The change in requirements while construction of a software may bring into several risks like over budget and extra schedule. The changes in requirements are considered as a high risk to fail the software projects. A good project manager always incorporates risk management paradigm to manage the risks of changing requirements. This research uses available statistical techniques to estimate the cost of risk management with respect to the changing requirement. In addition, a hybrid cost estimation model is proposed using action strategy model to counteract, mitigate and manage the risks of changing requirements. The proposed model is validated using an industrial case study in Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) to conclude the results. The results are found supportive because the proposed model shows significant improvement to estimate the costs of changing requirements as compared to the existing cost estimation models.

This paper discusses the roles of communication and coordination (C&C) in the agile teams. C&C are important activities that a project manager has to deal with tactically during the development of software projects to avoid the consequences. Their importance further increases especially in case of distributed software development (DSD). C&C are considered as project drivers to accomplish a project successfully within budget and schedule. There are several issues associated to poor C&C those can lead to fail software projects such as budget deficit, delay in delivery, conflicts among team members, unclear goals of project and architectural, technical and integration dependencies. C&C issues are critical and vital for collocated teams but their presences in distributed teams are disastrous. Scrum is one of the most widely practiced agile models and it is gaining further popularity in the agile community. Therefore, a novel framework is proposed to address the issues that are associated to C&C using Scrum methodology. The proposed framework is validated through a questionnaire. The results are found supportive to reflect that it will help to resolve the C&C issues effectively and efficiently.

Agile software development methodologies gaining the attention in the field of software engineering. There are several methods of agile such as Scrum, Lean, and Kanban. Scrum methodology divides the product into series of sprints. Lean is agile toolkit which has seven principles that facilitate: eliminating the wastes, delivering fast, and improving value for the final customer. Kanban is a visual method that can help in managing the production. To take the advantages of the following methodologies: Lean, Scrum, and Kanban we can integrate them together thus, the result will be a new methodology that can contribute in enhancing and improving the efficiency of the software development process, which is the aim of this thesis. An integrated methodology that integrating Scrum, Kanban, and Lean methodologies to yield a comprehensive agile methodology called L-ScrumBan has been proposed. The validation of the proposed methodology has been done through a survey by using a questionnaire; the survey results confirmed the efficiency of the proposed methodology.

Requirement elicitation and analysis form the focal point in the initial stages of the software development process. Unfortunately, in many software development projects, developers and end-users speak different languages. On one hand, end-users prefer to use natural languages while software developers who are technically perceptive, tend to use conceptual models. This difference in technical knowledge creates a communication gap, a potential cause of poor quality software products or project conflicts. The aim of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of a novel technique that seeks to foster effective elicitation of software requirements and support the implementation of structures that match particular requirements. By combining requirement elicitation and re-usable parts, the proposed solution envisages improvements in the overall software design process leading to enhanced requirement specifications. The novel idea is to incorporate an intermediate step for mapping Unified Modeling Language (UML) to Web Ontology Language (OWL) to enable the addition of ontology languages. The proposed model is validated through a survey. The validation results show that the proposed solution allows software developers to elicit software requirements and implement structures that match certain requirements.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a standard to implement and design applications. It is a channel of communication between service consumer (SC) and service provider (SP). SP offers a service and SC uses a service. Mobile web service verifier component, of SOA architecture, matches best service that is called. Mobile web service verifier component finds a best match of particular service in SP if it is available by the SP. Therefore, there is a pressing need to develop a component that can create a service if it is not found by mobile web service verifier component. This problem is addressed by proposing a new component for SOA architecture called service upgrade (SU) to increase and improve the service creation speed and satisfy SC and SP needs. The questionnaire is used as a research design to evaluate the proposed solution by providing qualitative data. The results show that the majority of respondents are in favor of the proposed solution. It is anticipated that the proposed solution will cater the industrial problem in hand.