The government of Tanzania adopted an e-Government strategy in 2009 that is aimed at improving efficiency in government and providing better services to citizens. Information security is identified as one of the requirements for the successful e-Government implementation although the government has not adopted any standards or issued guidelines to government agencies with regards to information security. Comprehensive addressing of information security can be an ex-pensive undertaking and without guidelines information security implementations may be more prone to failure. In a resource poor country such as Tanzania, there is a need for a cost effective and sustainable means of addressing information security in e-Government implementations. In this paper the authors present a case study of an e-Government interaction between a ministry and a government agency and the information security challenges identified in the implementation. In order to address these challenges an information security framework is conceptualized using action research. The framework is applied in the case study to address the identified challenges and the means to address future challenges in a sustainable manner is identified. Finally, the proposed framework is evaluated against Tanzanian and international metrics.
Formal methods have been shown to be beneficial in increasing the quality of, and confidence in software systems. Despite the advantages of using formal methods in software development, the uptake in the commercial industry has been limited where the use of informal and semi-formal notations is favoured. To bridge the gap between the ease-of-use of semi-formal notation and correctness of formal methods, a number of approaches to the formalisation of informal and semi-formal notation have been researched and documented. Two of these approaches are discussed in this dissertation using a medium-sized case study to demonstrate the approaches. It was shown that each approach offered results that differed in terms of levels of abstraction, requisite knowledge of the formal target specification language and potential for automation.
The benefits offered by software architectures include providing an improved understanding of high-level relationships amongst systems components and facilitating in making principled decisions between alternatives. A vast majority of architectural decisions are focused on realising functional requirements and often ignore the nonfunctional requirements (quality attributes) altogether or include them as an afterthought. This has a negative impact on the overall acceptance of the software system by its intended users. Moreover, these architectures are specified using diagrammatic notations such as boxes and lines as connectors between them. As a result, such semiformal representations lack precision in their definitions and may lead to misinterpretations of the architecture resulting in errors being introduced at later stages of development. Although several Architectural Description Languages (ADLs) exist for the formalisation of systems architectures, few are designed for formalising nonfunctional requirements. Since ADLs concentrate on component-level representations and not on the system as a whole, their support of non-functional requirements is limited. Additionally, as each ADL normally supports one quality attribute, multiple ADLs are required to cater for various quality attributes. This articles aims to address the challenges of inadequacies of specifying quality attributes in software systems in a manner that is both formal and applicable to a wider range of quality attributes. To achieve this goal, this paper present a process model that assists in formalising the non-functional requirements of a service-based software system and eliminates the need for multiple ADLs. It demonstrates the practicability of the proposed model by applying it to one quality attribute, namely "availability", using the general purpose Z specification language.
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