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Socioscientific issues have significant contributions to personal growth and education. However, no studies are conducted for different segments of society that encounter these issues. Based on this paucity, this study aims to determine the level of knowledge of software engineering students regarding the radiation emitted by cell phones and computers, evaluate their development and reveal the change in their attitudes towards socioscientific issues according to their years of education. 30 students from a state university’s department of software engineering were recruited for the study. Two different measuring tools were used on the same students at the beginning of the first and second year to identify their attitudes toward socioscientific issues and their understanding of the radiation emitted by mobile phones and computers. The data were analyzed with content analysis and dependent t-test. The results revealed that students’ knowledge and argumentation quality on radiation was low and did not change in the first two years. Attitudes towards socioscientific issues were analyzed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. As a result, no significant difference was found in the attitude scale and its sub-dimensions, suggesting that first-year software engineering students could not advance in socioscientific issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, surface texturing becomes a significant method in the regulation of contact forces between two bodies in contact. Surface texturing is generally carried out by using elastic cylindrical beams. In this study, the effect of elastic beam array structural parameters on friction force amplitude of beams in contact with a flat, smooth and rigid body are investigated by finite-element method. For this, the frictional motion of the elastic cylindrical beam array is modeled in a finite-element based engineering software. Validation of the established model is performed. In the model, backing layer thickness, spacing distance between two beams, and number of beams are changed in elastic beam array. Normal force and friction force amplitudes in the full-sliding frictional motion of beams in contact with a smooth and rigid body are calculated. When the spacing distance between the two beams or the beam backing layer thickness is increased, the friction force amplitude decreases; and the effect of the number of beams on the friction force amplitude per single beam is negligible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, the rapid development and widespread use of technology has brought many innovations. In addition to the developments in information technology and internet network, software engineering, decentralized formations, blockchain technology and advances in the cryptocurrency system attract great attention in the national and international arena. Cryptocurrencies, which emerged as an alternative to traditional payment systems, have gained a dizzying momentum with the integration of technology into financial systems. However, although the security of cryptocurrencies, which have a decentralized feature, is ensured by cryptographic systems, some governments do not find the operation of this system safe and make legal regulations to protect their users against the risks. In addition, it is argued that with the widespread use of expenditures with cryptocurrencies, the effect of classical payment methods will decrease. To shed light on this context, after the concept of money, its functions, and its historical development process are explained, the article will focus on what cryptocurrency and its economic functions are, and then, in particular, it will analyse the views of contemporary Islamic jurists on the legitimacy of cryptocurrencies. In addition, the study will reveal the risk level of cryptocurrencies, the possibility of circulation, and the legal regulations made by the states, especially the most recent legislative changes in Turkey. Nowadays, an exchange of cryptocurrencies has already formed. The daily use of cryptocurrencies may fulfil the role of traditional money in the economy. With the acceleration of e-commerce transactions, cryptocurrencies have gained widespread use, and have reached a potential that can be traded in a universal network with a distributed free-end encrypted digital value. Therefore, it has identical aspects that fit the definition of money. Although this is the case, there are still debates about the current state of crypto currencies in terms of Islamic law. Islamic jurists emphasized that there should not be “uncertainty, deception, fraud, ignorance, and interest” in transactions that cause mutual debt and stated that the agreements containing these are not valid. Likewise, they drew attention to the occurrence of important conditions such as the fact that the goods are in circulation, which is required by the legal norms in monetary transactions, and the transaction made is specific or identifiable. Accordingly, transactions and contracts made with cryptocurrency must, first of all, comply with the purposes of the law and the requirements of the contract. It will be inevitable for us to face the realities of our age in order to reach a correct conclusion regarding the legitimacy of crypto coins according to Islamic law. In these days, financial transactions are carried out in cryptocurrency exchanges, in a very wide network despite the risks, reaching very high volumes. Just as the money that has physical assets is used in circulation, there is no harm in using these currencies as a means of accumulating wealth or in money transfer transactions. Likewise, cryptocurrency mining is not prohibited legally. However, it is forbidden to use it for manipulation and speculation. Already existing risks and concerns for cryptocurrencies are in question for traditional currencies, too. The important thing is how and for what purpose cryptocurrency and other types of money are used. Whether we consider cryptocurrencies as money, goods or benefits, or financial assets, as these coins are not legally prohibited just like traditional currencies, if their risks are eliminated and accepted as a means of circulation and a measure of value by the society, we can say that they will be qualified as money just like banknotes and they will fulfil all the functions of traditional money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software, which is one of the fields of discipline of management information systems, is a rapidly developing industry field. In order to meet the needs of this field, a variety of methodologies as well as agile methodologies have been used in software engineering. Many methods and applications have been developed under the title of agile methodologies related to software, process and project concepts. Each of these has its own specific structures as well as many common points. Agile Software Development Manifest, which emphasizes these common points, has been declared to prevent concept confusion. In this study, these common features that are prominent in applications and processes based on agile software development approach are defined as classification categories. Some activities such as analysis, management, improvement, implementation, reconfiguring and evaluation in agile software development approach are prominent on the processes. Classification of defined methodologies, methods and applications under title of agile methodologies is based on these activities. Thus, which agile methodology, method and application in which agile activity area is determined more effective. In order to make the classification work more useful to the reader, it has been tried to reveal the interests and differences of some concepts and applications used in software project management within a conceptual framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In corporations, software issues and software change demands are forwarded to the Information Technology (IT) unit via a demand management system. The priority information in this system has critical importance to the IT unit. However, the priority decision that is left to the individuals who create the demand records may not always be realistic. For instance, a non-critical and low-priority demand may be created with the highest priority, and this may lead to faulty planning and eventually to customer dissatisfaction. In this work, internal customer demands were classified using text mining techniques and their priorities were predicted. The system was trained and tested with the records extracted from the demand management system of a corporation. After cleaning and preprocessing the raw textual demand data, TF-IDF (Term Frequency -- Inverse Document Frequency) weighting scheme was used when creating the document-term matrix. Several classification algorithms were tested on the data set generated, and the highest performance was obtained by Sequential Minimal Optimization algorithm with 54.1% F-Score. In addition, on the dataset made balanced with oversampling technique, the highest performance was achieved by Random Forest algorithm with 74.5% F-Score. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software development processes require continuous improvement in line with emerging new technologies and the possibilities it provides. A new generation of software development models based on product demands of software customers with marketable functions aims to increase the intermediate product production speed and thus the number of interim versions. In the light of these needs, software companies need to oversee their development processes to meet their customers' needs. But more importantly, companies are forced to change their processes in line with innovative practices in order not to cut back on the software production line. In this article, the software development methods of the three companies that develop software are examined in detail by the case study method, and the process change activities are systematically detailed. In the light of the information obtained, the experiences of the three firms in the software development methods are questioned and the effects of these acquisitions on the processes are discussed. As a result of the study, it has been observed that the software development success has a significant impact on the well-being of the process, and the software development teams are trying to design their own processes in the light of the gains they acquire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The studies show that many software projects exceed the estimated budget and schedule every year, or they are canceled on account of failure, and thus, this causes the waste of resources expressed in billion dollars. Software engineering education is one of the research areas aiming to produce solutions to this important problem. However, it is seen that there is still a need for large amount of skilled and educated software engineers required for the industry, and this workforce gap is also in an increasing fashion. One of the main reasons is thought to be the traditional or teacher-centered methods that are widely adopted in universities. On the other hand, software product development as well as learning and teaching processes, include a series of activities, which require their applications with a range at different levels. Therefore, the instructional methods should be adopted, which primarily concern the knowledge and skills that need to be acquired by engineering students together with the requirements and attributes of software systems to be developed in courses. Project-Assisted Instruction (PAI) and Project- Based Learning (PBL) can be given as examples for this type of methods. Therefore, in this research, the PBL and PAI methods are used in teaching the Database Management Systems Course, and their effects on academic achievements, product and project performances are explored. It is possible to say that the study has two contributions to the engineering research domain. First, (a) it is a study that compares PAI and PBL in an experimental setting. Second, (b) it presents the guidelines and prescriptions for the application of these methods for the domains of computer and software engineering education based on empirical findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software reverse engineering is a discipline of generating the system of abstracts and design information by analyzing the effects, functions, behaviors and documents of the software codes on hardware components. Assembler, unassembler, virtual simulators and debuggers can be listed as software reverse engineering tools. In this study, an unassembler application is developed for translating various-length machine codes, which belong to Intel microprocessor instruction set, into the symbolic form of the machine language. This application is designed both for 32-bit Intel microprocessor architectures while it can also be used for compilers. It is an open source software with the capabilities of translating table-based in-line codes and offering a certain hierarchy for the procedure. In addition, updating the software is also possible for future considerations. With its nature of working both as an assembler and an unassembler, this software brings a different perspective and depth to the existing table-based unassembler applications which are only used for certification and description. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, software engineering is one of the toughest challenges in the software industry and software engineering demand is increasing. However, software engineering industry indicates that, software engineering graduates does not meet the needs of. When new graduates start to job, industry spends time for their education. This waste of time and the low success rate of software projects in industry, causes a very serious cost. In this study, the questionnaire was performed on the projects to students of Systems Analysis and Design, Software Engineering and Agile Software Development courses at two different university. This questionnaire consists of questions designed to measure students' technical and soft skills. In this paper, Technical skills evaluated for Systems Analysis and Design, Software Engineering and Agile Software Development courses and these results compared with soscial skills results. Aim of this study is to determine the capabilities of students to be insufficient skills in software development courses project for improve the quality of software engineering graduates. Thus, more experienced student trained and higher-quality projects will be developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a new model for software reliability characterization using a growth curve formulation that allows model parameters to vary as a function of covariate information. In the software reliability framework, covariates may include such things as the number of lines of code for a product throughout its development cycle and the number of customer licenses sold over the field life of a product. We describe a Bayesian framework for inference and model assessment, using Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques, that allows for incorporation of subjective information about the parameters through the assumed prior distributions. The methods are illustrated using simulated defect data and defect data collected during development for two large commercial software products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses some of the works of Victor R. Basili, a professor at University of Maryland, related to empirical software engineering. Basili has mostly contributed in the field of measuring software development processes and products. The Goal Question Metric (GQM) approach developed by Basili made software measurement achievable. The GQM approach is based on the assumption that an organization must first specify goals for itself and its projects to measure its products and processes usefully. This approach has helped many organizations such as Schlumberger Ltd., and others in both guiding improvement initiatives and developing metrics for managing software projects. Basili has also developed QIP, which uses the principles of continuous improvement approaches such as Total Quality Management to software development. QIP is a cyclical process for planning organizational improvement on the basis of various factors including understanding the current baseline, setting quantifiable goals for improvement, choosing development processes to meet those goals and others.

The article presents information on the problems faced by the author while working with software estimation experts. Software estimation experts have strong ideas on how to perform estimation. Software estimation is an elusive art. The author also discusses his experience when he used to work with software experts and the problems faced by him during that period. His ideas didn't mesh with the expert's ideas. The author is least satisfied with the proposals made by the experts. He highlights the software expert's inability in putting words to their thoughts. In the overall spectrum of things, health, trust, money and integrity are all important, of course. But especially would assert, integrity, it might be ethereal and philosophical. but without it you are less of a person, in psychologically painful ways. He highlights his inability in satisfying many people because it contained what were basically good ideas, and satisfying those researchers whose ideas it contained. The author had never undergone through such a unsatisfactory writing experience.

The article discusses the problem of return on Information Technology investment (ROI). It discusses ROI in reference to the article "IT Doesn't Matter," published by Nicholas G. Carr on May 2003. Besides this it also discusses the effects of ROI on software engineering. Software project cost estimation is major part however, so are Information Technology (IT) assessments. Other relevant areas include IT governance, auditing, due diligence, outsourcing, portfolio management, productivity, value, project business impact assessment, and project adoption impact assessment. IEEE International Conference on Exploring Quantifiable Information on Technology Yields as planned. The conference's broad objective was to promote the development and dissemination of software engineering and IT-centered approach. This was not only limited to new projects but also to existing software projects. In 2003, Chris Verhoef of Vrije University, in its speech at the IEEE International Workshop on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation, claimed that there was little evidence of a positive correlation between IT investment and return on shareholders' investment.

Several letters to the editor in response to the articles published in previous issues including "What Do Software Developers Need to Know about Business?" in the September-October 2005 issue are presented.