Introduction to Communication Research: The First Basic Steps

Since the articles publish in Weekend Reviews and journals like Pakistan Perspectives are usually anchored in Communication Research it is incumbent that the first basic steps in that Research are delineated first. The first steps consist of three basic exposures i.e. Selective exposure, selective perception and selective retention. A. Selective exposure means that you expose yourself to those events or developments you’re already familiar with. If that is, if you’re PMLN fan you don’t usually expose yourself to PPP meetings or events. That is you strengthen your already antecedent perception all the more-to the exclusion to other perceptions. B. Selective perception means that even when you expose yourself to selective exposure you try to pursue only those developments or events that you’re at home with. Since you don’t expose yourself to other perceptions you get yourself confirmed or strengthened in your own persistent views. C. Finally, selective retention means that you retain only such perceptions which again are antecedent to your previous perceptions. In any case, the differences wrought by exposing yourself to different views are great, even monumental. This is seen in the respective stance of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Mohandas Karam Chand Gandhi on the federal part of the Government of India Act, 1935-1940. Jinnah use to expose himself to all sorts of document, word by word and formulated his stance in the light of his readings.

Feature Selection for Agile Development Through Data Mining Techniques

Traditionally software development has been performed by following a phased model. This model is called the waterfall (or traditional) model, in which the software development life cycle is divided into distinct phases i.e. requirements elicitation, software development, testing, and maintenance, which are followed in a defined order. The waterfall model creates heavy documentation, and most often results in huge rework and cost overruns because customer does not get the visibility of the project until it is very late. As an alternative to the documentation driven, heavyweight software development processes, many lightweight methodologies were created by software practitioners, e.g. crystal methodologies, feature driven development (FDD), scrum, extreme programming (XP) etc. The lightweight methodologies are called agile methodologies, and the development that is done following this model is called agile development. The agile methodologies follow the practices that add value to customers, and accept changes at any time during the development. From its inception, the agile development has been observed to be highly successful and it is used in most of the software companies now. However if a company wants to start using the agile development, then it is very difficult for it to choose which agile practices or features it should follow, because there are many practices for agile development, from which the company must choose which ones it would use. In this work the most important success factors will be extracted from the agile development practices that are successful in the software industry (with reference to the software practitioners in Pakistan). Through literature survey, the candidate factors will be selected, and then a survey will be conducted (using online survey forms) from the software practitioners of Pakistan, to obtain data about which agile practices are the most successful practices? The survey results will be analyzed using state of the art data mining techniques (e.g. dimension reduction techniques, clustering techniques, and regression modeling) on multiple dimensions (extent of usage, extent of benefits) to find out which practices are most successful among the software practitioners? The most useful success factors/features of agile development will be extracted on the basis of the obtained results.