In today’s digitally driven world, many small to medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) find it difficult to manage or scale businesses due impediments in procuring and managing digital and software services. Many SMEs are unable to purchase the off-the-shelf software, as they are not tailor-made for their specific business use-cases and at times may not even fulfill the requirements. Creating custom software applications is an expensive undertaking and is difficult to maintain and scale. Further, the cost of deployment of these applications and ensuring availability either on premises or on cloud becomes a major hurdle. To overcome these hindrances, in this paper we propose the use of function-as-a-service technology in comparison to other options like micro-services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and have highlighted the benefits in terms of ease of development and managing further we have put forth some economic benefits they have. FaaS can prove to be a major game changer service as it follows the model of pay-as-you-use and at idle time it can even scale to zero usage. This paper mainly discusses the option of using FaaS to help SMEs scale their application while cutting down on initial cost as well as economic impact in long run as compared to the other more traditional digital software service delivery models such as SaaS, ERP and custom application development.

This paper proposed a possible next-generation e-commerce “Home Décor Marketplace” system with web 3.0 capabilities to disrupt the traditional furniture and home décor retail market in developing countries like Pakistan. This project involves the development of a B2B and B2C furniture and home décor e-commerce marketplace application. The platform will allow manufacturers and retailers to list and sell their products directly to consumers as well as to other businesses. One of the main objectives of the project is to provide a convenient and efficient platform for both buyers and sellers in the furniture and home decor industry. The document describes the research work, analysis, design, and development of the platform. The proposed e-commerce marketplace has been developed based on market research. The application has been designed to be compatible with various platforms such as Web, iOS, and Android, utilizing the Google Flutter development tool. It is secured using user authentication, and the features have been carefully chosen to meet the market demands and requirements. This research paper will discuss all the technologies and tools used to build and implement an Innovative Home Decor Shopping Experience-based e-commerce platform.

Requirement elicitation process requires collaboration with people of different backgrounds and expertise. Collaboration between diverse teams such as developers, testers, designers, requirement engineers, and stakeholders makes requirement elicitation process highly human dependent. The main goal of this research is to find out the role and importance of “human aspects” such as domain knowledge, motivation, communication skills, gender, age personality, attitude, geographical distribution, emotions, and cultural diversity in requirement elicitation activities. The purpose of this study is to identify the industrial perspectives of key human aspects that will help organizations to carry out RE-related activities more effectively. To fulfill that purpose, we surveyed 165 software practitioners and elicited the industrial perspective through their responses. Practitioner’s data revealed that requirement elicitation activities are highly human-dependent, 90% of practitioners were of the view that the success of requirement engineering activities depends on the individuals engaged in those activities. Software practitioner’s data revealed that domain knowledge (84%), motivation (68%), communication skills (61%), and personality (41%) are the highly important aspect for the individual engaged in requirement engineering activities. Furthermore, the data revealed that the correctness (73%) of identified requirements is a highly important factor in measuring the performance of the person involved in the RE process. Simultaneously, the clarity (78%) and the completeness (75%) of identified requirements are also important. Our results suggest that the individual engaged in the requirement engineering process should have the social and collaborative (89%), enthusiastic (94%), altruistic (kind, generous, trustworthy, and helpful) (67%) qualities to be able to carry out RE activities effectively. Our survey suggests that the practitioners may consider the findings of this research appropriately when forming, managing teams, and conducting software requirement elicitation activities.

With the increase in the availability of skilled software engineers, the process of global software development is being increasingly adopted by organizations, at a relatively lesser cost. This has led to software processes being more viable in a progressive manner for several reasons that include better communication technologies and the levels of maturity seen in the software industry.
That being said, Organizations that undertake the decision of adopting Global software development should realize that this process isn't exactly a risk-free action and there have been many failures reported with regard to it. The existing bools of globally distributed projects portray a number of challenges. During the interactive phase, the need for particular consideration towards the requirements of the client and the globally dispersed distributed software provider teams has been indicated.
This paper makes use of surveys collected from IT professionals and people working in the software industry in order to present realistic insights gathered from them.

The success of any software product could be measured by its uses and adoption of that technology by the end-users. In this study, we investigate the factors on which bank user intents to adopt internet banking in Pakistan. A survey was conducted on Pakistani banking industry customers using the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model which explains the intention of bank users to use the banking systems. The four predictors of UTAUT which were facilitating conditions, social influence, effort expectancy and performance expectancy were significant in predicting the intention of bank users to adopt the banking systems. Finally, we discuss the results, restrictions, implications and future recommendations. The findings of the study may help to provide insights into a better approach to promote e-banking acceptance.

