Personal Knowledge of a Judge As a Source of Proof: An Islamic Perspective

Islam has given pivotal role to the judiciary and considers it one of the most important pillar of the state. In this regard, the role of a judge is also of great importance as justice cannot be dispensed in society without the contribution of a judge. When a dispute is brought to a court, it becomes the responsibility of the judge to provide justice to the parties. A judge relies on testimony, oath and circumstantial evidences as sources of proof. Jurists have discussed them in detail while they have also discussed personal knowledge of a judge (Ilm al-Qadi) as a source of proof. This article focuses on it, where different stipulations and conditions, as laid down by the jurists, have been discussed along with their arguments.

Resolving Requirement Traceability Conflicts in Distributed Scrum

Requirement traceability is the set of practices used to trace changes in requirements during development process. It ensures that each step of development is correct and confirms to the needs of prior and next steps. In agile methods like Scrum, there are short development cycles and the product owner creates product backlog and shares with Scrum team. In the distributed Scrum, teams are distributed across different geographic locations and team members discuss requirements, create designs, code and documentation. Co-located teams can discuss and trace the requirements easily but it becomes difficult for teams to gather, trace and manage requirements in the distributed Scrum. Sometimes requirements are repeated in different artifacts, which create requirement redundancy that cause requirement conflicts and interpret different meanings for the same requirement. Redundant requirements are difficult to trace, locate and create links. Many other studies discussed requirement traceability tools and frameworks but these tools didn?t focus on resolving requirement traceability in the distributed Scrum. To resolve the requirement traceability conflicts in the distributed Scrum, this study proposed a requirement traceability model. The proposed model is consisting of five steps including identifying the redundant requirements, remove redundant requirements, assigning unique IDs to requirements, storing requirement information and resolving the requirement traceability conflicts in the distributed Scrum. The study helped to locate, prevent and remove requirement redundancies and resolve the requirements conflicts in the distributed Scrum software development. A survey was conducted in software industry and the results of survey were analyzed and presented in the form of graphs. The most of the companies participated in survey were large in size. The survey results were analyzed using the SPSS tool and presented in the form of graphs. The survey results suggested that requirement traceability conflicts can be resolved by assigning unique IDs to requirements, removing inconsistent and redundant requirements, involving users into requirement elicitation process, proper communication with different stakeholders, using tools like JIRA. The proper planning in Scrum meetings with the whole team can avoid requirements conflicts. The proposed model is more beneficial in terms of removing redundant requirements and resolving requirement traceability conflicts in the distributed Scrum.