PREFACE

Special Issue on: "Software Engineering and Its Applications"

This special issue introduces innovative and advanced software engineering methods and techniques for developing software systems. Its aims are to facilitate and support research related to software engineering technology and the applications. The issue carries revised and substantially extended versions of seven papers presented and selected at The Seventh Malaysian Software Engineering Conference (MySEC 2013). MySEC 2013 was the seventh regional conference with aim to converge researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to advance the state-of-the-art of software engineering research and practice. MySEC 2013 was hosted in Melaka, the historical state of Malaysia on the 20–21 November 2013.

The article by Azlin Nordin et al. entitled “An Application of Bloom’s Taxanomy in Generation and Assessment of Examination Question Items” has explored the application of Bloom’s Taxonomy in the generation of examination question items process and assessment of examination questions in a new software platform. The second article “Dynamic Parameterized States Tracking for Reusable Workflow Routing” by Khor Swee Eng et al. proposed reusable workflow design to support majority of business process management. The dynamics feature functions calling feature of the workflow allow process owner to customize their flows seamlessly with their business requirement using this workflow engine.

In the area of software project, the article by Mariayee Doraisamy et al. entitled “The Need for Software Project Monitoring Methodology: An Exploratory Survey at Malaysian Public Sector” investigated the need of software project monitoring methodology for Malaysian Public Sector. The survey finding is the keystone to further the research on software project monitoring especially in the context of Malaysian Public Sector. The second article in the area of teaching and learning is the one by Nuraini Hidayah Sulaiman and Masitah Ghazali that describes the learning issues for children with cerebral palsy (CP) and their requirements. The paper layout the guidelines for designing and developing learning software applications that are compatible with the limited capabilities of children with CP.

The work by Fatai Idowu Sadiq et al. entitled “Context-aware Architecture Using Mobile Phone Simulator: a case study of an institution” reviews the context-aware techniques, and the unique proposal of the automatic message or call reminder service that offers both lecturers and students at university context, through the context-aware solution with the mobile portal database in the proposed context awareness architecture. Alireza Yousefpour et al. proposed a statistical and probabilistic method using standard deviation of features for high-dimensional problem on feature space in a sentiment analysis, while at the same time improved the accuracy of sentiment polarity forecasting, in their paper entitled “A Novel Feature Reduction Method in Sentiment Analysis”. In the paper of Abdehamid Abdelhadi Mansor et al. entitled “Policy Overlap Analysis to Avoid Policy Conflict in Policy-based Management Systems” presented a static analysis technique to address the inconsistencies and scalability when there is more than one manager controlling the system behaviour.

Guest Editors:

Masitah Ghazali and Dayang Norhayati Abang Jawawi

E-mail: masitah@utm.my, dayang@utm.my,

Faculty of Computing

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

Malaysia