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The potentially many software system input combinations make exhaustive testing practically impossible. To address this issue, combinatorial t-way testing (where t indicates the interaction strength, i.e. the number of interacting parameters (input)) was adopted to minimize the number of cases for testing. Complimentary to existing testing techniques (e.g. boundary value, equivalence partitioning, cause and effect graphing), combinatorial testing helps to detect faults caused by the faulty interaction between input parameters. In the last 15 years, applications of meta-heuristics as the backbone of t-way test suite generation have shown promising results (e.g. Particle Swarm Optimization, Cuckoo Search, Flower Pollination Algorithm, and Hyper-Heuristics (HHH), to name a few). Supporting the No Free Lunch theorem, as well as potentially offering new insights into the whole process of t-way generation, this article proposes a new strategy with constraint support based on the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA). Our work is the first attempt to adopt the WOA as part of a search-based software engineering (SBSE) initiative for t-way test suite generation with constraint support. The experimental results of the test-suite generation indicate that WOA produces competitive outcomes compared to some selected single-based and population-based meta-heuristic algorithms.

Information Security Management (ISM) is a systematic initiative in managing the organisation’s information security. ISM can also be defined as a strategic approach to addressing information security (IS) risks, breaches, and incidents that could threaten the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information. Although organisations have complied with ISM requirements, security incidents are still afflicting numerous organisations. This issue shows that the current implementation of ISM is still ineffective. The ineffective ISM implementation illustrates the low maturity level. To achieve a higher level of maturity, organisations should always evaluate their ISM practices. Several maturity models have been developed by international organisations, consultants, and researchers to assist organisations in assessing their ISM practices. However, the current models do not evaluate ISM practices holistically. The measurement dimensions in current models are more focused on assessing certain factors only. This caused the maturity assessment to be not executed comprehensively. Therefore, this study aims to address this shortcoming by proposing a comprehensive maturity assessment model that takes into account ISM success factors to evaluate the effectiveness of the implementation. This study adopted a mixed-method approach, which comprises qualitative and quantitative studies to strengthen the research finding. The qualitative study analyses the existing literature and conducts interviews with nine industry practitioners and six experts while the quantitative study involves a questionnaire survey. The data obtained from the qualitative study were analysed using content analysis while the quantitative data employed statistics analysis. The study identified fourteen success factors and fifty-seven maturity dimensions, which each contains five maturity levels. The proposed model was evaluated through experts’ reviews to ensure its accuracy and suitability. The evaluation shows that the model can identify the ISM maturity level systematically and comprehensively. This model will ultimately help the organisations to improve the weaknesses in the implementations thus diminishing security incidents.

Rapid development of information technology and communication (ICT) has increased the use of information systems in organizations since a decade ago. At the same time, many organizations are still using old information systems to support their business, known as legacy systems. Even though these systems cause technical problems, but they are still used to support service delivery to the customer. These systems are also essential to organizations as they have been operated for many years and possess high business value. The operation of legacy systems cannot be stopped quickly, as it will affect daily business tasks. However, organizations with legacy systems need to think about the ability of the systems to support their future direction. Modernization of legacy systems needs to be implemented to ensure the systems are aligned with global changes as well as improving the competitiveness of the organizations. This study, therefore, reviewed the phases and factors involved in legacy systems modernization to identify gaps and their insufficiencies. There are many studies on legacy systems, but only a few have focused on the overall process of legacy systems modernization. Most studies on legacy systems are technical in nature and refer to specific aspects and phases of modernization. This study aims to provide overall guidance to the organizations in performing legacy systems modernization.

