Browsing by Subject "software development"

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    Open Access
    Critical success factors influencing agile software development projects: a theoretical and empirical investigation
    (2025) Hanslo, Ridewaan; Tanner, Maureen
    Context: Information systems are the infrastructure and service backbone for many of today's organisations. The Agile mindset to software development and project delivery has substantially improved project outcomes compared to traditional software development methodologies. However, while Agile projects are more successful than traditional approaches, the success rate is considered low, and the percentage of Agile projects deemed challenged and failed is still too high. This low project success rate is attributed to projects not being rigorously evaluated against critical success factors of Agile projects and contemporary project success criteria. Furthermore, criticisms of the status quo include the lack of rigorous research into the factors that improve Agile project success. Therefore, this study examines the critical factors influencing Agile software development project success against project success criteria through a theoretical and empirical investigation. Objective: To identify the critical success factors that contribute to Agile software development project success as perceived by Agile practitioners and explain how they contribute to project success. Method: This study used a positivist approach to investigate the critical success factors of agile software development projects. A systematic literature review was conducted to identify and synthesise previous research, providing input to the quantitative survey questionnaire to identify Agile practitioners' perceived critical factors contributing to project success criteria. Partial least squares structural equation modelling with SmartPLS was used to analyse the data and test the hypotheses to identify significant relationships between the constructs and project success criteria. Results: This research found that a few critical factors significantly contribute to Agile project success. The Agile team's skilled individuals and appropriate group dynamics significantly impact stakeholder satisfaction. How well project activities, processes, and phases are managed has a positive relationship with stakeholder satisfaction and the project schedule. In addition, having an organised system and control mechanisms contributes to adhering to project schedules and cost estimates. Contribution: The study developed a novel model that can be used to evaluate and measure project success. Furthermore, the critical success factor, socio-technical systems, and the complex adaptive systems theories were used to identify, describe, and explain how the few significant critical success factors contribute to Agile software development project success, providing novel insights. Conclusion: This research contributes to a parsimonious model of critical success factors for Agile software development projects. Furthermore, this study provides practical guidance for organisations seeking to improve project success. By focusing on team effectiveness, project governance, and project management, organisations can enhance stakeholder satisfaction and achieve better adherence to project cost and schedule constraints. This study's findings offer a nuanced understanding of the interplay between these critical success factors and project success criteria, providing insight from multiple theoretical lenses. Future research could explore the dynamic relationships between these factors and investigate their applicability across diverse project contexts
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    Open Access
    Designing an effective user interface for the Android tablet environment
    (2015) Chang, Genevieve; Kuttel, Michelle Mary
    With over 1.3 million applications on the Android marketplace, there is increasing competition between mobile applications for customer sales. As usability is a significant factor in an application's success, many mobile developers refer to the Android design guidelines when designing the user interface (UI). These principles help to provide consistency of navigation and aesthetics, with the rest of the Android platform. However, misinterpretation of the abstract guidelines may mean that patterns and elements selected to organise content of an application do not improve the usability. Therefore, usability tests would be beneficial to ensure that an application meets objectives efficiently and improve on user experience. Usability testing is an important and crucial step in the mobile development process Many freelance developers, however, have limited resources for usability testing, even though the advantages of usability feedback during initial development stages are clear and can save time and money in the long-run. In this thesis, we investigate which method of usability testing is most useful for resource constrained mobile developers. To test the efficacy of Android guidelines, three alternate designs of a unique Android tablet application, Glycano, are developed. High-fidelity paper prototypes were presented to end-users for usability testing and to usability experts for heuristic evaluations. Both usability and heuristic tests demonstrated that following the Android guidelines aids in user familiarity and learnability. Regardless of the different UI designs of the three mockups, Android guidelines provided an initial level of usability by providing familiarity to proficient users and an intuitiveness of certain patterns to new users. However, efficiency in building Glycano schematics was an issue that arose consistently. Testing with end-users and experts, revealed several navigational problems. Usability experts uncovered more general UI problems than the end-user group, who focused more on the content of the application. More refinements and suggestions of additional features to enhance usability and user experience were provided by the experts. Use of usability experts would therefore be most advantageous in initial design stages of an application. Feedback from usability testing is, however, also beneficial and is more valuable than not performing any test at all.
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    Specification and implementation of the Larch shared language
    (1989) Everett, Yvonne; MacGregor, Ken
    This project aims to prototype formal specification in Larch. The motivation for looking at formal specifications stems from an appreciation of the problem outlined above, frustration with current methods, and a desire to practise what is preached. The aim is to implement a formal specification language, to write a non-trivial specification and to employ formal methods of specification during software development. As a result, one should have a thorough understanding of a formal specification language, and the practical implications of using it as a basis for formal methods.
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    Supporting mobile developers through a Java IDE
    (2008) Ogunleye, Olalekan Samuel; Marsden, Gary
    There exist several challenges in supporting mobile applications. For example, creating a separate target application for each device type, leaving developers with a huge maintenance chore. Most desktop applications run on largely homogenous hardware so instead of writing the same code over and over again, developers only need to write modules to implement a particular need. This is because even though there are differences in PC hardware configurations, the same desktop application will work fine on any hardware as the operating system provides an abstract layer. This is the way mobile applications are expected to work. However, this has been divided into dozens of ill-assorted versions. Java mobile applications developers spend more time rewriting code to run on different versions of mobile devices more than they do actually creating application in the first place. This is an intolerable burden for small mobile developers, and it stifles mobile software innovation overall. Mobile devices differ in a variety of attributes, such as screen size, colour depth and the optional hardware devices they support such as cameras, GPS etc. The differences often require special code or project settings for successful deployment for each device a developer is targeting but this creates a huge logistical overhead. One potential solution that is shipped with NetBeans IDE is to add a new configuration for each device, modify the project properties, add some pre-processing code, then build and deploy the application. In most cases, one configuration for each distribution of the Java Archive (JAR) one plans to build for the project is created. For example, if a developer is planning to support three· different screen sizes using two sets of vendor specific APIs, one needs to create six configurations. This reduces the performance of the application drastically and increases the size at the same time. This is not acceptable for mobile devices where memory size and processor performance are limited. The goal of this research work is to support mobile application development through a Java IDE (the NetBeans IDE in this case). Therefore, our approach will be to modify the NetBeans IDE to better address the difficulty that was mentioned above - namely targeting applications for different platforms. Our solution is to integrate another type of a preprocessor into the NetBeans IDE that will help alleviate the problems of the existing tool. Our approach is to directly implement this inside the NetBeans IDE to further support mobile application development with the NetBeans IDE.