It's a family affair: the effect of union recognition and human resource management on the provision of equal opportunities in the UK

Equal opportunities policies and family-friendly practices are examined using data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey in order to assess (i) their associations with union recognition and strategic human resource management and (ii) the outcomes of what has recently been described as ''tinkering around'' for women at work. We find that, controlling for various factors, equal opportunities policies and their monitoring, together with ''softer'' family-friendly policies are strongly associated with trade union recognition. On the other hand, we find that a number of both ''hard'' and ''soft'' Human Resource Management (HRM) policies are strongly associated with flexible working practices. Employees are least likely to have access to equal opportunities and family-friendly policies in workplaces which do not recognise a union or use HRM practices, and we present evidence to suggest that this is the worst option for the employer in terms of workplace performance, as well as for those with family responsibilities

An Approach for the Empirical Validation of Software Complexity Measures

Software metrics are widely accepted tools to control and assure software quality. A large number of software metrics with a variety of content can be found in the literature; however most of them are not adopted in industry as they are seen as irrelevant to needs, as they are unsupported, and the major reason behind this is due to improper empirical validation. This paper tries to identify possible root causes for the improper empirical validation of the software metrics. A practical model for the empirical validation of software metrics is proposed along with root causes. The model is validated by applying it to recently proposed and well known metrics

Building a Common Ground – The Use of Design Representation Cards for Enhancing Collaboration between Industrial Designers and Engineering Designers

To achieve success in today’s commercial environment, manufacturers have progressively adopted collaboration strategies. Industrial design has been increasingly used with engineering design to enhance competitiveness. Research between the two fields has been limited and existing collaboration methods have not achieved desired results. This PhD research project investigated the level of collaboration between industrial designers and engineering designers. The aim is to develop an integration tool for enhanced collaboration, where a common language would improve communication and create shared knowledge. An empirical research using questionnaires and observations identified 61 issues between industrial designers and engineering designers. The results were grouped and coded based on recurrence and importance, outlining 3 distinct problem categories in collaborative activity: conflicts in values and principles, differences in design representation, and education differences. A taxonomy further helped categorise design representations into sketches, drawings, models and prototypes. This knowledge was indexed into cards to provide uniform definition of design representations with key information. They should benefit practitioners and educators by serving as a decision-making guide and support a collaborative working environment. A pilot study first refined the layout and improved information access. The final validation involving interviews with practitioners revealed most respondents to be convinced that the tool would provide a common ground in design representations, contributing to enhanced collaboration. Additional interviews were sought from groups of final-year industrial design and engineering design students working together. Following their inter-disciplinary experience, nearly all respondents were certain that the cards would provide mutual understanding for greater product success. Lastly, a case study approach tested the cards in an industry-based project. A design diary captured and analysed the researchers’ activities and observations on a daily basis. It revealed positive feedback, reinforcing the benefits of the cards for successful collaboration in a multi-disciplinary environment. Keywords Industrial Design, Engineering Design, Collaboration, Design Representation, New Product Development.</p

Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering: A Design for a Global Family of Surveys and First Results from Germany

For many years, we have observed industry struggling in defining a high quality requirements engineering (RE) and researchers trying to understand industrial expectations and problems. Although we are investigating the discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, they still do not allow for empirical generalisations. To lay an empirical and externally valid foundation about the state of the practice in RE, we aim at a series of open and reproducible surveys that allow us to steer future research in a problem-driven manner. We designed a globally distributed family of surveys in joint collaborations with different researchers and completed the first run in Germany. The instrument is based on a theory in the form of a set of hypotheses inferred from our experiences and available studies. We test each hypothesis in our theory and identify further candidates to extend the theory by correlation and Grounded Theory analysis. In this article, we report on the design of the family of surveys, its underlying theory, and the full results obtained from Germany with participants from 58 companies. The results reveal, for example, a tendency to improve RE via internally defined qualitative methods rather than relying on normative approaches like CMMI. We also discovered various RE problems that are statistically significant in practice. For instance, we could corroborate communication flaws or moving targets as problems in practice. Our results are not yet fully representative but already give first insights into current practices and problems in RE, and they allow us to draw lessons learnt for future replications. Our results obtained from this first run in Germany make us confident that the survey design and instrument are well-suited to be replicated and, thereby, to create a generalisable empirical basis of RE in practice