Agile methods adoption has increased in recent years because of its contribution to the success rate of project development. Nevertheless, the success rate of projects implemented using Agile methods has not completely reached its expected mark, and selecting the appropriate Agile methods is one of the reasons for such lag. Selecting the appropriate Agile methods is a challenging task because there are so many methods to select from. In addition, a lot of organizations consider the selection of Agile methods as a mammoth task. Therefore, to assist Agile team members, this study aimed to investigate how the appropriate Agile methods can be determined for different projects. Based on a Grounded Theory study, 23 Agile experts drawn from 19 teams across thirteen countries were interviewed. Hence, this study employed the Ground Theory of selecting Agile methods. Sixteen factors, grouped into five categories, have been found to affect the selection of twenty Agile methods. The nature of project (size, maturity, criticality and decomposability), development team skills (communication skills, domain knowledge, team technical skills and maturity), project constraints (cost/value/ROI, cost of change, time, scope and requirements volatility), customer involvement (collaboration, commitment and domain knowledge) and organizational culture (type of organizational culture) are the key factors that should guide Agile team members in the selection of an appropriate Agile methods based on the value these factors have for different organizations and/or different projects.

Information Security Management (ISM) concerns shielding the integrity, confidentiality, availability, authenticity, reliability and accountability of the organisation’s information from unauthorised access in order to ensure business continuity and customers’ confidence. The importance of information security (IS) in today’s situation should be given due attention. Recognising its importance, organisations nowadays have devoted wide efforts in protecting their information. They establish information security policy, processes, and procedures as well as reengineer their organisational structures to align with ISM principles. Regardless of the efforts, security incidents continue to occur in many organisations. This phenomenon shows that the current implementation of ISM is still ineffective due to unaware of the factors contributing to the success of ISM. Thus, the objective of this paper is to identify ISM success factors and their elements through a large-scale survey. The survey involves 243 practitioners from statutory bodies, public and private organisations in Malaysia. The results of the survey indicate that top management, IS coordinator team, ISM team, IS audit team, employees, third parties, IS policy, IS procedures, resource planning, competency development and awareness, risk management, business continuity management, IS audit and IT infrastructure are the factors that contribute to the success of ISM implementation. These factors shall guide practitioners in planning and refining ISM implementation in their organisations.

Requirements change has been regarded as a substantial risk in software development projects. The factors that contribute to the risk are identified through impact analysis, which later determine the planning of the change implementation. The analysis is however not straightforward as the risk factors that constitute requirements change implementation is currently not much explored. This paper identifies the risk factors by firstly collating them qualitatively through a review of related work and a focus group study. The factors are then confirmed quantitatively through a survey in which data is analysed by using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). The survey comprise of 276 practitioners from software industry who are involved in the impact analysis. The results indicate that User, Project Team, Top Management, Third Party, Organisation, Identification of Change, Existing Product and Planning of Change Implementation are the significant risk factors in planning of requirements change implementation.

Rapid and unpredictable technology advancements cause a rise in demand for software products that can be delivered faster, adapt to volatile changes and save cost. Over the years, Agile Software Development (ASD) becomes more suitable as the software process that can cater to those demands while still maintaining the quality desired. With this Agile nature, it is apparent that the team that develops the software product need to have unique features as well. The team should also be formed correctly to gain effectiveness, strong performance and ultimately project success. Ineffective teams can be caused by, among others, conflict, inadequate skillset, unbalanced role assignment, lack of teamwork and non-competent team members. However, by far, the characteristics that need to be considered in forming effective teams are yet to be formalized. Thus, this study aims to identify the necessary characteristics in composing a competent team that is well balanced and can create coherent teamwork. The study involves a qualitative literature review which includes past studies about team formation specifically in the software development domain. The data were collected from online journal databases and analyzed using content analysis. From the analysis, six characteristics together with their attributes were identified as vital in team formation. Another two characteristics were also identified as influencing the six-team formation characteristics. These findings will need further empirical rigor before they can become a complete Agile Software Development team composition model. This model is believed to assist Agile practitioners in forming effective teams for their development projects.

