Earticle

The opportunity cost decision of selecting a software project is dependent, among other things, on how a given project best meets a company’s business goals and overall competitive strategy. Remaining competitive in the agile software market today requires selecting only those projects that position a business strategically in the market place and that render it competitive over time. Using an industrial case study, we demonstrate the role of the Complex Adaptive Systems Software Engineering (CASSE) framework in supporting value-based project selection. We apply Actor Object Dependencies (AOD) analysis and Functional Points (FP) sizing techniques to predict the overall project value before incurring any actual costs of implementing such a project. The overall contribution of this work therefore lies in demonstrating that alternative engineering approaches that analyze AODs can enhance how we select software projects and how we plan project schedules optimally so as to increase business value derived on projects.

Anonymous signcryption is a novel cryptographic primitive motivated from ring signature. It is an important method to realize the signcrypter identities' ambiguity. In this paper, we propose an identity-based anonymous signcryption scheme for multiple receivers in the standard model. The proposed scheme satisfies the semantic security, unforgeability and signcrypter identity's ambiguity. We also give the formal security proof on its semantic security under the hardness of Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman problem and its unforgeability under the Computational Diffie-Hellman assumption.

Vulnerability is discussed in the context of data processing and information management applications. It is argued that a new class of information technology applications must now be recognised, in which one or more organisations cooperate with small enterprises and private individuals. The term 'extra-organisational systems' is coined for such applications. Using illustrations arising from studies in the field of consumer EFTS, it is shown that the public is generally regarded as 'usees', beyond the system and affected by it, rather than as part of the system. It is argued that conventional systems life-cycle notions and techniques are inappropriate to extra-organisational systems. Rather than the software engineering, artefact-oriented philosophy inherent in existing techniques, such systems demand an alternative organically-based paradigm.

This paper considers an EM (expectation-maximization) based scheme for record value statistics (RVS) models in software reliability estimation. The RVS model provides one of the generalized modeling frameworks to unify several of existing software reliability models described as non-homogeneous Poisson processes (NHPPs). The proposed EM algorithm gives a numerically stable procedure to compute the maximum likelihood estimates of RVS models. In particular, this paper focuses on an RVS model based on a mixture of exponential distributions. As an illustrative example, we also derive a concrete EM algorithm for the wellknown Musa-Okumoto logarithmic Poisson execution time model by applying our result, and discusses the effectiveness of the EM-based scheme for RVS models with a simple numerical example.

The quality of spinning forming parts is closely related to the selection of spinning forces. In this paper, we use the finite element numerical simulation technology, establish a three-dimensional model and carry out a finite element analysis, to realize the simulation of variations of tube spinning parts’ spinning forces with composite bars. This method provides a theoretical basis for selecting an accurate spinning force, and has a great significance for improving the spinning forming quality and productivity.