The aim of this paper is to employ the guidelines of Android, iOS, Blackberry and Windows Phone to analyze the usability compliance of free blood donation (BD) apps. An analysis process based on a systematic review protocol is used to select free BD apps. An assessment is conducted using a questionnaire composed of 13 questions concerning the compliance of free BD apps with Android, Blackberry, iOS and Windows Phone usability guidelines. A total of 133 free BD apps have been selected from the 188 BD apps identified. Around 63% of the free BD apps selected have a good compliance with mobile OS usability recommendations. Around 72% of Android, 57% of Windows Phone, 33% of iOS and 33% of Blackberry BD apps have a high usability score. The aspect of BD app behavior should be improved along with some style components: the use of pictures to explain ideas and the adaptation of the app to both horizontal and vertical orientations. Structure patterns should also be used to improve the structure aspect of a BD app. Usability is a quality aspect that should be improved in current BD apps. Our study provides smartphone users with a list of usable free BD apps and BD app developers with recommendations.

Global Software Development (GSD) is a well established field of software engineering with the benefits of a global environment. Software Project Management (SPM) plays a key role in the success of GSD. As a result, the need has arisen to study and evaluate the downsides of SPM for GSD, to thereby pave the way for the development of new methods, techniques, and tools with which to tackle them. This paper aims to identify and classify research on SPM approaches for GSD that are available in the literature, to identify their current weaknesses and strengths, and to analyze their applications in industry. We performed a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) based on six classification criteria. Eighty-four papers were selected and analyzed. The results indicate that interest in SPM for GSD has been increasing since 2006. As a class of approaches, the most frequently reported methods (40%) are those used for coordination, planning, and monitoring, along with estimation techniques that can be used to better match a distributed project. SPM for GSD requires further investigation by researchers and practitioners, particularly with respect to cost and time estimations. These findings will help overcome the challenges that must to be considered in future SPM research for GSD, especially regarding collaboration and time-zone differences.

No abstract

No abstract

Context: Software development has always been characterised by certain parameters. In the case of global software development, one of the important challenges for software developers is that of predicting the development effort of a software system on the basis of developer details, size, complexity, and other measures. Objective: The main research topics related to global software development effort estimation are the definition and empirical evaluation of a search-based approach with which to build new estimation models and the definition and empirical evaluation of all available early data. Datasets have been used as a basis to carry out an analogy-based estimation using similarity functions and measures. Method: Many of the problems concerning the existing effort estimation challenges can be solved by creating an analogy. This paper describes an enhanced analogy-based model for the estimation of software development effort and proposes a new approach using similarity functions and measures for software effort estimation. Result: A new approach for analogy-based reasoning with which to enhance the performance of cost estimation in distributed or combined software projects dealing with numerical and categorical data. The proposed method will be validated empirically using The International Software Benchmarking Standards Group dataset as a basis. Conclusion: The proposed estimation model could be a useful approach for early stage effort estimation on distributed projects.