Abstract-There has been an enormous increase in globalization that has led to more cooperation and competition across boundaries. Software engineering, particularly distributed software development (DSD) and global software development (GSD), is evolving rapidly and presents several challenges, such as geographical separations, temporal differences, cultural variations, and management strategies. As a result, a variety of situational factors (SFs) arise that causes challenging problems in software development. Both literature and real world software industry study revealed that the extent of the effect of SFs may vary subject to a certain software project. Project executives should need to concentrate on the right SFs for the successful development of a specific project. This work first examines the optimal and most well-balanced GSD-related SFs and then presents a mechanism for prioritizing the SFs to better understand the extent to which an SF generally affects the GSD. A set of 56 SFs in 11 categories is identified and analyzed in this research. A fuzzy set theory based, multi criteria decision making (MCDM) technique, fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) was proposed to extract the SFs that have the strongest effects on GSD. The proposed technique is intelligent and automated and can be customized to suit specific conditions and environments. Thus, it can provide support for a much-needed variation that is the hallmark of such software development environments. A case study of a global company working in collaboration on a project JKL was selected to identify and prioritize the most challenging SFs. A sensitivity analysis is carried out to evaluate the extent of the impact for highly ranked SFs related to JKL project.

The requirement to develop an organization makes collaboration with other organizations necessary, so the organizations can share resources to perform common tasks. Different organizational domains use different access control models to protect their resources from unauthorized access. Organizational collaboration is an important goal for distributed computing paradigms, but policy inconsistencies between domains will cause problems in a collaboration model that add to the problems involved in constructing the collaboration model itself. These problems provide the two challenges that motivate the research presented here: (1) the construction of a collaboration model across multiple domains protected by different access control models; and (2) ensuring that the access control policy used by a participating domain contains no inconsistencies; (3) we also present our new approach to solving the inter-domain role mapping (IDRM) problem, i.e., to determine the minimal role set that covers requested permissions from a collaborating domain. We also analyse our algorithms, present the results of our tests, and compare our results with the results of existing approaches.

Articulated structure of mobile robot presents high flexibility on the environment adaptation. It has been widely used on the mobile robot to get through rough terrain. This class of robots named as articulated mobile robots can move in hard condition with high stability and environment adaptability. In order to satisfy the requirement of Urban Search and Rescue (USAR), a series of articulated mobile robots are analyzed. The performance of articulated mobile robots is analyzed for get an appropriate robot for USAR. Two snake-like robots named Perambulator I and II are analyzed. Based on the structure of Perambulator II, the articulated mobile robot Ameba II are presented based on track drive mechanism. Ameba II has high performance on mobility and adaptability in complex environment. The comparisons among of some typical articulated robots are given based on mobility and environment adaptation. The experimental results of both Perambulator II and Ameba II show that the Ameba II mobile robot is a better than the snake-like robot Perambulator II on the urban search and rescue applications.

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