The cashless revolution is changing the landscape of the banking industry in Pakistan. In addition to internet and phone banking, a major role is played by Fintech applications such as UPaisa, Easypaisa, and JazzCash. This paper aims to study the public perception of a cashless Pakistan and the potential of Pakistan to develop into a cashless economy. We conduct an exploratory survey to find out the needs, expectations, perceptions, and fears of the consumers associated with cashless technology, and then discuss various ways in which Pakistan can go completely cashless such as e-wallets, debit cards, and other digital payment systems. The results of the survey show a positive response of the public towards a cashless Pakistan. Several factors are identified that the public faces. These make the public reluctant to move to cashless technology. This paper will point these out, and suggest solutions to these problems; paving the path towards a cashless Pakistan.

Now that every company and every consumer prioritize quality over quantity of work, the career of Software quality assurance is also taking a leap, especially in the field of academia. Thus, this report gives an overview of what a future with the usage of software quality control and testing would look like, and why it’s needed for the development of the caliber of software used all around the globe. It further marks out why adding courses related to software quality assurance in the curriculum is important and how this addition can widen the dynamics of software control, quality and testing industries. It also marks out how, even today, academia can and is playing an integral role in the developmental process of software quality assurance and testing in terms of the research that can be and is being made towards the whole developmental process of SQA. Universities and undergraduate programs can further play an important role towards the researching the horizons and fields software testing and assurance has to offer in the near future. Furthermore, this report questioned various practitioners belonging to some of the most prestigious IT companies about their opinion on the research questions involved in this report so as to verify the credibility of the data that has been gathered. At the end of the research, we have a foresight for as to how the industry of software quality assurance and software testing will grow.

In this day and age, the rise in technological advancements has the potential to improve and transform our lives every day. The rapid technology innovation can have a great impact on our business operations. Currently, Cloud computing services are popular and offer a wide range of opportunities for their customers. This paper presents a survey on a more recent computing architecture paradigm known as Fog Computing. Fog networking is a beneficial solution that offers the greater facility of data storage, enhanced computing, and networking resources. This new concept of fog complements cloud solution by facilitating its customers with better security, real-time analysis improved efficiency. To get a clear picture and understanding of how fog computing functions, we have performed an extensive literature review. We also presented a comparative study of fog computing with cloud and grid computing architectures. In this study, we have conducted a survey that led us to the conclusion that fog computing solution is still not applicable and implemented in most of the IoT industries due to the lack of awareness and the high architecture’s cost. Results of the study also indicate that optimized data storage and security are a few of the factors that can motivate organizations to implement the Fog computing architecture. Furthermore, the challenges related to fog computing solution are reviewed for progressive developments in the future.

Software start-ups are fundamentally different from traditional software development firms and boutique software services enterprises of all sizes. They develop software products with strict time and resource constraints and are focused on beating competitors to the market. They fail fast and often pivot their business models several times in their lifetimes. Their approach to designing, developing, testing, and shipping software products differs vastly from the established software engineering principles that emerged during the field’s earlier decades. One such principle is Software Quality Assurance. Start-ups tend to do away with procedures that ensure that their products are of the utmost quality. Instead, they focus on shipping their products to market as fast as possible, testing these products vis-a-vis real-life customers and use-cases, and eventually improving these products, repeating the process several times over. We hypothesize that this reluctance to adhere to software quality assurance principles can have adverse effects on the health of start-ups or their products. This paper investigates this hypothesis through over 20 questions presented to CEOs, CTOs, Technical Leads, and Product Managers of several start-ups. These questions focus on start-ups’ motivations, their levels of understanding and appreciation of software quality assurance principles, and the limitations they face due to time and resource constraints. Our research’s results indicate the surveyed start-ups’ problems are partially due to the absence of robust software quality assurance practices within their processes.

