Several researchers have criticized the standards of performing and reporting empirical studies in software engineering. In order to address this problem, Jedlitschka and Pfahl have produced reporting guidelines for controlled experiments in software engineering. They pointed out that their guidelines needed evaluation. We agree that guidelines need to be evaluated before they can be widely adopted. The aim of this paper is to present the method we used to evaluate the guidelines and report the results of our evaluation exercise. We suggest our evaluation process may be of more general use if reporting guidelines for other types of empirical study are developed. We used a reading method inspired by perspective-based and checklist-based reviews to perform a theoretical evaluation of the guidelines. The perspectives used were: Researcher, Practitioner/Consultant, Meta-analyst, Replicator, Reviewer and Author. Apart from the Author perspective, the reviews were based on a set of questions derived by brainstorming. A separate review was performed for each perspective. The review using the Author perspective considered each section of the guidelines sequentially. The reviews detected 44 issues where the guidelines would benefit from amendment or clarification and 8 defects. Reporting guidelines need to specify what information goes into what section and avoid excessive duplication. The current guidelines need to be revised and then subjected to further theoretical and empirical validation. Perspective-based checklists are a useful validation method but the practitioner/consultant perspective presents difficulties
Social media plays a significant role in rapid propagation of information when disasters occur. Among the four phases of disaster management life cycle: prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery, this paper focuses on the use of social media during the response phase. It empirically examines the use of microblogging platforms by Emergency Response Organisations (EROs) during extreme natural events, and distinguishes the use of Twitter by EROs from digital volunteers during a fire hazard occurred in Australia state of Victoria in early February 2014. We analysed 7,982 tweets on this event. While traditionally theories such as World System Theory and Institutional Theory focus on the role of powerful institutional information outlets, we found that platforms like Twitter challenge such notion by sharing the power between large institutional (e.g. EROs) and smaller non-institutional players (e.g. digital volunteers) in the dissemination of disaster information. Our results highlight that both large EROs and individual digital volunteers proactively used Twitter to disseminate and distribute fire related information. We also found that the contents of tweets were more informative than directive, and that while the total number of messages posted by top EROs were more than the non-institutional ones, whereas non-institutions exceeded on tweets and sharing of the tweets.
Background Mobile health (mHealth) apps have gained significant popularity over the last few years due to their tremendous benefits, such as lowering health care costs and increasing patient awareness. However, the sensitivity of health care data makes the security of mHealth apps a serious concern. Poor security practices and lack of security knowledge on the developers’ side can cause several vulnerabilities in mHealth apps. Objective In this review paper, we aimed to identify and analyze the reported challenges concerning security that developers of mHealth apps face. Additionally, our study aimed to develop a conceptual framework with the challenges for developing secure apps faced by mHealth app development organizations. The knowledge of such challenges can help to reduce the risk of developing insecure mHealth apps. Methods We followed the systematic literature review method for this review. We selected studies that were published between January 2008 and October 2020 since the major app stores launched in 2008. We selected 32 primary studies using predefined criteria and used a thematic analysis method for analyzing the extracted data. Results Of the 1867 articles obtained, 32 were included in this review based on the predefined criteria. We identified 9 challenges that can affect the development of secure mHealth apps. These challenges include lack of security guidelines and regulations for developing secure mHealth apps (20/32, 63%), developers’ lack of knowledge and expertise for secure mHealth app development (18/32, 56%), lack of stakeholders’ involvement during mHealth app development (6/32, 19%), no/little developer attention towards the security of mHealth apps (5/32, 16%), lack of resources for developing a secure mHealth app (4/32, 13%), project constraints during the mHealth app development process (4/32, 13%), lack of security testing during mHealth app development (4/32, 13%), developers’ lack of motivation and ethical considerations (3/32, 9%), and lack of security experts’ engagement during mHealth app development (2/32, 6%). Based on our analysis, we have presented a conceptual framework that highlights the correlation between the identified challenges. Conclusions While mHealth app development organizations might overlook security, we conclude that our findings can help them to identify the weaknesses and improve their security practices. Similarly, mHealth app developers can identify the challenges they face to develop mHealth apps that do not pose security risks for users. Our review is a step towards providing insights into the development of secure mHealth apps. Our proposed conceptual framework can act as a practice guideline for practitioners to enhance secure mHealth app development.
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