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Virtual social network is a kind of social network established through indirect interactions between individuals, especially through online interactions. Virtual social network has significant implications on business operations, governing, scientific research, and social relations. This paper describes several virtual social networks and studies their properties and effects using empirical approach and computer simulations. Furthermore, the authors find that these virtual social networks have similar distributions with respect to the frequency of nodes and different edges. These distributions are similar between directed networks and undirected networks. In addition, through simulations they demonstrate that the roles played by different nodes in a virtual social network are unequal. Limitations of this study and future research directions are also presented.

This chapter describes a new interdisciplinary course introduced at Indiana University South Bend. The course is designed for students of any majors to meet their general education requirement on ‘the natural world' subject. The course topics are divided into three parts. First, using ‘information' as the main thread, this course connects physical information, chemical information, biological information, and social information. Second, using basic computing model and information entropy, this course generalizes information and information theory. Third, information is correlated to cutting-edge computing topics such as quantum computing, complexity, and uncertainty. The main objective of this course is to provide an outline of information theory to students using an interdisciplinary approach.

This chapter describes mobile payment, a mobile financial activity born of digital revolution, which is the combination of electronic money and mobile technology. The underlying technologies of mobile payment, its big players, and its status quo and future trend are discussed. In addition, this chapter discusses how mobile payment is related to social equality and social inclusion. Through presenting the historical, technical, economic, and social aspects of mobile payment, this chapter intends to provide readers with a holistic view of one of the fast-evolving financial activities that are transforming business, individuals, and the society.

Software development is the process to produce an information technology solution to a real-world problem. Teaching and integrating non-technical software engineering skills into the curriculum is considered one of the most challenging tasks in an academic environment. This becomes even more challenging when the curriculum is supposed to be internationalized and applied in different countries because of the cultural difference, policy difference, and business model difference. In this chapter, the authors present their experience of teaching a software engineering course both locally and globally, where two universities of USA and China are chosen for this study. Specifically, they describe how they adjust homework assignments and student performance evaluations to reflect different government policies, different business environment, and different real-world customer requirement. The chapter shows that it is possible to create an internationalized computer science curriculum that contains both common core learning standards and adjustable custom learning standards.

With the wide usage of the internet and mobile apps, various e-business models are created and realized. Although most of them have a short history, their economic and social impact are significant. This paper describes the background and status quo of several representative emerging e-business models, including marketplace lending, mobile-enabled transportation, peer-to-peer rental, and personalized marketing. In addition, this paper discusses how these e-business models are transforming the landscape of our society and our social relations.

In C-alike programs, the source code is separated into header files and source files. During the software evolution process, both these two kinds of files need to adapt to changing requirement and changing environment. This paper studies the coevolution of header files and source files of C-alike programs. Using normalized compression distance that is derived from Kolmogorov complexity, we measure the header file difference and source file difference between versions of an evolving software product. Header files distance and source files distance are compared to understand their difference in pace of evolution. Mantel tests are performed to investigate the correlation of header file evolution and source file evolution. The study is performed on the source code of Apache HTTP web server.

In the past 15 years, China's e-commerce industry has grown tremendously and become the world's largest e-commerce market. This chapter studies some popular e-commerce companies of China, including Alibaba, JD, and Pindoudou. Specifically, the customer engagement strategies of these companies are described and analyzed. This chapter helps readers understand how various customer engagement strategies of China's e-commerce companies have facilitated the change of their consumers' shopping habits—switching from offline shopping centers to online marketplaces and from cash-based payment to credit-based payment. The success of these customer engagement strategies has contributed to the performance improvement of e-commerce companies and could ultimately assist China to transfer from a production economy to a consumption economy. Moreover, these customer engagement strategies developed in China might also be applied to other e-businesses or marketplaces of different regions, especially developing countries that have a similar economy structure as China.

Design patterns are reusable software design solutions to object-oriented programs. Since the initial introduction of the 23 well-known design patterns in 1995, more and more patterns have been identified and utilized in the software industry. The benefits of applying design patterns include reducing development cost, improving code quality, and standardizing the integration and maintenance processes. Therefore, using design patterns is becoming a common practice to build both commercial software and open-source products. Although most design patterns are considered creative solutions to some difficult design problems, not all of them are necessarily the best with respect to all different software quality measures, such as program complexity. This paper studies 13 commonly employed design patterns in software industry. First, these 13 patterns are analyzed theoretically about their design complexity in comparison to the conventional solutions. Second, empirical studies are performed on five open-source Java projects to investigate the correlations between design patterns and class structural quality. Finally, these 13 design patterns are evaluated by software programmers who have experience of using all of them. Overall, this study finds that although some design patterns are considered useful, creative, and significant compared to conventional solutions based on user experience, pattern-involved classes are more complex than pattern-free classes, both theoretically and empirically. The authors accordingly recommend a balanced approach to using design patterns: design quality, cost, development time, and product quality should all be considered, when design patterns are utilized.