The paper discusses the issues and problems faced by individuals working in diverse or distributed teams especially in the software industry. The research shows a feedback and trend of the teams that work in distributed environments letting us understand the behaviors and figuring out solutions for the problems of communication. The trend was already set in a few organizations that provided outsourcing services to their clients but after the recent issue of the pandemic almost all organizations switched towards this trend and started focusing on working in distributed teams and not on site. This ensured the safety of the employees as well as it let them keep their work and performance undisturbed. But in the practice of working in distributed teams the major factor that affected the performance was the problem in communication, either due to the available mediums (online meeting software products) or the internet connections. The only factor affecting the performances somehow was the communication problem factor and we have addressed this in our paper, moreover a survey is also done through a questionnaire with the people of software industries in Pakistan and a result is generated for how the people feel working in distributed environments and what hurdles they faced in communication.

The use of automation is emerging with the help of internet providing possibility of objects to work it-self. With recent advancements to the fast speed internet, IoT will be playing a vital role in our daily tasks in present and future. IoT is offering feasibility and effectiveness to the system that are based upon it. These modern technologies are creating comfort and standard way of living because of its time, energy and cost efficiency. In this modern world, where things are going to be on our finger tips, our daily household appliances will also be controlled with our smartphones. This will allow us to manage the usage smartly, and can help in building of an eco-friendly environment. This paper will conduct a study based on how household appliances may be automated smartly with software applications that are integrated with hardware board. It presents the complete architecture of the system with its working capabilities. Also, it explains the internal mechanism of the system which mainly considers the software application and hardware board interaction. As we know the smart home automation is a costly process, so in this paper we would be looking at its low-cost implementation.

Managing the underlying structure of an enterprise is a daunting task. The business management and IT management alike have to deal with intricate layers of complexity that lies beneath the surface of the day-to-day operations of an enterprise. Without a proper Enterprise Architecture Framework, any organization regardless of size and magnitude of operations is bound to struggle in managing their business strategies. However, choosing a suitable Enterprise Architecture Framework is in itself a pretty hard endeavor that requires a deep dive into the terrifying maze of available Enterprise Architecture Frameworks and their respective characteristics. In this study, we compare the major Enterprise Architectu¬re Frameworks that are currently prevalent in Pakistan. Through a well-crafted questionnaire we conducted a survey and assessed what Enterprise Architecture Frameworks most of the industries in Pakistan are using and the enterprise’s level of satisfaction with the achieved results. By focusing on the trends of Enterprise Architecture Framework implementation in Pakistan we try to offer a unique perspective on the comparative studies of Enterprise Architecture Framework that are usually done on general basis.

Agile focuses on delivering small increments of the project quickly. Unlike, in traditional practices, project development is initiated after gathering complete requirements. There are different techniques that are used for requirement engineering in agile. Few techniques includes, Extreme programming, Scrum and Feature-Driven Development. This research discusses the problems faced in requirement engineering in agile. Requirements variability and team size are few such problems faced in agile. A comparison of traditional and agile practices is presented in later sections through survey. The survey was filled by IT professionals in Pakistan and results were analyzed. The results indicate that requirements variability causes main problem in requirement engineering process. In addition, good customer relationships help to gather requirements effectively.  Teams working in agile are quite satisfied by the customer as compared to teams implementing traditional practices. Moreover, the ways through which efficiency can be attained in requirement engineering is presented. There are different techniques such as, use cases and prototyping that can be used for requirement engineering for efficient results.

Requirement elicitation through crowdsourcing is trending nowadays and due to its major benefits, some of the organizations are implementing this idea. Our research paper discusses the traditional requirement engineering concepts and then compares them with crowd-based requirement engineering to show the benefits of crowdsourcing. Features of Crowd-Based Requirements Engineering are highlighted to give an idea of the basis on which the survey was conducted. Furthermore, we have discussed the online survey and gamification methods to motivate the crowd.

Due to the greater availability of skilled software engineers, organizations are increasingly adopting Global Software Development, at relatively lesser costs. Software process in such distributed teams have turned out to be progressively more viable for numerous reasons, due to better communication technologies and maturity level of software industry. However organizations adopting Global Software Development must take into consideration that it is not a risk-free action, as many failures related to it have been reported.
There are a number of challenges when existing tools of globally distributed projects are adopted. Upon deep evaluation of requirement analysis during interactive phase, particular consideration must be given to the requirements of clients and distributed software provider teams which are globally dispersed. In this paper, we present realistic insights gathered from carrying out surveys from IT professionals and people working in the software industry. Moreover, extensive examination of the literature work previously done in this regard is also documented in our paper. The objective of our paper is to get a clear idea about the major factors and challenges faced by the team members of the globally distributed team. After identification of these key factors, based on the results of our survey, we have endeavored to present an analysis on how to overcome these challenges.