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We report the case of a 36-year-old male who was referred to us with a provisional diagnosis of ethanol-related acute on chronic liver failure with ascites, encephalopathy, and altered liver function tests (LFTs). The patient underwent a living donor liver transplant. Posttransplant, he had an uneventful recovery till postoperative day (POD) day 7 when he developed tachycardia and low-grade fever. The immunosuppression has to be withheld till POD 26. The patient later developed deranged LFT and an initial liver biopsy showed features of acute cellular rejection. He also had ongoing tachycardia; thus, immunosuppression was withheld. Subsequent to that patient developed rapid progression from progressive early to chronic rejection (CR) within 78 days posttransplant. The patient initially responded to antithymocyte globulin, but finally succumbed to fungal infection. CR usually occurs over 6 months posttransplant. The occurrence of CR was noted very early in the index patients. This case highlights the importance of a basic step-wise approach to a case post liver transplant. It also highlights the importance of specialized liver histopathology aiding in early diagnosis.

The software organizations widely consider the cloud based global software development (CGSD) as it offer the quality projects with low cast. The adoption of CGSD is challenging due to the geographical distance between practitioners. This study aims to identify and analyses the motivators that could positively impact the implementation of CGSD paradigm. The systematic literature review approach was applied to identify the CGSD motivators reported in the literature, and were further validated with industry experts using questionnaire survey study. Moreover, the fuzzy-AHP approach was applied to prioritize the investigated motivators concerning their significance for the successful adoption of CGSD. The findings of the study provide the prioritization-based taxonomy of the investigated motivators that assists the software organizations to develop and revise their strategies for the successful implementation of CGSD.

Currently, being deployed by organizations to develop high-quality software at a low cost, global software development (GSD) faces many challenges that make development activities more complex. These GSD challenges are mainly concerned with requirements to change management (RCM). RCM plays a key role in the successful execution of software projects. The objective of this paper is to identify the best practices of the RCM process by adopting a systematic literature review (SLR) and validate them using questionnaire survey with industry experts. A total of 46 best practices were identified through SLR and validated with industry experts. We have further classified the identified practices in the domain of client and vendor GSD organizations with the aim to provide a clear understanding of the RCM best practices in the context of both types of GSD organizations (client, vendor). Moreover, we have conducted a comparison analysis between SLR and questionnaire survey data and found a moderate positive correlation in the ranks of both data sets (rs = 0.522, p=0.003). In addition, the criticality of the identified best practices was assessed using the criteria of a practice having frequency ≥50%. The findings of this paper provide a framework that could help the GSD organizations to address the problems related to RCM in GSD environment.

Quality is the most important factor for software development as it mainly defines customer satisfaction that is directly related to the success of a software project. The software process model is used to ensure software quality, represent a variety of task settings, manage project duration, improve the process and range to execute the process understanding, and to appropriate implicit conjecture for all task settings. Several software processes models exist in software albeit with limited scope. Given this viewpoint, this paper presents a new software development life cycle model, “AZ-Model”, for software development by introducing new activities during software development life cycle. It overcomes the limitations of traditional models and significantly impacts the production of a quality product in a time-box. This paper also presents a comprehensive comparative study and statistical analyses to examine the significance of AZ-Model for software development.

Traditionally, software development organizations relied on heavyweight development methodologies, such as waterfall, V-model, and others. Later, agile development methodologies known as lightweight methodologies were introduced. Many considered these to be more flexible and more effective than heavyweight methodologies. Both methodologies are equally important for a software development life cycle. The purpose of adopting software development methodologies is to optimize the process model to achieve milestones while concurrently and effectively managing time, budget, and quality. The literature review reveals that there is a lack of statistical evidence for determining the effect of both methodologies on the six-pointed star model (schedule, scope, budget, risk, resource, and quality). In this paper, statistical comparisons were performed for the effects of both methodologies on each factor of the six-pointed star model and the interdependency among factors. Numerical analyses were conducted based on survey responses collected from the experienced users of both methodologies. After examining the results of all the factors of both methodologies, it was determined that lightweight methodologies are suitable for small-scale projects and that heavyweight methodologies perform better for mediumand large-scale projects.

Presently, global software development (GSD) is growing very rapidly. However, it is not an easy and straightforward process. Requirements engineering (RE) and requirements change management (RCM) both are considered as very challenging activities due to demanding rich communications. Because it is necessary to address geographical and cultural differences in GSD, this requirement makes RE and RCM challenging. This paper investigates the importance of project management in RE and RCM processes. First, the frameworks with the phenomena of specialized project management are proposed for RE and RCM. Then, a survey and blind interviews of the experts are conducted to validate the proposed frameworks. Finally, statistical tools are applied to analyze the collected data. By utilizing the analyzed data, our results show the significant impacts of both frameworks (i.e., RE and RCM) in the GSD environment.

Software development organizations are globalizing their activities by adopting the phenomenon of global software development (GSD), mainly due to the significant return on investment it offers. Various challenges are associated with the software process improvement (SPI). The aim of this paper is to develop a software process improvement implementation and management model (SPIIMM) that can assist GSD organizations in assessing and improving their SPI activities. A thorough systematic literature review (SLR) study was performed to identify the critical success factors (CSFs), critical barriers (CBs), and the relevant practices of SPI. An empirical study of the industry was conducted with 111 SPI experts using a survey questionnaire to verify the outcomes of the SLR. The final CSFs and CBs were categorized into five maturity levels based on the implementation maturity model, the software outsourcing vendor readiness model, and capability maturity model integration. Each maturity level consisted of different CSFs and CBs to assess and improve the SPI-related maturity level of an organization. Three case studies were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The results revealed that SPIIMM can provide a robust framework to assess and improve SPI activities in GSD organizations.

Context: The use of controlled vocabularies (CVs) aims to increase the quality of the specifications of the software requirements, by producing well-written documentation to reduce both ambiguities and complexity. Many studies suggest that defects introduced at the requirements engineering (RE) phase have a negative impact, significantly higher than defects in the later stages of the software development lifecycle. However, the knowledge we have about the impact of using CVs, in specific RE activities, is very scarce. Objective: To identify and classify the type of CVs, and the impact they have on the requirements engineering phase of software development. Method: A systematic mapping study, collecting empirical evidence that is published up to July 2019. Results: This work identified 2348 papers published pertinent to CVs and RE, but only 90 primary published papers were chosen as relevant. The process of data extraction revealed that 79 studies reported the use of ontologies, whereas the remaining 11 were focused on taxonomies. The activities of RE with greater empirical support were those of specification (29 studies) and elicitation (28 studies). Seventeen different impacts of the CVs on the RE activities were classified and ranked, being the two most cited: guidance and understanding (38%), and automation and tool support (22%). Conclusions: The evolution of the last 10 years in the number of published papers shows that interest in the use of CVs remains high. The research community has a broad representation, distributed across the five continents. Most of the research focuses on the application of ontologies and taxonomies, whereas the use of thesauri and folksonomies is less reported. The evidence demonstrates the usefulness of the CVs in all RE activities, especially during elicitation and specification, helping developers understand, facilitating the automation process and identifying defects, conflicts and ambiguities in the requirements. Collaboration in research between academic and industrial contexts is low and should be promoted.