Institutional-Repository, University of Moratuwa
Welcome to the University of Moratuwa Digital Repository, which houses postgraduate theses and dissertations, research articles presented at conferences by faculties and departments, university-published journal articles and research publications authored by academic staff. This online repository stores, preserves and distributes the University's scholarly work. This service allows University members to share their research with a larger audience.
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Recent Submissions
item: Thesis-Full-text
Strategies to overcome requirements engineering challenges in distributed scrum teams
(2019) Udayanganee, HAS; Meedeniya, D
Requirements are the needs and want of a customer and or a user group, expressed in a formal set-up. They are inevitable in any software and should be managed extensively, to prevent product/project being failed. Requirement management in scrum projects has a significant difference to that of the traditional approach.
This research discusses Requirement Engineering challenges seamlessly occur in Scrum offshore teams. An initial survey was carried out to identify the most challenging factors affecting the Requirement engineering process and it was followed by a survey reaching the software professionals. The challenges identified in the literature review and the pre-survey are same. Therefore, the study was designed to further investigate the matter with three factors that are affecting the success of the business analysis function.
The methodology used for the survey is an online based questionnaire. The population considered for the survey is software professionals in distributed Scrum teams. Sri Lanka is becoming an offshore development destination. Over 30,000 software professionals are employed in Sri Lanka, and the majority are engaged in offshore development. Therefore, a sample of 376 is drawn from the population for further proceedings.
The present study revealed that Scrum requirement process and the soft skills are statistically related to the entire requirement management process in a team. This emphasizes that the method adopted in the team has a direct impact on the requirement analysis. Soft skills produced by the team members are highly contributing to the effectiveness and the productivity of the requirement management.
This research highlights important factors to consider in formulating requirement management plans. Requirements have to balance two extremes of expectations; expectations of the fellow team members on receiving comprehensive clear documentation and the expectations imposed by the development method. Organizations should incorporate suggested changes to the requirement management process depending on the suitability of the organizational culture and standards.
item: Thesis-Full-text
Cloud based resource prediction tool for development migrations for DevOps
(2020) Ranaweera, AGNM; Meedeniya, D; Perera, I
Cloud computing is a promising paradigm for delivering computer services for industries, due to the advances in technologies such as virtualization, networking, web services, etc. As the cloud host providers offer an infinite amount of resources to their customers, the overhead of procuring traditional infrastructure resources has been reduced. In addition to the infinite resource offers, the dynamic resource scaling feature in the cloud allows the enterprise application owners to choose an appropriate pricing model. This feature in the cloud reduces the risk of over-provisioning and under-provisioning. Selecting an appropriate dynamic resource scaling model in the cloud platform is a tedious task as it depends on the accuracy of the forecasted resource provisioning values.
Based on this deliberate background, this research intends to model a POC (Proof of Concepts) for the future resource prediction in the cloud platform which assists the dynamic resource provisioning scaling. These resource provisioning predictions were done using the performance metrics gathered in the on-premises servers. The performance metrics gathered during 30 days were evaluated using the ARIMA (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) time series model. To improve the accuracy of the seasonality effects, the 30 days matrics have been gathered. Out of many ARIMA models, the best fitted ARIMA model was chosen based on the least RMSE (Root Mean Square Error).
The best fitted ARIMA model has predicted the future resource requirement of resources, by evaluating the gathered metrics. The model was trained based on the 75% data sets consisting of 22 days metrics and was tested using 25% data sets consisting of 8 days metrics. As a best practice, the data set splitting ratio has been selected as a 75:25 which consists of a higher number of data matrics for training. The resource provisioning model has been evaluated in the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) layer of the Amazon cloud. As the experimental cloud infrastructure, an EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) in the Amazon Web Services has been used. The observed values were evaluated using RMSE, MAPE (Mean Percentage Error), precision, recall, and F1 score factors as accuracy assessment criteria. The obtained accuracy percentages of CPU, RAM, Disk, and Network were respectively 84.07%, 93.13%, 90.47% and 71.16% which demonstrates a considerable accuracy for future forecast prediction. Further, visualization of the future forecasted resource provisioning results is provided in a dashboard. The developed dashboard has been evaluated through a survey comprised of a questionnaire that was distributed among a DevOps team which is consists of ten members. The sample of the survey consisted of both technical and non-technical users who have 4 to 14 years of work experience in the IT industry. The overall average satisfaction rate of the survey was 4.1 out of 5, which was a considerably acceptable result. Based on the survey results and accuracy percentages of assessment criteria, it can be concluded that the research work has been successful and the proposed dashboard will be used for resource provisioning management
item: Thesis-Full-text
The Methods to mitigate emeployee uncertainty due to project discontinuation in Sri Lankan software industry
(2018) Kaluarachchi, VD; Meedeniya, D
Project discontinuation with an existing customer in a software development company may create a huge impact on employee uncertainty. Employees may start to think about what organizational changes may arise due to this situation since leaving a main customer will affect the business and there will be several changes in the current job due to project discontinuation.
