The computer science department of the University of Pittsburgh offers two undergraduate and two graduate courses in software engineering in which we emphasize the importance of general engineering principles for software development. For the last ten years the undergraduate courses have been based on team projects. This structure has advantages: students see immediately the relevance of what t...

Numerous studies over the years have shown that information systems development (ISD) projects often run over budget or fail entirely. Such failures are not restricted to certain industry sectors or project types; rather they occur with some regularity in systems development projects and organizations of all types and sizes. Cost estimation has long been a difficult task in systems development,...

As a practice-oriented discipline, Software Engineering is most effectively taught by using a variety of hands-on experiences. Team-based projects where students can practice their technical and soft skills are a key feature of many software engineering courses aimed to prepare students for the realities of industrial software development. This paper surveys the objectives of software developme...

Although the choice of control mechanisms in systems development projects has been extensively studied in prior research, differences in such choices across internal and outsourced projects and their effects of systems development performance have not received much attention. this study attempts to address this gap using data on 57 outsourced and 79 internal projects in 136 organizations. Our r...

Agile development methods are commonly used to iteratively develop the information systems and they can easily handle ever-changing business requirements. Scrum is one of the most popular agile software development frameworks. The popularity is caused by the simplified process framework and its focus on teamwork. The objective of Scrum is to deliver working software and demonstrate it to the cu...

in recent decades, information technology systems and tools play an essential role in improving the method for responding the requests from managers. decision support system as an important tool has the fundamental role in organizations. in the team of software project allocating people to tasks has a noticeable effect on profits. a decision support system can help managers in making appropriat...

The increase in complexity of software development has become critical to the organizations to comprehensively identify and manage the risks involved in the software development projects. In identifying and further developing the projects, project managers must be aware of the risks or inherent risks affecting the projects. This paper presents empirical findings on the risk factors that signifi...

On the verge of the information society of the next millenium we are looking for innovative learning scenarios to prepare students for their future professions including the challenge of lifelong learning. In this article we describe our software engineering class which is designed as an open, self-directed, constructionist learning scenario in the context of authentic problems. The concept of ...

Previous research has shown that topics can be automatically discovered in a software project’s source code. Topics are collections of words that co-occur frequently in a text collection and are discovered using topic models such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). Tracking how topics evolve, i.e., grow and spread, over time is useful for supporting software maintenance, comprehension, and re...

Current 8-10m ground-based telescopes require complex real-time control systems that are large, distributed, fault tolerant, integrated and heterogeneous. New challenges on the horizon (laser guide star, adaptive optics, 30–40m class telescopes) will bring increased complexity, where requirements cannot be cleanly isolated due to component coupling within the control and acquisition chain. More...