Usability has been increasingly recognized as a significant quality dimension to determine the success of mobile applications. Due to its importance, a number of usability guidelines have been proposed to direct the design of usable applications. The guidelines are intended particularly for desktop and web-based applications. Mobile applications on the other hand are different in many ways from those applications due to the mobility nature of mobile devices. To date, the usability guidelines for mobile applications are very limited. They in fact are isolated, which makes usability evaluation for mobile devices more difficult. This study aims to address this issue by proposing a set of usability dimensions that should be considered for designing and evaluating mobile applications. The dimensions are illustrated as a model that considers four contextual factors: user, environment, technology and task/activity. The model was proposed based on the reviews of previous related studies, which were analyzed by using content analysis approach. Twenty-five dimensions were found from the analysis. The dimensions however were synthesized and prioritized based on their importance towards designing usable mobile applications. As a result, ten most important dimensions were outlined in the model. The model can be used by practitioners and researchers as a guideline to design usable mobile applications and further research can be conducted in the near future.

Software testing outsourcing appears to be the best alternative to acquire better software quality with competent ratification by extrinsic parties who have the capability to do it. Through the effort, organizations are peeking to promising benefits constitute in it such as current testing technology, experts, an abridgment of the project’s duration and more concentration on the main organisation’s activity. Along with these benefits, one important reason that encourages the decision is optimization of cost expenditure, which the strategy is perceived as a good move for a competitive organization. However, implementing such preference eventually results in a different outcome. Organizations have to bear the higher cost and incur losses of cost deviation from the expected estimation. The conflicting between cost and benefits raises an important concern of striving better cost estimation for such projects. This paper aims to address this interest by analyzing the existing literature in order to identify the contributing factors towards better cost estimation for software testing outsourcing project-context. The analysis is done using the content analysis method. The results could be divided into two categories; which are the cost items and contributing factors. Cost items consist of direct cost and indirect cost, which refers to the expenses for the project. While the contributing factors consist of people and environment, which are needed to produce accurate cost estimation. The findings provide an insight to excogitate attentively the essentials in the endeavor of improving the exactitude of cost estimation for software testing outsourcing project.

Scrumban is a combination of practices from Kanban and Scrum practices to manage the development of software based on different project situations. Scrumban practices formation can differ based on different projects and team members. However, since each method has its own pros and cons, inappropriate formation of Scrumban practices may lead to increased waste and time of development, and decreased quality, which in turn, affect the Agile organizations and cause inefficient and ineffective development. Practitioners of Kanban and Scrum are convinced that a combination of both methods is better than the use of one and thus, practitioners should be guided in their decision making. This study aims to show how Scrumban method is formed based on a combination of Kanban and Scrum methods. Scrumban formation and the identification of the factors, which assist in the combination of Kanban and Scrum were conducted through a review of the previous work and semi-structured interviews with 7 Agile experts, after which, content analysis was conducted to analyse the gathered data. Different factors - the method prescription, roles and responsibilities, adoption time, team size, batch size, requirements prioritization, feature size, lead time, technical practices, cost and quality, assist Agile team members in the formation of Scrumban by combining appropriate Kanban and Scrum practices. In addition, Scrumban were found to be more appropriate than Scrum or Kanban in saving time, improving quality and minimizing waste.

Computer Programming is a core subject in Computer Science. This course requires the analysis and solving of problem critically. These skills are also required in preparing Computer Science students for the career world. Problem-based Learning is thus regarded as one of the suitable methods for Teaching and Learning programming. Although this method has been proven to hone student skills in other areas such as Medicine, its usage in Computer Programming courses has yet to bring about any impacts. This is because, to date, Problem-based Learning has been employed based on the practitioner’s intuition without specifically meeting the principles and concepts of Programming courses from the human, process, and product aspects. The human aspect involves practitioners during the process. The framework for this study is built using a qualitative method that combines theoretical and empirical studies. The theoretical study includes reviews of the implementation of previous Problem-based Learning in Computer Science as well as other fields. The empirical study involves information obtained from both the theoretical and empirical studies were analysed by utilising the Thematic Analysis method to generate the proposed framework for this study. This framework can be utilised as a guide for the management and practitioners in Computer Science education to use Problem-based Learning as an effective Teaching and Learning method for Programming courses.

