Products and prototypes: What’s the difference?

Prototypes are intended to demonstrate or test an idea. Commercial Off-The-Shelf products are intended for ongoing profitable sales. Their quality requirements are different: the former should be as cheap as possible whilst meeting the need for an adequate Proof-of-Concept or Demonstrator; the latter should be fit-for-purpose, cost-effective and an attractive, reliable solution to real world needs. Selling a prototype as a product risks customer dissatisfaction, com-plaints, legal challenges and reputation damage. Often the proto¬type has to be re-written to meet product quality-level expectations. This paper reviews the quality properties required of a product ready for delivery. This follows the ISO/IEC 25010 Quality Model, then adds important missing elements that lie “behind the scenes” in customer support, product management, legal aspects and defensive programming. It draws on a lifetime’s experience working on software products, products containing software and Software as a Service, providing facilities to end users

Towards a hybrid testing process unifying exploratory testing and scripted testing

CONTEXT Given the current state of the art in research, practitioners are faced with the challenge of choosing scripted testing (ST) or exploratory testing (ET). OBJECTIVE This study aims at systematically incorporating strengths of ET and ST in a hybrid testing process to overcome the weaknesses of each. METHOD We utilized systematic review and practitioner interviews to identify strengths and weaknesses of ET and ST. Strengths of ET were mapped to weaknesses of ST and vice versa. Noblit and Hare's lines-ofargument method was used for data analysis. The results of the mapping were used as input to codesign a hybrid process with experienced practitioners. RESULTS We found a clear need to create a hybrid process as follows: (i) both ST and ET provide strengths and weaknesses, and these depend on some particular conditions, which prevents preference of one approach to another; and (ii) the mapping showed that it is possible to address the weaknesses in one process by the strengths of the other in a hybrid form. With the input from literature and industry experts, a flexible and iterative hybrid process was designed. CONCLUSIONS Practitioners can clearly benefit from using a hybrid process given the mapping of advantages and disadvantage

3D-printing techniques in a medical setting : a systematic literature review

Background: Three-dimensional (3D) printing has numerous applications and has gained much interest in the medical world. The constantly improving quality of 3D-printing applications has contributed to their increased use on patients. This paper summarizes the literature on surgical 3D-printing applications used on patients, with a focus on reported clinical and economic outcomes. Methods: Three major literature databases were screened for case series (more than three cases described in the same study) and trials of surgical applications of 3D printing in humans. Results: 227 surgical papers were analyzed and summarized using an evidence table. The papers described the use of 3D printing for surgical guides, anatomical models, and custom implants. 3D printing is used in multiple surgical domains, such as orthopedics, maxillofacial surgery, cranial surgery, and spinal surgery. In general, the advantages of 3D-printed parts are said to include reduced surgical time, improved medical outcome, and decreased radiation exposure. The costs of printing and additional scans generally increase the overall cost of the procedure. Conclusion: 3D printing is well integrated in surgical practice and research. Applications vary from anatomical models mainly intended for surgical planning to surgical guides and implants. Our research suggests that there are several advantages to 3D- printed applications, but that further research is needed to determine whether the increased intervention costs can be balanced with the observable advantages of this new technology. There is a need for a formal cost-effectiveness analysis

