The paper presents the swarm intelligence approach to the selection of a set of software components based on computational experiments simulating the desired operating conditions of the software system being developed. A mathematical model is constructed, aimed at the effective selection of components from the available alternative options using the artificial bee colony algorithm. The model and process of component selection are introduced and applied to the case of selecting Node.js components for the development of a digital platform. The aim of the development of the platform is to facilitate countrywide simultaneous online psychological surveys in schools in the conditions of unstable internet connection and the large variety of desktop and mobile client devices, running different operating systems and browsers. The module whose development is considered in the paper should provide functionality for the archiving and checksum verification of the survey forms and graphical data. With the swarm intelligence approach proposed in the paper, the effective set of components was identified through a directional search based on fuzzy assessment of the three experimental quality indicators. To simulate the desired operating conditions and to guarantee the reproducibility of the experiments, the virtual infrastructure was configured. The application of swarm intelligence led to reproducible results for component selection after 312 experiments instead of the 1080 experiments needed by the exhaustive search algorithm. The suggested approach can be widely used for the effective selection of software components for distributed systems operating in the given conditions at this stage of their development.

The article is dedicated to the development of a mathematical model and methodology for evaluating the effectiveness of integrating information technology solutions into digital platforms using virtual simulation infrastructures. The task of selecting a stack of technologies is formulated as the task of selecting elements from sets of possible solutions. This allows us to develop a mathematically unified approach to evaluating the effectiveness of different solutions, such as choosing programming languages, choosing Database Management System (DBMS), choosing operating systems and data technologies, and choosing the frameworks used. Introduced technology compatibility operation and decomposition of the evaluation of the efficiency of the technology stack at the stages of the life cycle of the digital platform development allowed us to reduce the computational complexity of the formation of the technology stack. A methodology based on performance assessments for experimental research in a virtual software-configurable simulation environment has been proposed. The developed solution allows the evaluation of the performance of the digital platform before its final implementation, while reducing the cost of conducting an experiment to assess the characteristics of the digital platform. It is proposed to compare the characteristics of digital platform efficiency based on the use of fuzzy logic, providing the software developer with an intuitive tool to support decision-making on the inclusion of the solution in the technology stack.

Web surveys are very popular in the Internet space. Web surveys are widely incorporated for gathering customer opinion about Internet services, for sociological and psychological research, and as part of the knowledge testing systems in electronic learning. When conducting web surveys, one of the issues to consider is the respondents’ authenticity throughout the entire survey process. We took 20,000 responses to an online questionnaire as experimental data. The survey took about 45 min on average. We did not take into account the given answers; we only considered the response time to the first question on each page of the survey interface, that is, only the users’ reaction time was taken into account. Data analysis showed that respondents get used to the interface elements and want to finish a long survey as soon as possible, which leads to quicker reactions. Based on the data, we built two neural network models that identify the records in which the respondent’s authenticity was violated or the respondent acted as a random clicker. The amount of data allows us to conclude that the identified dependencies are widely applicable.

At every software design stage nowadays, there is an acute need to solve the problem of effective choice of libraries, development technologies, data exchange formats, virtual environment systems, characteristics of virtual machines. Due to the spread of various kinds of devices and the popularity of Web platforms, lots of systems are developed not for the universal installation on a device (box version), but for a specific architecture with the subsequent provision of web services. Under these conditions, the only way for estimating the efficiency parameters at the design stage is to conduct various kinds of experiments to evaluate the parameters of a particular solution. Using the example of the Web platform of digital psychological tools, the methods for experimental parameter evaluation were developed in the article. The mechanisms and technologies for improving the efficiency of the Vagrant and Docker cloud virtual environment were also proposed in the paper. A set of basic criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of the configuration of the virtual development environment has been determined to be rapid deployment; increase in the speed and decrease in the volume of resources used; increase in the speed of data exchange between the host machine and the virtual machine. The results of experimental estimates of the parameters that define the formulated efficiency criteria are given as: processor utilization involved (percentage); the amount of RAM involved (GB); initialization time of virtual machines (seconds); time to assemble the component completely (Build) and to reassemble the component (Watch) (seconds). To improve the efficiency, a file system access driver based on the NFS protocol was studied in the paper.

This paper concerns the case of the development of a technology for increasing the efficiency of access control based on the user behavior monitoring built into a software system’s user interface. It is proposed to use the time of user reactions as individual indicators of psychological and psychophysical state. This paper presents the results and interpretation of user reactions collected during a mass web survey of students of the Russian Federation. The total number of users was equal to 22,357. To reveal the patterns in user reactions, both quantitative and qualitative approaches were applied. The analysis of the data demonstrated that the user could be characterized by their psychomotor reactions, collected during the answering of a set of questions. Those reactions reflected the personal skills of the interface interaction, the speed of reading, and the speed of answering. Thus, those observations can be used as a supplement to personal verification in information systems. The collection of the reaction times did not load the data volumes significantly nor transmit confidential information.