We all want to be associated with long lasting ideas; as originators, or at least, expositors. For a tyro researcher or a seasoned veteran, knowing how long an idea will remain interesting in the community is critical in choosing and pursuing research threads. In the physical sciences, the notion of half-life is often evoked to quantify decaying intensity. In this paper, we study a corpus of 19,000+ papers written by 21,000+ authors across 16 software engineering publication venues from 1975 to 2010, to empirically determine the half-life of software engineering research topics. In the absence of any consistent and well-accepted methodology for associating research topics to a publication, we have used natural language processing techniques to semi-automatically identify and associate a set of topics with a paper. We adapted measures of half-life already existing in the bibliometric context for our study, and also defined a new measure based on publication and citation counts. We find evidence that some of the identified research topics show a mean half-life of close to 15 years, and there are topics with sustaining interest in the community. We report the methodology of our study in this paper, as well as the implications and utility of our results.

Business processes play an important role in organizations; however, not enough attention is given to analyzing and modeling errors in them. In this paper, we study syntactic and control flow error frequencies in business processes from real industry projects. Our samples come from a number of application domains such as Banking and Capital Markets, Insurance and Healthcare, and Retail. We consider industrial business processes modeled in Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and use graph-theoretic techniques and Petri net-based analyses to detect syntactic and control flow-related errors, respectively. We then use a set of metrics that capture different network characteristics of the models and study the empirical relations between the metrics and process errors. The major results of the empirical investigation are: 1) multiple edges to or from tasks as well as hanging nodes are the predominant forms of syntactic errors, 2) syntactic errors occur frequently in Retail & Logistics domain and significantly less in the Insurance and Healthcare domain, and 3) the probability of error occurrence can be modeled as a function of node size and coefficient of connectivity through a logistic regression model which correctly classified 97.6 percent of the cases.

Research into software engineering (SE) education is largely concentrated on teaching and learning issues in coursework programs. This paper, in contrast, provides a meta analysis of research publications in software engineering to help with research education in SE. Studying publication patterns in a discipline will assist research students and supervisors gain a deeper understanding of how successful research has occurred in the discipline. We present results from a large scale empirical study covering over three and a half decades of software engineering research publications. We identify how different factors of publishing relate to the number of papers published as well as citations received for a researcher, and how the most successful researchers collaborate and co-cite one another. Our results show that authors with high publication rates do not concentrate on a few selected venues to publish, researchers with high publication rates behave differently from researchers of high citation rates (with the latter group co-authoring and citing their peers to a much lesser extent than the former), and collaborators citing each other's works is not a significant phenomenon in SE research.

Hiding critical information has resulted in disastrous failures of some major software projects. This paper investigates, using a subset of Keil's test, how graduates (70% of them with work experience) from different cultural backgrounds who are enrolled in a postgraduate course on global software development would handle negative information that is critical in a project. The subjects were mainly from Europe and Asia. The results showed that the subjects are highly likely to report critical information to their immediate supervisors (t(36)=-11, p<;0.0005), but are undecided on whether they would take the matter further up the organisational hierarchy if the supervisor ignored their report. There was no significant difference between participants of different regions, or between those with and without work experience. The consequences of negative information not reaching the level where remedial actions can be taken could be serious in software projects. The results of this experiment point to the need to incorporate in software engineering curriculum the teaching of the ethical responsibility of effective communication of bad news.

A preliminary work in support of our research in developing ontology driven LO extraction analyzes some of the existing Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS) with emphasis on Architecture and Design Issues. Learning Object Repositories (LOR) have great impact on retrieval and storage of contents, so performance improvement issues via content aggregation in LORs have been studied in this paper. The paper discusses the challenges that are being faced by Web-Based LCMS with regards to content extraction.