The purpose of this research is to find out the methods to mitigate employee uncertainty through the analysis and findings of the survey by identifying employee perception on project discontinuation to provide management a clear understanding on which factors are affecting most on employee uncertainty and take actions to mitigate them. Quantitative research method has been used in this study since the population of this research is employees in IT industry in Sri Lanka and self- administrative questionnaire was designed to get the responses from the selected sample.
The main contribution of this study comes from the fact that this study is one of the few to be carried out with the aim of finding the methods to mitigate employee uncertainty due to project discontinuation in Sri Lankan IT industry. Moreover, the literature does not record efforts for measuring specifically employee uncertainty due to project discontinuation while this study reveals the factors which can be affect employee uncertainty and the most affected factor, job insecurity has a huge impact on employee uncertainty due to project discontinuation. And also there is a positive relationship between lack of management communication, perception of organizational readiness for change and mistrust in management.
It would be interesting to explore more variables which are affecting employee uncertainty due to project discontinuation and find the relationship with employee uncertainty.
item: Thesis-Full-text
A Study of the relationship between retention strategies and job performance in the IT industry in Sri Lanka
(2018) Rajapakse, SD; Meedeniya, D
In today’s world, employee turnover is one of the major issues faced by many companies. The turnover rate impacts the employees’ performance and organization’s stability as well. This study explores and analyses the relationship between retention strategies and job performance in the Sri Lankan IT industry. The main objectives are to determine the job performance of employees in the software industry, discuss the factors that affect the turnover in the software industry, examine the relationship between retention strategies and job performance, and recommend a set of guidelines to improve job performance.
The analysis of the literature review discusses the current research on retention factors such as, employee recognition, flexible working arrangements, rewards, compensation, work-life balance, leadership and management, etc. This study has identified five main retention factors using a pilot test, to be addressed throughout the research. The research methodology is based on a quantitative approach; hence a survey is conducted with 300 employees who work in IT industry. The survey questionnaire contains 30 questions, with five questions per variable. Descriptive analysis is performed to analyze the respondent demographic characteristics based on frequency analysis and the central tendencies measurement of constructs. Then, the scale measurement is used for the reliability analysis. This is followed by inferential analyses using the Pearson correlation coefficient analysis. Finally, the ANOVA test is applied to identify the impact of the five independent variables with the dependent variable, job performance.
According to the analysis results, it can be concluded that flexible working arrangements have a high impact on job performance compared to the other four variables. Management and leadership, employee recognition, onboarding/training and employee relations have a considerable relationship with job performance even though it is of a lower impact. Further, a set of recommendations is proposed to improve the job performance of employees in the IT industry in Sri Lanka. These recommendations will enable the organizations to identify employees’ needs and wants. These strategies can be implemented based on a priority level, which includes the most influential ranking with the intention of satisfying and motivating the employees. Thus, by meeting the needs of employees, job performance can be increased and by that, the employee turnover rate can be reduced.
item: Thesis-Full-text
Factors affecting successful adoption of scrum in software companies
(2016) Nishali, KS; Meedeniya, D
There are number of software development methodologies such as Waterfall, Rapid prototyping, Spiral, Incremental, Evolutionary Delivery, etc. However, these traditional methodologies were not flexible enough to develop complex and critical software systems with frequently changing requirements. Therefore, alternative software development methodologies gradually emerged and are used in practice.
Agile is the most suitable software development methodology for the frequently requirement changing environment. There are number of variants developed based on the Agile framework. Scrum is the most famous Agile variant with an incremental iterative process.
Main objectives of the project are to identify the factors towards the successful adoption of Scrum software development processes and their relative importance. The research contains three phases. Phase one is based on the literature review, formulation of the theoretical framework and hypothesis development. The theoretical framework is developed based on the literature review. The hypothesis is developed based on the research questions. In second phase a questionnaire is designed. This research examined the validity of the questionnaire based on Cronbach alpha, which is calculated using pilot survey responses. Web based survey was conducted for the collection of data. The research eliminated five questions to improve the validity of the questionnaire on alpha value. Phase three of the research is the data analysis. It is based on Pearson correlation and linear regression. The statistical analysis results show the correlation between identified factors and verify the success of the project.
The results of the study show that the key factors, such as Scrum technology, communication, people, process and organization culture are having positive contribution towards adopting Scrum software development process in Sri Lanka. The study further reveals the percentage importance of each factor towards the success of Scrum. Such as people factor contributes 10%, process factor contributes 7%, technology factor contributes 28%, communication factor contributes 23% and organization culture factor contributes 6%.