The software organizations rapidly adopting global software development (GSD) to gain the economic and strategic benefits. Besides, GSD faces many challenges that mainly concerned with the requirements change management (RCM). This study aims to identify and empirically validate the factors that can negatively influence the RCM process in GSD. To this end, literature review and questionnaire survey were conducted for the investigation and validation of RCM challenges. A total of 31 RCM challenges were identified. We have further classified the identified challenges in organization types, organization size and based on experts' opinions with the aim to provide a clear understanding of the RCM process and its challenges to the practitioners. Based on these identified challenges, we believe that this study can provide a framework for tackling problems associated with RCM activities in GSD environment, which is significant to success and progression of GSD organizations.INDEX TERMS Requirements change management, challenges, and empirical investigations.

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The DevOps (development and operations) is a collaborative software development environment which offers the continues development and deployment of quality software project within short time. The DevOps practices are not yet mature enough, and the software organizations hesitate to adopt it. This study aims: (1) to explore the DevOps challenges by conducting systematic literature review (SLR) and to get the insight of industry experts via questionnaire survey study; (2) to prioritize the investigated challenges using fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP). The study findings provide the set of critical challenges faced by the software organizations while adopting DevOps and a prioritization-based taxonomy of the DevOps challenges. The application of FAHP is novel in this research area as it assists in addressing the vagueness of practitioners concerning the influencing factors of DevOps. We believe that the finding of this study will serve as a body of knowledge for real world practitioners and researchers to revise and develop the new strategies for the successful implementation of DevOps practices in the software industry.

The software organizations are outsourcing their development activities across the geographical border due to huge business gains. However, the adoption of the global software development (GSD) paradigm is not straightforward; various challenges are associated with it, particularly related to the requirements engineering (RE) process. The objective of this study is to identify the barriers to the RE process faced during GSD. To achieve this, we have conducted a systematic mapping study and questionnaire survey to identify and validate the barriers of the RE process with industry practitioners. A total of 20 barriers were identified and validated with the experts. Moreover, we have performed organization types (client and vendor), organization size (small, medium, and large) and experts' levels (junior, intermediate, and senior) based analysis to provide a clear understanding of the RE barriers in the three different context. Besides, we have also developed a theoretical framework by mapping the investigated barriers into six core knowledge areas of software process improvement. The mapping results indicated that project administration is the most significant knowledge area of investigated barriers. We believe that the findings of this study will provide a framework that assists the GSD practitioners in developing an effective plan and strategies to improve the RE process in the GSD context. INDEX TERMS Global software development, requirements engineering (RE), empirical investigation, client, vendor.

Trust and reputation are important terms whether the communication is Humans-to-Human (H2H), Human-Machine-Interaction (HMI) or Machine-to-Machine (M2M). As Cloud computing and the internet of things (IoT) bring new innovations, they also cause various security and privacy issues. As numerous devices are continuously integrating as a core part of IoT, it is necessarily important to consider various security issues such as the trustworthiness of a user or detection of a malicious user. Moreover, fog computing also known as edge computing is revolutionizing the Cloud-based IoT by providing the Cloud services at the edge of the network, which can provide aid in overcoming security, privacy and trust issues. In this work, we propose a context-aware trust evaluation model to evaluate the trustworthiness of a user in a Fog based IoT (FIoT). The proposed approach uses a context-aware multi-source trust and reputation based evaluation system which helps in evaluating the trustworthiness of a user effectively. Further, we use context-aware feedback and feedback crawler system which helps in making trust evaluation unbiased, effective and reliable. Furthermore, we introduce monitor mode for malicious/untrustworthy users, which helps in monitoring the behavior and trustworthiness of a user. The proposed approach uses several tunable factors, which can be tuned based on the system's requirements. The simulations and results indicate that our approach is effective and reliable to evaluate the trustworthiness of a user.