Critical Issues In Software Quality Assurance: An Exploratory Study

Recent reviews of the Software Quality Assurance (SQA) literature expose that in most organizations, systems development is characterized by recurrent problems, such as poor system quality.  The conclusions of these reviews is that SQA efforts have failed due primarily to their failure to adequately address the linkages between the organizational and process aspects of quality assurance in software development projects.  As an initial step in identifying and understanding the linkages between the organizational and process aspects of SQA, the authors conducted an exploratory study to elicit a set of issues critical to the assurance of delivering reliable software

Information Technology Audit in Georgia

With the development of information technology to carry out effectively their missions the largest part of a variety of organizations, government agencies and services have become dependent on computer systems. For each of the organization’s activities the IT environment must be properly studied and evaluated in which they perform the basic activities. Therefore, in such environment it is necessary to make the information technology audit of IT systems operating reliability and functionality in order to obtain reasonable assurance. IT governance and information systems audit is imperative for successful governance. This paper with a comprehensive literature review defines information technology audit, investigates how IT audit performs in the public sector of Georgia. Also it provides the thorough explanation of the experiences of the Georgian State Audit Office. The study analyses the challenges of the IT audit and point to future development directions of IT audit in the public sector. Although considerable research exists on IT control and on internal auditing, there is limited study that refers to IT evaluation control activities in the public sector auditing. As such, the findings from this research would generate new conclusion to enrich the existing literature on IT related auditing. The findings also may improve the IT evaluation activities in the Georgian public sector

University strategic planning in Cameroon: what lessons for sub-Saharan Africa?

This article argues that the global, regional, and local realities can complement rather than contradict each other in the process of strategic planning for universities in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Using the case of the University of Buea in Cameroon, it attempts to use the global trends of polarisation in knowledge production capacity as an input or tool for identifying strategic choice in the process of strategic planning in institutions. The national policy background is used to highlight the context and inherent role of the central government in the process of institutional strategic planning

Audit of public finances: methodological issues and the case of Ukraine

The paper aims to analyze the methodological issues that exist in the field of public finance audit, and find ways to solve them on the example of Ukraine. The methodological basis of the study is the analysis of scientific publications, regulations, standards; best practices analysis; retrospective analysis of ACU’s performance indicators; content analysis of reports on the results of audits; method of logical generalization and systematization in formulating conclusions and recommendations. The study found that an important role in maintaining the functions of the SAI in society is played not only by the fact of auditing public finances, but also its methodology, including compliance with INTOSAI standards and building confidence in its results. The recommendations concern the need to: conduct financial audits of all major administrators of budget funds in accordance with the requirements of INTOSAI standards; ensure the timeliness of financial audits, the results of which should be published together with the financial statements; assessment of the skills of the ACU’s specialists performing financial audits to plan staff training; revise approaches to the interaction of the ACU’s auditors with internal audit departments to support the development of the internal audit function in the public sector; establish a quality control system according to the requirements of ISSAI 140; revise the approaches to the implementation of public finance reform on the transition to the application of the principle of accrual in accounting. Implementation of the recommendations will strengthen the role of the Accounting Chamber in society by increasing the credibility of its audits and their importance for improving the efficiency of public administration

Integrated SCM/PDM/CRM and delivery of software products to 160.000 customers

The release and deployment of enterprise application software is a potentially complex task for software vendors. This complexity can unfortunately result in a significant amount of work and risk. This paper presents a case study of a product software vendor that tries to reduce this complexity by integrating product data management (PDM), software configuration management (SCM), and customer relationship management (CRM) into one system. The case study shows that by combining these management areas in a single intelligent software knowledge base, software release and deployment processes can be automated and improved, thereby enabling a software vendor of enterprise software to serve a large number of customers with different product configuration

Research on approaches to public funding and development of tertiary education within selected OECD nations

No abstract available

Quality Assurance of Higher Education Governance and Management: An Exploration of the Minimum Imperative for the Envisioned African Common Higher Education Space

In 2018, as part of the African higher education harmonisation drive, the African Union Commission (AUC) issued the African Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ASG-QA). Within the ASG-QA, the AUC commits to promoting good governance and management in higher education institutions and provides governance and management as the second standard. However, there is a dearth of knowledge about the governance and management architecture for higher education institutions in the African higher education landscape that is either implicit or explicit in the ASG-QA. Against the above backdrop—using the ASG-QA as a source of data and content analysis as a data analysis method—the paper examines the governance and management imperative for higher education institutions in the African higher education landscape from the perspective of the AUC. Six themes relating to Africa’s higher education governance and management landscape emerged from the data: the role of the state (or government) in higher education, the internal governance framework, focus on quality and quality enhancement, observance of values of higher education, adherence to the principles of good governance, and capable leadership. The findings suggest that the governance and management architecture under the ASG-QA leans more towards providing common standards for quality assessment of governance and management than creating an identical national higher education governance and management ecosystem across Africa

Managing Change at Universities - a selection of case studies from Africa and Southeast Asia

This publication contains nine case studies of change processes in higher education institutions in Africa and Asia. The case studies show the wide variety of challenges higher education institutions face. Quality management has become a key issue in virtually all countries around the world. The search for strategies for faculties or smaller units is another important issue. The authors show how careful reflection on the challenges, on the options available, on benchmarking internationally can help in identifying viable ways for managing the institutional transformation

Real-Time Systems: Reflections on higher education in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia

Real-time systems (An ICT definition)\ud In real-time multiprocessing there is the extra requirement that the system complete its response to any input within a certain critical time. This poses additional problems, particularly in situations where the system is heavily loaded and is subject to many\ud simultaneous demands. Real-time systems are always dedicated. Most systems are not real-time