Attitudes towards software piracy in South Africa: Knowledge of Intellectual Property Laws as a moderator

The aims of the study were to describe the relationship between all three of Kohlberg's levels of moral development and attitudes towards software piracy as well as to determine if an individual's Knowledge of Intellectual Property Laws moderated this relationship. The research exploring moral development and attitudes towards software piracy is limited in that the results are inconclusive and often do not assess higher levels of moral development. In this study, we explore some of the early antecedent relationships in the theory of reasoned action. An exploratory, non-experimental, cross-sectional survey design was used and a questionnaire containing three scales (attitudes towards software piracy, levels of moral development and Knowledge of Intellectual Property Laws) were obtained from a sample of 402 respondents from three medium-sized South African organisations and from an online survey on a prominent South African online information technology magazine. The results indicated that there is a significant positive relationship between the respondents’ attitudes to software piracy and levels of moral development. Additionally, there are significant relationships between attitudes towards software piracy and each of the levels of moral development. Level 2 moral development predicted the most amount of variance in attitudes towards software piracy. The moderated multiple linear regression revealed that the Knowledge of Intellectual Property Laws did not have a moderating effect on the relationship between attitudes towards software piracy and moral development. These findings provide a more in-depth analysis of the relationship between attitudes and levels of moral development with respect to software piracy.     

Autonomic rejuvenation of cloud applications as a countermeasure to software anomalies

Failures in computer systems can be often tracked down to software anomalies of various kinds. In many scenarios, it might be difficult, unfeasible, or unprofitable to carry out extensive debugging activity to spot the cause of anomalies and remove them. In other cases, taking corrective actions may led to undesirable service downtime. In this article, we propose an alternative approach to cope with the problem of software anomalies in cloud‐based applications, and we present the design of a distributed autonomic framework that implements our approach. It exploits the elastic capabilities of cloud infrastructures, and relies on machine learning models, proactive rejuvenation techniques, and a new load balancing approach. By putting together all these elements, we show that it is possible to improve both availability and performance of applications deployed to heterogeneous cloud regions and subject to frequent failures. Overall, our study demonstrates the viability of our approach, thus opening the way towards its adoption, and encouraging further studies and practical experiences to evaluate and improve it.     

METKIT: training in how to use measurement as a software management tool

A Science is as mature as its measurement tools. Louis PasteurThe main purpose of this paper is to present the results of the ESPRIT project METKIT, a three-year collaborative technology transfer project in the field of software engineering measurement. METKIT was concerned with developing a set of integrated training courses that show how to implement process improvement programmes and use measurement as a powerful management tool. METKIT can be used by an organization to enable them to provide in-house training to their managers and software developers to enable them to understand control and then improve software development.     

Utilization of a systemic business process re-engineering method as a tool to improve software process quality

This paper suggests that a software process can be viewed as an instance of a business process. Therefore software process improvement might be achieved by applying the concepts of Business Process Re-engineering (BPR). BPR is introduced and the recent work of Jacobson, using object-oriented concepts to construct a BPR framework, is described. The paper critiques Jacobson's approach as being essentially reductionist, and presents an alternative approach, State-Behaviour Modelling (SBM), that utilizes systems principles in the analysis of problem situations, while generating object models. The application of SMB to model and improve a component of a software development process, is presented.