Characterization and prediction of issue-related risks in software projects

Identifying risks relevant to a software project and planning measures to deal with them are critical to the success of the project. Current practices in risk assessment mostly rely on high-level, generic guidance or the subjective judgements of experts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to risk assessment using historical data associated with a software project. Specifically, our approach identifies patterns of past events that caused project delays, and uses this knowledge to identify risks in the current state of the project. A set of risk factors characterizing “risky” software tasks (in the form of issues) were extracted from five open source projects: Apache, Duraspace, JBoss, Moodle, and Spring. In addition, we performed feature selection using a sparse logistic regression model to select risk factors with good discriminative power. Based on these risk factors, we built predictive models to predict if an issue will cause a project delay. Our predictive models are able to predict both the risk impact (i.e. the extend of the delay) and the likelihood of a risk occurring. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our predictive models, achieving on average 48%-81% precision, 23%-90% recall, 29%-71% F-measure, and 70%-92% Area Under the ROC Curve. Our predictive models also have low error rates: 0.39-0.75 for Macro-averaged Mean Cost-Error and 0.7-1.2 for Macro-averaged Mean Absolute Error.

Green marketing strategies

This chapter presents the fundamentals of “green” marketing by drawing on traditional marketing theory as well as researchfocused on green marketing context. It discusses five critical areas in green marketing. The first critical area stems from green marketingtheory and practice that examines the logic for reducing the environmental impact of value creation and exchange. The second criticalarea highlights green marketing strategy that focuses on achieving organizational goals in ways that can reduce or eliminate negativeimpacts on the natural environment. The third critical area examines the green marketing mix that accounts for green products, greendistribution, green pricing, and green promotion. By using traditional marketing concepts, the chapter identifies how the entiremarketing mix elements should consistently provide a complete green product offering. Green products and processes need to beresearched, designed, and manufactured to include environmentally safe ingredients and components. Products need to be strategicallypriced to reflect their green values, distributed in the green chain channels and displayed effectively to highlight their status, and accuratelycommunicated to consumers and stakeholders. The fourth critical area illustrates governance and control. It shows how theholistic transformation toward greening the organization requires organizational culture change to gain support within and outside thefirm to ensure environmental issues are appropriately considered. These can be assessed by using existing management mechanisms,such as environmental management systems and/or triple bottom line management, which ensure best practice and continuousimprovements to occur. Lastly, the chapter discusses the future of green marketing and the direction that businesses need to take if theyseek to be sustainable.