of sedentary behaviour by utilizing the on-board sensors of a smartphone. We use the accelerometer sensor of the smartphone to recognize user situations (i.e., still or active). If our model confirms that the user context is still, then there is a high probability of being sedentary. Then, we process the environmental sound to recognize the micro-context, such as working on a computer or watching television during leisure time. Our goal is to reduce sedentary behaviour by suggesting preventive interventions to take short breaks during prolonged sitting to be more active. We achieve this goal by providing the visualization to the user, who wants to monitor his/her sedentary behaviour to reduce unhealthy routines for self-management purposes. The main contribution of this paper is two-fold: (i) an initial implementation of the proposed framework supporting real-time context identification; (ii) testing and evaluation of the framework, which suggest that our application is capable of substantially reducing sedentary behaviour and assisting users to be active.
The widespread popularity of social networking is leading to the adoption of Twitter as an information dissemination tool. Existing research has shown that information dissemination over Twitter has ...a much broader reach than traditional media and can be used for effective post-incident measures. People use informal language on Twitter, including acronyms, misspelled words, synonyms, transliteration, and ambiguous terms. This makes incident-related information extraction a non-trivial task. However, this information can be valuable for public safety organizations that need to respond in an emergency. This paper proposes an early event-related information extraction and reporting framework that monitors Twitter streams synthesizes event-specific information, e.g., a terrorist attack, and alerts law enforcement, emergency services, and media outlets. Specifically, the proposed framework, Tweet-to-Act (T2A), employs word embedding to transform tweets into a vector space model and then utilizes the Word Mover's Distance (WMD) to cluster tweets for the identification of incidents. To extract reliable and valuable information from a large dataset of short and informal tweets, the proposed framework employs sequence labeling with bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory based Recurrent Neural Networks ( bLSTM-RNN ). Extensive experimental results suggest that our proposed framework, T2A, outperforms other state-of-the-art methods that use vector space modeling and distance calculation techniques, e.g., Euclidean and Cosine distance. T2A achieves an accuracy of 96% and an F1-score of 86.2% on real-life datasets.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has received significant attention from software providers and users as a software delivery model. Most of the existing companies are transferring their business into a ...SaaS model. This intensely competitive environment has imposed many challenges for SaaS developers and vendors. SaaS development is a very complex process and SaaS success depends on its architecture design and development. This paper provides a better understanding of SaaS applications architecture phase during the SaaS development process. It focuses mainly on an empirical investigation of key factors of SaaS Architecture phase identified from the systematic literature review. A quantitative survey was developed and conducted to identify key architecture factors for an improved and successful SaaS application. A developed survey was used to test the proposed hypothesis presented in this study. Empirical investigation's results provide evidence that vendors and developers must consider key architecture factors for SaaS development process to stand in the current competitive environment. These key factors include customization, scalability, MTA (Multi-Tenancy Architecture), security, integration, and fault tolerance and recovery management. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate empirically the influence of identified key factors of the architecture on SaaS applications success.
•We reviewed the literature of business factors especially for digital game development organization.•We identified seven key business factors for digital game development organization.•The study ...empirically investigate the significance of business key factors for game development organization.•The five out of seven business key factors found statistically significant.
Game development is an interdisciplinary concept that embraces software engineering, business, management, and artistic disciplines. This research facilitates a better understanding of the business dimension of digital games. The main objective of this research is to investigate empirically the effect of business factors on the performance of digital games in the market and to answer the research questions asked in this study. Game development organizations are facing high pressure and competition in the digital game industry. Business has become a crucial dimension, especially for game development organizations. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate empirically the influence of key business factors on the business performance of games. This is the first study in the domain of game development that demonstrates the interrelationship between key business factors and game performance in the market. The results of the study provide evidence that game development organizations must deal with multiple business key factors to remain competitive and handle the high pressure in the digital game industry. Furthermore, the results of the study support the theoretical assertion that key business factors play an important role in game business performance.
A Digital Game Maturity Model (DGMM) Aleem, Saiqa; Capretz, Luiz Fernando; Ahmed, Faheem
Entertainment computing,
November 2016, 2016-11-00, Volume:
17
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
•We identified four dimensions of game development and management practices i.e. selecting the game design strategy, development methodology, game playability and usability factors, and finally, the ...business dimension.•We proposed a Digital Game Maturity Model (DGMM) that includes key game development factors and crucial concepts from software engineering and project management.•A DGMM provides a set of best practices for managing complex game projects.•A DGMM framework consists of assessment questionnaires for the five maturity levels, a rating method, and performance scales.•In the course of this research, case studies were conducted to demonstrate the methodology for evaluating the level of maturity of game development in two organizations.
Game development is an interdisciplinary concept that embraces artistic, software engineering, management, and business disciplines. This research facilitates a better understanding of important dimensions of digital game development methodology. Game development is considered as one of the most complex tasks in software engineering. The increased popularity of digital games, the challenges faced by game development organizations in developing quality games, and high competition in the digital game industry demand a game development maturity assessment. Consequently, this study presents a Digital Game Maturity Model to evaluate the current development methodology in an organization. The framework of this model consists of assessment questionnaires, a performance scale, and a rating method. The main goal of the questionnaires is to collect information about current processes and practices. In general, this research contributes towards formulating a comprehensive and unified strategy for game development maturity evaluation. Two case studies were conducted and their assessment results reported. These demonstrate the level of maturity of current development practices in two organizations.
The growth of the software game development industry is enormous and is gaining importance day by day. This growth imposes severe pressure and a number of issues and challenges on the game ...development community. Game development is a complex process, and one important game development choice is to consider the developer＇s perspective to produce good-quality software games by improving the game development process. The objective of this study is to provide a better understanding of the developer＇s dimension as a factor in software game success. It focuses mainly on an empirical investigation of the effect of key developer＇s factors on the software game development process and eventually on the quality of the resulting game. A quantitative survey was developed and conducted to identify key developer＇s factors for an enhanced game development process. For this study, the developed survey was used to test the research model and hypotheses. The results provide evidence that game development organizations must deal with multiple key factors to remain competitive and to handle high pressure in the software game industry. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate empirically the influence of key developer＇s factors on the game development process.
Software game is a kind of application that is used not only for entertainment, but also for serious purposes that can be applicable to different domains such as education, business, and health care. ...Multidisciplinary nature of the game development processes that combine sound, art, control systems, artificial intelligence (AI), and human factors, makes the software game development practice different from traditional software development. However, the underline software engineering techniques help game development to achieve maintainability, flexibility, lower effort and cost, and better design. The purpose of this study is to assesses the state of the art research on the game development software engineering process and highlight areas that need further consideration by researchers. In the study, we used a systematic literature review methodology based on well-known digital libraries. The largest number of studies have been reported in the production phase of the game development software engineering process life cycle, followed by the pre-production phase. By contrast, the post-production phase has received much less research activity than the pre-production and production phases. The results of this study suggest that the game development software engineering process has many aspects that need further attention from researchers; that especially includes the postproduction phase.
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