Abstract The Software Process Improvement (SPI) Manifesto is based on three basic values: people, business focus and organisational change underpinning the philosophy of SPI. In turn, these values bring up to date certain SPI principles serving as a foundation for action in software development. The authors of this paper carried out a pilot expert validation of the sociocultural dimension of the sociocultural, technical, economic, environmental, political, legal, ethical and demographic analysis of the SPI Manifesto. Further, the authors report on the rationale and results of the pilot validation of both the survey instrument and the qualitative responses generated by the field experts, targeting to enlighten and reinforce the importance of the sociocultural dimension of the SPI Manifesto in research and development. The related literature review findings and the pilot research study strengthen this target. The pilot study with experts in particular provided stronger indications that the sociocultural dimension is considered of high importance by between 62% and 88% of the respondents, who were IT and computing professionals and software practitioners from academia and industry.

We propose a novel hierarchical sliding slice regression which in a coarse-to-fine manner represents global circular target space with a number of ordinally localized and overlapping subspaces. Our method is particularly suitable for visual regression problems where the regression target is circular (e.g., car viewing angle) and visual similarity inconsistent over the target space (e.g., repetitive appearance). A good application example is the camera-based car viewing angle estimation problem, where visual similarity of different views is highly inconsistent-front and back views and left and right side views are pair-wise similar, but appear at the far ends of the circular view angle space. In practice, the problem is even more complicated due to large visual variation of objects (e.g., different car models). We perform extensive experiments on the Lausanne Federal of Institute of Technology Multi-view Car and KITTI Data Sets as well as the Technische Universitat Darmstadt Multi-view Pedestrians Data Set and achieve superior performance as compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.

In web browsers, a variety of anti-phishing tools and technologies are available to assist users to identify phishing attempts and potentially harmful pages. Such anti-phishing tools and technologies provide Internet users with essential information, such as warnings of spoofed pages. To determine how well users are able to recognise and identify phishing web pages with anti-phishing tools, we designed and conducted usability tests for two types of phishing-detection applications: blacklist-based and whitelist-based anti-phishing toolbars. The research results mainly indicate no significant performance differences between the application types. We also observed that, in many web browsing cases, a significant amount of useful and practical information for users is absent, such as information explaining professional web page security certificates. Such certificates are crucial in ensuring user privacy and protection. We also found other deficiencies in web identities in web pages and web browsers that present challenges to the design of anti-phishing toolbars. These challenges will require more professional, illustrative, instructional, and reliable information for users to facilitate user verification of the authenticity of web pages and their content.

Action-oriented service and technology development begins with the idea that people use technologies to reach their action goals. Consequently, we should investigate user needs and how they can be satisfied, and adapt services and technologies to the natural course of actions. Here, we focus on family communication and investigate mobile communication service types for families. For this study 10 mothers were interviewed; we investigated the nature of their everyday information and communication needs and the different knowledge and information transfer actions that were discovered in their families. Qualitative analysis of these interviews was used to generate a taxonomy, which, in turn, can help in providing enhanced individual services and family-centred design models.