Local government may face different challenges in adopting IT innovation due to its unique characteristic in terms of business functions which dealt directly with the citizens, organisational type, structure, and geographic location. To date, although numerous review studies on IT innovation adoption have been carried out, nevertheless there are obvious limitations in a local government context. Hence, this study aims to put forward an explanation for critical influential determinants of IT innovation adoption in local government contexts by reviewing related works from the year 2013 to 2017. This study has identified influential technological, organisational, individual, and environmental determinants of IT innovation adoption in a local government context. The most striking finding is that critical influential determinants of IT innovation in local government context were organisational (leadership, governance), technological (perceived benefits, cost), individual (personnel skills), and environmental (policy and regulations, citizen influence). The results from this study will help other researchers to understand the critical influential determinants of IT innovation adoption, particularly in a local government context.

Memory operations are critical to an application's reliability and performance. To reason about their correctness and track opportunities for optimisations, sophisticated instrumentation frameworks, such as Valgrind and Pin, have been developed. Both provide only limited facilities for analysing the collected data. This work presents a Valgrind's extension for examining a software applications’ dynamic memory profile through live interactive analysis with SQL. The Pico COllections Query Library (pico ql) module maps Valgrind's data structures that contain the instrumented application's memory operations metadata to a relational interface. Queries are type-safe and the module imposes only a trivial overhead when idle. The authors evaluate the proposed approach on ten applications and through a qualitative study. They find 900 kb of undefined bytes in bzip2 that account for 12% of its total memory use and a performance-critical code execution path in the Unix commands sort and uniq. The referenced functions are part of glibc and have been independently modified to boost the library's performance. The qualitative study has users rate the usefulness, usability, effort, correctness, and expressiveness of pico ql queries compared to Python scripts. The findings indicate that querying with pico ql incurs lower user effort.

Design rationale is the synthesis of the structure that is consistent with the model of an artefact, decisions, alternative approaches, and the reasoning behind it. Hence, bypassing it will result in poor quality systems engineering. Ambiguous representation of design rationale goals is just one of the many limitations that contributes to the intricacy of design patterns, thereby this research aims to introduce an approach to support the structuring, evaluation, and analysis of design patterns. The authors have proposed a method and implemented an associated tool with a mechanism that validates the class relationships and properties of design patterns comprehensively, resulting in a reliable pattern detection result. The preliminary results of the proposed research show that although detection and evaluation of a design pattern require some overhead using the approach, it does contribute to the confidence of the developers and gives affirmation that the design pattern implemented in the source code achieves its defined rationale goals based on the gang of four definition of design patterns through the reliable pattern detection output and straightforward evaluation result. The conclusion could be drawn that through the proposed approach, the preliminary result resolves the intricacy of design rationale traceability while achieving software quality is permissible.

Software companies need to employ state-of-the-art technologies to meet customer requirements. Owing to the complexity of contemporary software products and uncertainty concerning the budget for the required resources, companies use process-oriented quality management techniques in order to guarantee appropriate product quality. In this light, standardised quality assurance system that uses the capability maturity model integration-development (CMMI-DEV) program are incorporated into software development processes, and software companies aim to enhance productivity by acquiring CMMI-DEV certificates. In this study, an approach based on CMMI-DEV is used to develop software process diversity for an international company. The results show that the proposed software process diversity model can be used to assess and improve processes in middle-sized software companies that have identical technical frameworks and similar business structures.

In recent years, smart TVs have become more common, making them need to be included as targets for the software industry. In this study, the authors developed a code generator framework and demonstrated it in an architectural view. The proposed framework converts C# programming language based projects, in a Windows Forms or a Windows Phone Application project, into native smart TV Platform applications. The selected primary smart TV platforms assigned for application conversion were Android TV, Firefox OS, and Tizen OS. The authors enabled developers to generate native codes for all three platforms from a single code base using model to model conversion, as in the model driven architecture approach with the use of the open source Roslyn C# language compiler. The need for creating projects for every single platform to make them run on different platforms will thus be eliminated and development cycles shortened. By doing so, the time required to develop an application for each platform is reduced while keeping the generated applications’ quality as high as the original application. To show the functionality, the proposed approach is applied in three case studies. The success of the code conversion is satisfactory and converted applications are functional.