Mum effect is the risk arising from project members’ reluctance to report negative information. We investigate the cultural factors contributing to this risk in offshore outsourcing. The study was conducted in Thailand with participation from both students and IT professionals. In order to understand the influence of the IT work environment on the risks, we used the student data as a control sample since students and professionals share the same cultural background but only the professionals have the work experience in the IT industry. We use three of Hofstede's cultural characteristics (power distance (PD), long-term orientation and individualism) and three mum effect factors (fear of consequences, communication gap and team solidarity). Our findings show that PD (i.e. inequality based on seniority and other status symbols) has a significant influence on a mum effect factor. Professionals correlate it with team solidarity (Pearson's r = 0.7, p < 0.001) indicating that PD with superiors is likely to influence team members to be protective of each other. There were also significant differences between students’ and professionals’ mean response to PD (t(75) = −2.97, p = 0.004), fear of consequences (t(75) = −3.67, p < 0.001) and communication gap (t(75) = −3.5, p = 0.001), with professionals producing lower mean values, indicating that the work environment within the IT companies is possibly less risky than the general culture.

Mum Effect is an important software project risk. The risk indicates members of projects not speaking out when they are aware of problems; this silence in turn can lead to project failure. In a multi-cultural offshoring scenario, culture is very much likely to influence both the intensity and probability of mum effect. We have proposed a model for mum effect which identifies three causes, namely, communication gap, fear of consequences and team solidarity. This study demonstrates the relationships between cultural dimensions and potential causes of mum effect among IT students. Understanding the perceptions of students is important to better design courses on software project management in outsourced environments.

Offshore outsourcing has become a cost-saving measure in modern software businesses. However, there are numerous risks associated in this business model. Among these risks, "mum effect" could be one of the serious threats to software development projects. This paper extends our previous work on the perceived probability of "mum effect" in offshore outsourcing scenarios based on cultural dimensions. It introduces a mum effect multidimensional model, and describes the perceived relationship between mum effect factors and cultural differences.

As part of a larger research project whose objective was to determine the antecedent condition for e-Procurement assimilation, this paper assesses the organizational e-Business capabilities and supplier readiness in the Australian public sector. With the help of an extensive literature review and pilot study, organizational e-Business capabilities and supplier e-Business readiness factors were identified, a research model was developed and hypotheses were formulated. Based on the Resource-based View of the firm, it is argued that organizational e-Business capabilities such as authentication, interoperability, legal framework, open standards, and security and privacy and also supplier e-Business readiness factors positively impact the transactional and strategic assimilation of e-Procurement. A nationwide web-based survey of Procurement/e-Procurement professionals in the Australian public sector is in the final stage of completion at the time of writing of this paper and analysis of the complete set of data will be presented at the conference. Interested readers can also obtain the results of this study by emailing one of the authors of the paper.

In component-based systems, regression test selection is a challenge since vendors of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components do not release source code. We model the regression test selection of component based software systems using UML and Object-Constraint Language. Our model selects test cases based on version information that can be made available with components without the need for accessing source code.

Software size is a fundamental product measure that can be used for assessment, prediction and improvement purposes. However, existing software size measures, such as function points, do not address the underlying problem complexity of software systems adequately. This can result in disproportional measures of software size for different types of systems. We propose a vector size measure (VSM) that incorporates both functionality and problem complexity in a balanced and orthogonal manner. The VSM is used as the input to a vector prediction model (VPM) which can be used to estimate development effort early in the software life-cycle. We theoretically validate the approach against a formal framework. We also empirically validate the approach with a pilot study. The results indicate that the approach provides a mechanism to measure the size of software systems, classify software systems, and estimate development effort early in the software life-cycle to within /spl plusmn/20% across a range of application types.

Inheritance Anomaly is considered as a major problem in integrating object-orientation and concurrency. The anomaly forces redefinitions of inherited methods to maintain the integrity of concurrent objects. In this paper we discuss how the use of boolean, access and path guards attached to methods solve the problem of inheritance anomaly. Synchronization using boolean guards have known to be free of inheritance anomaly caused by partitioning of acceptable states. However, they cause anomalies from history sensitivity. We solve this using path guards. Path guards are similar to path expressions in the sense that both express the execution pattern of methods. However while a path expression independently specifies the synchronization of a collection of methods, a path guard is attached to a method and it specifies the history of execution sequence(s) acceptable for executing the current method. Path expressions have been shown to cause inheritance anomaly, on the other hand, we will show that path guards form a solution to the problem.