In C-alike programs, the source code is separated into header files and source files. During the software evolution process, both these two kinds of files need to adapt to changing requirement and changing environment. This paper studies the coevolution of header files and source files of C-alike programs. Using normalized compression distance that is derived from Kolmogorov complexity, we measure the header file difference and source file difference between versions of an evolving software product. Header files distance and source files distance are compared to understand their difference in pace of evolution. Mantel tests are performed to investigate the correlation of header file evolution and source file evolution. The study is performed on the source code of Apache HTTP web server.

Scheduling is an important management activity in software projects. The relationship between nominal development time and development effort has been characterized as a power-law function where development time is dependent on development effort. Studies performed in 1980s determined that there is a scheduling barrier for any software project given the amount of effort to complete the project. Specifically, the studies found out that it is extremely difficult to reduce the development time lowering than a threshold calculated based on the nominal development time. Scheduling barriers are largely due to the complexity of interactions and communications among developers. Thirty years later, this paper examines six software projects in order to understand the relationship between development time and development effort in the 21st century. The author's study suggests that in modern software development, scheduling barriers could be broken through improving the efficiencies of communications, collaborations, and project management.

Android is an operating system for mobile devices. Its development is led by Google and some other companies. Because of the open-source property of Android, anyone can report a bug through its online bug tracking system. In this paper, we analyze the bug reports of Android operating systems. Specifically, through this study, we would like to answer the following questions regarding Android development and its project management: (1) Could Android bug reports be handled on time? (2) What is the distribution of different maintenance activities initiated by Android bug reports? (3) How long does it take to handle an Android bug report? (4) Are the number of followers and the number of following messages of an Android bug report related to the effort spent on handling this bug report? Through answering these questions, this paper presents a comprehensive study of Android bug reporting and handling process. The information and knowledge obtained through this case study could help us better understand open-source software project, such as its development process and project management.

This chapter describes e-commerce, a trading business built on top of the Internet. Different e-commerce models, such as B2B, B2C, C2C, and their major players are described. E-commerce companies like Amazon and Alibaba, are used to explain the effect of e-commerce on our economy, society, and beyond. GMV, MAU, market capitalization, and other business data are presented and analyzed. Influential factors, such as user retention, government policy, payment method, and logistics are also discussed. Finally, the emerging e-commerce model, emerging e-commerce market, and the future of e-commerce are illustrated.

This chapter describes the evolution of social networking together with its supporting technologies. Most popular social networking service providers, such as Facebook, Tencent, Twitter, and Sina Weibo are described with their market and financial data. The new business and new social relations built on social networking platforms are introduced and their impacts are discussed. The future trends of social networking are also illustrated based on the potential development of related emerging technologies. The objective of this chapter is to help readers understand the impact of technology on the functioning, evolution, and variation of socializations.

This paper describes the teaching methods and teaching experiences of an instructor who has been teaching computer science freshmen for more than ten years. Problem-based learning has been used in introductory programming courses to enhance the quality of learning. The common problem in introductory programming courses is that instructors quite often focus mainly on programming language syntax and usage but ignore the real world applications of these language features. Accordingly, students are likely to find out that it is difficult to apply their programming skills on solving complex problems in their high level courses. Through introducing problem-based learning in introductory programming courses, students not only could obtain experience of dealing with complex problems, but also could practice other soft skills, such as team working skills, which could better prepare them for junior and senior level coursework and capstone projects. In addition, other philosophy issues related to teaching introductory courses are discussed and tentative solutions are presented.