A CMMI-compliant requirements management and development process

Requirements Engineering has been acknowledged an essential discipline for Software Quality. Poorly-defined processes for eliciting, analyzing, specifying and validating requirements can lead to unclear issues or misunderstandings on business needs and project’s scope. These typically result in customers’ non-satisfaction with either the products’ quality or the increase of the project’s budget and duration. Maturity models allow an organization to measure the quality of its processes and improve them according to an evolutionary path based on levels. The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) addresses the aforementioned Requirements Engineering issues. CMMI defines a set of best practices for process improvement that are divided into several process areas. Requirements Management and Requirements Development are the process areas concerned with Requirements Engineering maturity. Altran Portugal is a consulting company concerned with the quality of its software. In 2012, the Solution Center department has developed and applied successfully a set of processes aligned with CMMI-DEV v1.3, what granted them a Level 2 maturity certification. For 2015, they defined an organizational goal of addressing CMMI-DEV maturity level 3. This MSc dissertation is part of this organization effort. In particular, it is concerned with the required process areas that address the activities of Requirements Engineering. Our main goal is to contribute for the development of Altran’s internal engineering processes to conform to the guidelines of the Requirements Development process area. Throughout this dissertation, we started with an evaluation method based on CMMI and conducted a compliance assessment of Altran’s current processes. This allowed demonstrating their alignment with the CMMI Requirements Management process area and to highlight the improvements needed to conform to the Requirements Development process area. Based on the study of alternative solutions for the gaps found, we proposed a new Requirements Management and Development process that was later validated using three different approaches. The main contribution of this dissertation is the new process developed for Altran Portugal. However, given that studies on these topics are not abundant in the literature, we also expect to contribute with useful evidences to the existing body of knowledge with a survey on CMMI and requirements engineering trends. Most importantly, we hope that the implementation of the proposed processes’ improvements will minimize the risks of mishandled requirements, increasing Altran’s performance and taking them one step further to the desired maturity level

Showstoppers for Continuous Delivery in Small Scale Projects

Small scale projects outsourced to consultants provide their own difficulties when compared to more standard software development. Some of these problems are a lack of infrastructure and customers inexperienced with software development. This thesis is looking at the possibility of implementing continuous delivery in such an environment. The concrete problems are small projects with very little room for experimentation. But also the inexperience in automated testing which is essential for efficient regression testing. This led this thesis in two directions. The first one is how can you create a situation where continuous delivery could be beneficial, where developers prefer writing automated test cases instead of performing Ad Hoc manual testing during development and relying on a larger testing phase towards the end, much like what is done in waterfall development. The solution is to perform more deliveries to the customer throughout the project, with the customer having the responsibility of providing feedback on these deliveries. For the developers to embrace automated testing, a shift in focus is needed, from functional testing through the GUI to smaller unit and integration tests that will be easier to write and maintain. The other direction is addressing the fact that there is very little to continuously deliver during early stages of development, which could essentially make up half the project length. But also that there are several small projects each year. Making configuration management a support function for projects allows for standardisation and sharing the cost between all the projects

Practical Application Of Uml Activity Diagrams For The Generation Of Test Cases

Software testing and debugging represents around one third of total effort in development projects. Different factors which have influence on poor practices of testing have been identified through specific surveys. Amongst several, one of the most important is the lack of efficient methods to exploit development models for generating test cases. This paper presents a new method for automatically generating a complete set of functional test cases from UML activity diagrams complementing specification of use cases. Test cases are prioritized according to software risk information. Results from experiences with more than 70 software professionals/experts validate benefits of the method. Participants also confirm its interest and effectiveness for testing needs of industry

A framework for flexible and reconfigurable vision inspection systems

Reconfiguration activities remain a significant challenge for automated Vision Inspection Systems (VIS), which are characterized by hardware rigidity and time-consuming software programming tasks. This work contributes to overcoming the current gap in VIS reconfigurability by proposing a novel framework based on the design of Flexible Vision Inspection Systems (FVIS), enabling a Reconfiguration Support System (RSS). FVIS is achieved using reprogrammable hardware components that allow for easy setup based on software commands. The RSS facilitates offline software programming by extracting parameters from real images, Computer-Aided Design (CAD) data, and rendered images using Automatic Feature Recognition (AFR). The RSS offers a user-friendly interface that guides non-expert users through the reconfiguration process for new part types, eliminating the need for low-level coding. The proposed framework has been practically validated during a 4-year collaboration with a global leading automotive half shaft manufacturer. A fully automated FVIS and the related RSS have been designed following the proposed framework and are currently implemented in 7 plants of GKN global automotive supplier, checking 60 defect types on thousands of parts per day, covering more than 200 individual part types and 12 part families