Software projects still suffer from high failure rates, especially in developing countries. However, no one evaluated the current studies that were conducted in the context of Saudi Arabia (SA), a developing country. We try to fill this gap using a property-based critical literature survey of existing studies. The findings suggest that management/organization factors including lack of top management support, organizational culture, business process reengineering, lack of training, and unavailability of project management office are main factors that influence software project failures in SA. However, technical and financial factors are secondary; this might be due to the extensive government subsidization for IT. Our analysis can assist software project managers in SA, and it may apply to other developing countries in the Middle East.

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Electronic health records (EHRs) are implemented by many health care organizations as a potential service solution. Despite the appeal of EHRs, failure in their implementation can lead to negative consequences, ranging from the loss of money to reputation damage, for health care providers. However, the causes of this problem have not attracted the attention of a sufficient number of researchers. This paper aims to investigate this phenomenon objectively and subjectively in a public context using an interview-based qualitative approach supported by archival data and records of a real-world failed EHR project. The results show that the factors influencing failure are divergent and include technical and managerial issues. In particular, the timing and duration of the training as well as the integration of EHR with the enterprise systems were found to be the strongest influencing factors, followed by reasons related to the software design (eg, a lack of required pharmacy functionality) and software people management (eg, resistance to change). The paper also discusses points related to EHR development and design, such as the development paradigm, data quality and validation, architecture for security, and source code naming convention. K E Y W O R D S electronic health record, software design, software project management, failure, software security 1 1258 1259While increased adoption and growth of EHR have been observed, there is a surprising lack of studies regarding the reasons why EHR implementation fails. Such studies could help prevent past implementation mistakes and reduce the overall risk involved in implementation. The benefits of EHR, if it is properly implemented, are far more substantial than the risks. The benefits include higher patient and doctor satisfaction, real-time information tracking, fewer handwritten forms, fewer preventable errors, fewer dosage errors, and increased quality of care. 6,7 However, due to several factors, including technological barriers and poor infrastructure, these benefits are not always achieved, especially in developing countries. 8 Additionally, each health service has particularities that should be considered to facilitate adoption. 9 Adoption may involve diverse changes in the different phases of the work of health professionals. Once EHR is implemented, the process is continually changing and evolving. EHR implementation is thus a challenging development stage, especially in developing countries characterized by a lack of information and communication technology (ICT) adoption. 8,10 The consequences of implementation failure not only affect patient satisfaction but also can cause tremendous economic loss and reputation damage for health care providers.The contribution of our study is the identification of the reasons for EHR implementation failure in real-world environments. To the best of our knowledge, this area has received less research attention than different aspects related to EHR systems. 1,6,[11][12][13][14] Conducting such real-world-based studies is harder i...

Software obfuscation techniques are increasingly being used to prevent attackers from exploiting security flaws and launching successful attacks. With research on software obfuscation techniques rapidly growing, many software obfuscation techniques with varying quality and strength have been proposed in the literature. However, the literature on obfuscation techniques has not yet been coherently collated and reviewed. This research paper aims to present an overview of state-of-the-art software obfuscation techniques, focusing on quality and strength. A systematic analysis and synthesis of literature published between 2010 and April 2021 has been performed to identify the common measures to quantify obfuscation and their measures, the publication venue, and the home country of the researchers. We have identified the obfuscation quality attributes, such as potency, resilience, cost, stealth, and similarity, that are the most widely used metrics to evaluate the quality of obfuscation techniques. In addition, different measures have been used to quantify these qualities, such as complexity (to measure potency), human effort (to measure resilience), efficiency (to estimate cost), and multiclass performance metrics, distance measures, and matching method (to quantify similarity). These measures were then categorized into sub-measures. The literature lacks research in the following two areas: empirical research using a case study strategy, i.e., realworld datasets, and measurements of obfuscation stealth. Researchers did not address stealth as clearly as they addressed potency, cost, and similarity.

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