An Empirical Study on Decision making for Quality Requirements

[Context] Quality requirements are important for product success yet often handled poorly. The problems with scope decision lead to delayed handling and an unbalanced scope. [Objective] This study characterizes the scope decision process to understand influencing factors and properties affecting the scope decision of quality requirements. [Method] We studied one company's scope decision process over a period of five years. We analyzed the decisions artifacts and interviewed experienced engineers involved in the scope decision process. [Results] Features addressing quality aspects explicitly are a minor part (4.41%) of all features handled. The phase of the product line seems to influence the prevalence and acceptance rate of quality features. Lastly, relying on external stakeholders and upfront analysis seems to lead to long lead-times and an insufficient quality requirements scope. [Conclusions] There is a need to make quality mode explicit in the scope decision process. We propose a scope decision process at a strategic level and a tactical level. The former to address long-term planning and the latter to cater for a speedy process. Furthermore, we believe it is key to balance the stakeholder input with feedback from usage and market in a more direct way than through a long plan-driven process

Análise e desenvolvimento de uma aplicação de monitorização de produção

Dissertação de mestrado em Engenharia de SistemasAtualmente, do ponto de vista industrial, a procura crescente de mercado e a concorrência elevam a exigência, sendo necessário que as empresas industriais entreguem os seus produtos com a melhor qualidade, no menor intervalo de tempo possível. Desta forma é imprescindível que internamente sejam efetuadas melhorias contínuas para alcançar e ultrapassar a concorrência através da conquista do mercado com produtos de excelência. Através de melhorias contínuas aplicadas nas instalações, nos equipamentos de produção e nas políticas de internas é possível reduzir os tempos resultantes da produção até à entrega do produto final. Este projeto terá como base o estudo das manutenções corretivas, recolhendo o máximo de informação possível para a análise das diferentes métricas utilizadas. O desenvolvimento do software de monitorização de produção tem como função o registo de todas as ações como a produção e paragens de máquinas, pretendendo-se obter um registo dos diferentes estados em que as máquinas estiveram presentes, no setor da bobinagem, para que sejam calculados vários indicadores de desempenho com função de avaliar a disponibilidade das máquinas num período de tempo específico, seja para monitorização da produção, definição de objetivos ou comparação de valores. O objetivo do desenvolvimento deste programa é a redução de tempos de paragem das máquinas, com o apoio de uma funcionalidade que permite visualizar o estado do shop floor em tempo real, de forma intuitiva para todos os colaboradores que se encontrem no setor. Para ser conhecida a influência do software desenvolvido e suas potencialidades, foram calculados indicadores de desempenho antes e depois da implementação, assim como métricas específicas de paragens de máquinas. Após a implementação da aplicação desenvolvida, os resultados dos vários indicadores decritos anteriormente apontam para a conclusão do objetivo de redução dos tempos de paragens das máquinas antigido com sucesso.Currently, from an industrial point of view, the demands of the market and increasing competitors are becoming more and more demanding and it is necessary that industrial enterprises deliver products with the best quality and in the smaller time interval as possible. Therefore, it is mandatory that internally are performed continuous improvements to reach and surpass competitors by dominating the market with excellent products. Through continuous improvements in installations, production equipment and intern policies, it is possible to reduce the time elapsed from production start to the delivery of the final product. This project will be based on the study of corrective maintenance, collecting as much information as possible to analyze all the metrics used. The development of production monitoring software has the function of record all actions, like production and machine breakdowns, in order to obtain a record of the different states in which the machines were submitted in the defined sector, so that performance indicators can be used to evaluate the availability of the machines in a specific period of time, to production monitoring, definition of objectives or comparison of values. The objective of the development of this program is to reduce machine downtime times, through the support of a second screen that will demonstrate the state of the shop floor in real time, in an intuitive way for all employees who are in the sector. In order to know the benefits of the developed software and the potential of the data collected, performance indicators were studied before and after implementation, as specific metrics of machine breakdowns. After the implementation of the application developed, severall indicators previously described point to the conclusion of the goal of reducing the failure times with success

An investigation of how quality requirements are specified in industrial practice

Context: This paper analyses a sub-contractor specification in the mobile handset domain. Objective: The objective is to understand how quality requirements are specified and which types of requirements exist in a requirements specification from industry. Method: The case study is performed in the mobile handset domain, where a requirements specification was analyzed by categorizing and characterizing the pertaining requirements. Results: The requirements specification is written in structured natural language with unique identifiers for the requirements. Of the 2178 requirements, 827 (38%) are quality requirements. Of the quality requirements, 56% are quantified, i.e., having a direct metric in the requirement. The variation across the different sub-domains within the requirements specification is large. Conclusion: The findings from this study suggest that methods for quality requirements need to encompass many aspects to comprehensively support working with quality requirements. Solely focusing on, for example, quantification of quality requirements might overlook important requirements since there are many quality requirements in the studied specification where quantification is not appropriate. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved