37,079 research outputs found
NDE: An effective approach to improved reliability and safety. A technology survey
Technical abstracts are presented for about 100 significant documents relating to nondestructive testing of aircraft structures or related structural testing and the reliability of the more commonly used evaluation methods. Particular attention is directed toward acoustic emission; liquid penetrant; magnetic particle; ultrasonics; eddy current; and radiography. The introduction of the report includes an overview of the state-of-the-art represented in the documents that have been abstracted
A research review of quality assessment for software
Measures were recommended to assess the quality of software submitted to the AdaNet program. The quality factors that are important to software reuse are explored and methods of evaluating those factors are discussed. Quality factors important to software reuse are: correctness, reliability, verifiability, understandability, modifiability, and certifiability. Certifiability is included because the documentation of many factors about a software component such as its efficiency, portability, and development history, constitute a class for factors important to some users, not important at all to other, and impossible for AdaNet to distinguish between a priori. The quality factors may be assessed in different ways. There are a few quantitative measures which have been shown to indicate software quality. However, it is believed that there exists many factors that indicate quality and have not been empirically validated due to their subjective nature. These subjective factors are characterized by the way in which they support the software engineering principles of abstraction, information hiding, modularity, localization, confirmability, uniformity, and completeness
Software Measurement Activities in Small and Medium Enterprises: an Empirical Assessment
An empirical study for evaluating the proper implementation of measurement/metric programs in software companies in one area of Turkey is presented. The research questions are discussed and validated with the help of senior software
managers (more than 15 years’ experience) and then used for interviewing a variety of medium and small scale software companies in Ankara. Observations show that there is a
common reluctance/lack of interest in utilizing measurements/metrics despite the fact that they are well known in the industry. A side product of this research is that internationally recognized standards such as ISO and CMMI are pursued if they are a part of project/job
requirements; without these requirements, introducing those standards to the companies remains as a long-term target to increase quality
Risk factors affecting the ability for earned value management to accurately assess the performance of infrastructure projects in Australia
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate a set of risk-related factors influencing the earned
value management (EVM) concept as an assessment technique in evaluating the progress of modern
sustainable infrastructure construction projects.
Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative research approach has been adopted for identifying
risk-related factors influencing EVM concept from a literature review and through interviewing
industry personnel, followed by an inductive process to form sets of key factors and their measuring
items.
Findings – EVM is a common method for assessing project performance. A weakness of this approach
is that EVM assessment in its current form does not measure the impact of a number of project
performance factors that result from the complexity of modern infrastructure construction projects, and
thus does not accurately assess their impact in this performance. This paper discusses and explains a
range of potential risk factors to evaluating project performance such as sustainability, stakeholder
requirements, communication, procurement strategy, weather, experience of staff, site condition, design
issues, financial risk, subcontractor, government requirements and material. In addition, their
measuring items were identified.
Practical implications – This research assists projects managers to improve the evaluation process of
infrastructure construction performance by incorporating a range of factors likely to impact on that
performance and which are not included in current EVM calculations.
Originality/value – This research addresses the need to include in the EVM calculation a range of risk
factors affecting the performance of infrastructure projects in Australia and therefore makes this calculation a more reliable tool for assessing project performance
Lunar TV - Reliability Evaluation Plan
Reliability plan for lunar TV camera projec
Usability Evaluation in Virtual Environments: Classification and Comparison of Methods
Virtual environments (VEs) are a relatively new type of human-computer interface in which users perceive and act in a three-dimensional world. The designers of such systems cannot rely solely on design guidelines for traditional two-dimensional interfaces, so usability evaluation is crucial for VEs. We present an overview of VE usability evaluation. First, we discuss some of the issues that differentiate VE usability evaluation from evaluation of traditional user interfaces such as GUIs. We also present a review of VE evaluation methods currently in use, and discuss a simple classification space for VE usability evaluation methods. This classification space provides a structured means for comparing evaluation methods according to three key characteristics: involvement of representative users, context of evaluation, and types of results produced. To illustrate these concepts, we compare two existing evaluation approaches: testbed evaluation [Bowman, Johnson, & Hodges, 1999], and sequential evaluation [Gabbard, Hix, & Swan, 1999]. We conclude by presenting novel ways to effectively link these two approaches to VE usability evaluation
An Efficient Approach for Reviewing Security-Related Aspects in Agile Requirements Specifications of Web Applications
Defects in requirements specifications can have severe consequences during
the software development lifecycle. Some of them may result in poor product
quality and/or time and budget overruns due to incorrect or missing quality
characteristics, such as security. This characteristic requires special
attention in web applications because they have become a target for
manipulating sensible data. Several concerns make security difficult to deal
with. For instance, security requirements are often misunderstood and
improperly specified due to lack of security expertise and emphasis on security
during early stages of software development. This often leads to unspecified or
ill-defined security-related aspects. These concerns become even more
challenging in agile contexts, where lightweight documentation is typically
produced. To tackle this problem, we designed an approach for reviewing
security-related aspects in agile requirements specifications of web
applications. Our proposal considers user stories and security specifications
as inputs and relates those user stories to security properties via Natural
Language Processing. Based on the related security properties, our approach
identifies high-level security requirements from the Open Web Application
Security Project (OWASP) to be verified, and generates a reading technique to
support reviewers in detecting defects. We evaluate our approach via three
experiment trials conducted with 56 novice software engineers, measuring
effectiveness, efficiency, usefulness, and ease of use. We compare our approach
against using: (1) the OWASP high-level security requirements, and (2) a
perspective-based approach as proposed in contemporary state of the art. The
results strengthen our confidence that using our approach has a positive impact
(with large effect size) on the performance of inspectors in terms of
effectiveness and efficiency.Comment: Preprint accepted for publication at the Requirements Engineering
journal. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1906.1143
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