Software development is a fast-changing area. New methods and new technologies emerge all the time. As a result, the education of software engineering is generally considered not to be keeping pace with the development of software engineering in industry. Given the limited resources in academia, it is unrealistic to purchase all the latest software tools for classroom usage. In this chapter, the authors describe how free/open-source data and free/open-source tools are used in an upper-level software engineering class at Indiana University South Bend. Depending on different learning objectives, different free/open-source tools and free/open-source data are incorporated into different team projects. The approach has been applied for two semesters, where instructor’s experiences are assembled and analyzed. The study suggests (1) incorporating both free/open-source tools and free/open-source data in a software engineering course so that students can better understand both development methods and development processes and (2) updating software engineering course regularly in order to keep up with the advance of development tools and development methods in industry.

This chapter describes how problem-based learning is utilized in a software engineering classroom to help students develop soft skills, such as communication skills, documentation skills, team working skills, and interpersonal skills. Case studies are performed at Indiana University South Bend, where experiences of two instructors with similar teaching approaching are analyzed. Studies find that while problem-based learning is promising in engaging students and effectively delivering soft skills, it is more challenging for instructors. Compared to traditional instructor-centered learning approach, problem-based learning requires instructors to spend more effort on problem design/refinement, student coaching, performance evaluation, data gathering, and experience analysis. Despite its difficulties of implementation, problem-based learning is considered an effective approach in software engineering education.

Complex software systems and the huge amounts of data they produce are becoming an integral part of our organizations. We are also becoming increasingly dependent on high quality software products in our everyday lives. These systems ‘evolve’ as we identify and correct existing defects, provide new functionalities, or increase their nonfunctional qualities - such as security, maintainability, performance, etc. Simultaneously, more software development projects are distributed over multiple locations (often globally) and are often several millions of dollars in development costs. Consequently, as the Internet continually eliminates geographic boundaries, the concept of doing business within a single country has given way to companies focusing on competing in an international marketplace. The digitalization of work and the reorganization of work processes across many organizations have resulted in routine and/or commodity components being outsourced.

Design patterns are standardized solutions to commonly encountered problems using the object-oriented programming paradigm. Applying design patterns can speed up software development processes through the reuse of tested, proven templates, or development paradigms. Accordingly, design patterns have been widely used in software industry to build modern software programs. However, as different design patterns are introduced to solve different design problems, they are not necessarily superior to alternative solutions, with respect to all aspects of software design. One major concern is that the inappropriate use of design patterns may unnecessarily increase program complexity, such as class structural quality. Theoretical analysis of the effect of design patterns on software complexity has been widely performed. However, little work is reported to empirically study how design patterns might affect class structural quality. This chapter studies six components from five open-source Java projects and empirically investigates if design patterns can affect class structural quality. The chapter finds that pattern-involved classes are more complex than pattern-free classes and recommends the cautious use of design patterns to avoid unnecessary increases in class complexity and decrease in class structural quality.

Scheduling and staffing are important management activities in software projects. In closed-source software development, the relationships among development effort, time, and staffing have been well established and validated: the development effort determines the development time and the best number of developers that should be allocated to the project. However, there has been no similar research reported in open-source projects. In this chapter, the authors study the development effort, development time, and staffing in an open-source project, the Linux kernel project. Specifically, they investigate the power law relations among development effort, development time, and the number of active developers in the Linux kernel project. The authors find the power law relations differ from one branch to another branch in the Linux kernel project, which suggests different kinds of management and development styles might exist in different branches of the Linux kernel project. The empirical knowledge of software development effort obtained in this study could help project management and cost control in both open-source communities and closed-source industries.

Complex software systems and the huge amounts of data they produce are becoming an integral part of our organizations. We are also becoming increasingly dependent on high quality software products in our everyday lives. These systems ‘evolve’ as we identify and correct existing defects, provide new functionalities, or increase their nonfunctional qualities - such as security, maintainability, performance, etc. Simultaneously, more software development projects are distributed over multiple locations (often globally) and are often several millions of dollars in development costs. Consequently, as the Internet continually eliminates geographic boundaries, the concept of doing business within a single country has given way to companies focusing on competing in an international marketplace. The digitalization of work and the reorganization of work processes across many organizations have resulted in routine and/or commodity components being outsourced.

In this chapter, the authors describe their experiences in designing, developing, and teaching a course on Software Architecture that tested both in an academic context with their graduate Computer Science students and in an advanced context of professional updating and training with scores of system engineers in a number of different companies. The course has been taught in several editions in the last five years. The authors describe its rationale, the way in which they teach it differently in academia and in industry, and how they evaluate the students' learning in the different contexts. Finally, the authors discuss the lessons learnt and describe how this experience is inspiring for the future of this course.