Path-based equivalence checkers (PBECs) have been successfully applied for verification of programmes from diverse domains and from various stages of high-level synthesis. In the case of non-equivalence, PBEC provides very little information which is not sufficient for further investigation of the two programmes being compared by some human expert. In this work, the authors show how a counter-trace (cTrace) can be generated in the case of non-equivalence reported by the PBEC. Using this cTrace, they also present a procedure to find suitable initialisation values for input variables which reveal the non-equivalence (i.e. counter-example) by using off-the-shelf satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solvers. To aid the human expert, they also show that how they can visualise this cTrace in the control and data-flow graph of the programmes using the graph visualisation software – Graphviz. This counter-example and visual representation of the corresponding cTrace will be helpful in debugging the root cause of the non-equivalence. The experimental results are encouraging.

A combinatorial testing (CT) is an important technique usually employed in the generation of test cases. The generation of an optimal sized test case is a non-deterministic polynomial hard problem. In recent times, many researchers had developed various strategies based on the search-based approach to address the CT issues. This study presented the most recent variable interaction strength (VS) CT strategy using an enhanced variant in the greedy algorithm. Hence, they are referred to as variable strength modified greedy strategy (VS-MGS). Moreover, the modified strategy supports a VS together with interaction strength up to six. The proposed variant-greedy algorithm employed the elitism mechanism alongside the iteration in order to improve its efficiency. This algorithm is invariably called the modified greedy algorithm (MGA). Furthermore, the efficiency and performance of the VS-MGS using MGA were assessed first by comparing its results with the original greedy algorithm results and thereafter benchmarked with the results of the existing VS CT strategies. The VS-MGS's results ultimately revealed that the adaptation of elitism mechanism with iteration in greedy algorithm resulted in an improved efficiency in the process of generating a near-optimal test case set size.

While mobile instant messaging applications such as WhatsApp, Messenger, Viber offer benefits to phone users such as price, easy usage, stable, collective and direct communication, SMS (short message service) is still considered a more reliable privacy-preserving technology for mobile communication. This situation directs the institutions that want to perform the product promotion such as advertising, informing, promotion etc. to use SMS. However, spam messages sent from unknown sources constitute a serious problem for SMS recipients. In this study, a content-based classification model which uses the machine learning to filter out unwanted messages is proposed. From the selected dataset, the model to be used in the classification is created with the help of Word2Vec word embedding tool. Thanks to this model, two new features are revealed for calculating the distances of messages to spam and ham words. The performances of the classification algorithms are compared by taking these two new features into consideration. The random forest method succeeded with a correct accuracy rate of 99.64%. In comparison to other studies using the same dataset, more successful correct classification percentage is achieved.

Adaptive metacognitive scaffolding is developed to provide learning assistance on an as-needed basis; thus, advances the effectiveness of computer-based learning systems. Metacognitive scaffoldings have been developed for some science subjects; however, not for algorithm-learning. The learning algorithm is different from learning science as it is more oriented to problem-solving; therefore, this study is aimed to describe the modelling, development, and evaluation of the adaptive metacognitive scaffolding which is dedicated for encouraging algorithm-learning. In addition, the authors present a new approach for learner modelling to find students’ metacognitive state. Adaptivity of the scaffolding is based on the learner modelling. To evaluate the effectiveness of the developed system, it is deployed in a real algorithm-learning classroom of 38 students. The class is randomly divided into two groups: experiment and control. Two parameters are measured from both groups, i.e. academic success and academic satisfaction. Non-parametric statistical test, i.e. Mann–Whitney U-test (significance level 0.01) rejects the null hypothesis (U-value = 86.5 and U-critical = 101). This result verifies that the academic success of the experiment group is significantly higher than that of the control group. In addition, an academic satisfaction survey shows that adaptive scaffolding is valid in assisting students while learning with the system.

Test-case prioritisation (TCP) attempts to schedule the order of test-case execution such that faults can be detected as quickly as possible. TCP has been widely applied in many testing scenarios such as regression testing and fault localisation. Abstract test cases (ATCs) are derived from models of the system under test and have been applied to many testing environments such as model-based testing and combinatorial interaction testing. Although various empirical and analytical comparisons for some ATC prioritisation (ATCP) techniques have been conducted, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no comparative study focusing on the most current techniques has yet been reported. In this study, they investigated 18 ATCP techniques, categorised into four classes. They conducted a comprehensive empirical study to compare 16 of the 18 ATCP techniques in terms of their testing effectiveness and efficiency. They found that different ATCP techniques could be cost-effective in different testing scenarios, allowing us to present recommendations and guidelines for which techniques to use under what conditions.