Agile methods have become popular in recent years because the success rate of project development using Agile methods is better than structured design methods. Nevertheless, less than 50 percent of projects implemented using Agile methods are considered successful, and selecting the wrong Agile method is one of the reasons for project failure. Selecting the most appropriate Agile method is a challenging task because there are so many to choose from. In addition, potential adopters believe that migrating to an Agile method involves taking a drastic risk. Therefore, to assist project managers and other decision makers, this study aims to identify the key factors that should be considered when selecting an appropriate Agile method. A systematic literature review was performed to elicit these factors in an unbiased manner and then content analysis was used to analyze the resultant data. It was found that the nature of project, development team skills, project constraints, customer involvement and organizational culture are the key factors that should guide decision makers in the selection of an appropriate Agile method based on the value these factors have for different organizations and/or different projects.

Information security management (ISM) is a continuous, structured and systematic security approach to manage and protect the organisation’s information from being compromised by irresponsible parties. To ensure the information remains secure, many organisations have implemented ISM by establishing and reviewing information security (IS) policy, processes, procedures and organisational structures. Regardless of the efforts, security threats, incidents, vulnerabilities and risks are still plaguing many organisations. Lack of awareness of ISM effectiveness due to low understanding of the success factors is one of the major factors that cause this phenomenon. This study aimed to address this subject by firstly identifying the ISM key factors from existing literature and then by confirming the factors and discovering other related factors from practitioners’ perspective. This study used qualitative method where it adopted semi-structured interviews involving nine practitioners. The data were analysed using content analysis technique. Through the analysis, the study validated several ISM factors and their elements that contribute to the success of ISM. The findings provide practitioners with the high understanding of ISM key factors and could guide practitioners in implementing proper ISM.

Agile methods such as Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), Extreme Programming (XP), SCRUM, Agile Modeling (AM) and Crystal Clear enable small teams to execute assigned task at their best. However, larger organizations aim at incorporating more Agile methods owing to the fact that its application is prevalently tailored for small teams. The scope in which large firms are interested will extend the original Agile methods to include larger teams, coordination, communication among teams and customers as well as oversight. Determining particular software method is always challenging for software companies especially when considering start-up, small to medium or large enterprises. Most of large organizations develop large-scale projects by teams of teams or teams of teams of teams. Therefore, most recognized Agile methods or first-generation methods such as XP and SCRUM need to be modified before they are employed in large organizations; which is not an easy task. Accomplishing said task would necessitate large organizations to pick and select from the scaling Agile methods in accommodating a single vision for large and multiple teams. Deciding the right choice requires wholesome understanding of the method including its strengths and weaknesses as well as when and how it makes sense. Therefore, the main aim of this paper is to review the existing literature of the utilized scaling Agile methods by defining, discussing and comparing them. In-depth reviews on the literature were performed to juxtapose the methods in impartial manner. In addition, the content analysis was used to analyse the resultant data. The result indicated that the DAD, LeSS, LeSS huge, SAFe, Spotify, Nexus and RAGE are the adopted scaling Agile methods at large organizations. They seem to be similar but there are discrepancies among them that take the form of team size, training and certification, methods and practices adopted, technical practices required and organizational type.

User requirements are in high demand due to advancements of technology and business needs. Therefore it is extremely difficult to achieve user requirements at one single time. Agile methods have been introduced to mitigate such issues by implementing user requirements incrementally and iteratively. The top significant aspect in agile development is selecting a group of prominent requirements to be implemented in iteration. This could be derived from continuous requirements prioritisation (RP). To assign which requirements should be selected by practitioners is considered one of the obstacles faced in the process of implementing the inter-iteration period. This study aimed to identify the RP elements and factors that should be considered through the RP process in agile software development. The elements and factors were identified through a review of previous studies and in-depth interviews involving 18 agile practitioners from different software development organizations in different countries (i.e., Malaysia and Jordan), over a period of 2 years. To get the best result, the data is analyzed by using grounded theory techniques (Open, Axial and Selective coding). The elements and factors from the RP process will guide practitioners to an effective RP process that can produce high quality requirements, which are expected to meet the needs of the intended users.