A New Method for Protecting Interrelated Time Series with Bayesian Prior Distributions and Synthetic Data

Organizations disseminate statistical summaries of administrative data via the Web for unrestricted public use. They balance the trade-off between confidentiality protection and inference quality. Recent developments in disclosure avoidance techniques include the incorporation of synthetic data, which capture the essential features of underlying data by releasing altered data generated from a posterior predictive distribution. The United States Census Bureau collects millions of interrelated time series micro-data that are hierarchical and contain many zeros and suppressions. Rule-based disclosure avoidance techniques often require the suppression of count data for small magnitudes and the modification of data based on a small number of entities. Motivated by this problem, we use zero-inflated extensions of Bayesian Generalized Linear Mixed Models (BGLMM) with privacy-preserving prior distributions to develop methods for protecting and releasing synthetic data from time series about thousands of small groups of entities without suppression based on the of magnitudes or number of entities. We find that as the prior distributions of the variance components in the BGLMM become more precise toward zero, confidentiality protection increases and inference quality deteriorates. We evaluate our methodology using a strict privacy measure, empirical differential privacy, and a newly defined risk measure, Probability of Range Identification (PoRI), which directly measures attribute disclosure risk. We illustrate our results with the U.S. Census Bureau’s Quarterly Workforce Indicators

Quality-Based Leadership of Principal at Vocational School 2 Sragen

This study aimed to describe (1) the characteristics of the principal working relationship with the citizens of Vocational School 2 Sragen, (2) the characteristics of the principal social relations with people surrounding Vocational School 2 Sragen. It was a qualitative study using ethnographic design. This study was conducted at Vocational School 2 Sragen. Interviews were conducted to the principal, vice principal, teachers, and students. Methods for collecting data used interviews, observations, and documentation. Data analysis began with data collection, data reduction, data presentation, and conclusion. The validity of data used triangulation of sources. The finding suggested that (1) the work relationship of the principal with the school citizen was done both formally and informally. The formal work relationship included meetings, while non‐formal work relationship included casual talks, doing sport together, and eating together. This principal’s work relationship was not based on power, but it was a kind of relationship that relied on the work mechanism concept and based on trust, respect and competence. The principal held the ESQ training in order to improve the spirit and discipline of each personnel in carrying out their tasks and provide exemplary. (2) Social relation of the principal with the community was realized by doing communication and involving them in such activities organized by the school. It was also done in a cooperation of maintaining the school safety, involving community in the provision and distribution of zakat fitrah and Qurban meat and performing Friday prayer together. Principal established a good social relationship with parents in the form of cooperation in an effort to improve the quality of learners. The principal also had a good social relation and work relation with the business and industry both formally and informally associated with the industrial work practice and labor recruitment

Experiential Role of Artefacts in Cooperative Design

The role of material artefacts in supporting distributed and co-located work practices has been well acknowledged within the HCI and CSCW research. In this paper, we show that in addition to their ecological, coordinative and organizational support, artefacts also play an ‘experiential’ role. In this case, artefacts not only improve efficiency or have a purely functional role (e.g. allowing people to complete tasks quickly), but the presence and manifestations of these artefacts bring quality and richness to people’s performance and help in making better sense of their everyday lives. In a domain like industrial design, such artefacts play an important role for supporting creativity and innovation. Based on our prolonged ethnographic fieldwork on understanding cooperative design practices of industrial design students and researchers, we describe several experiential practices that are supported by mundane artefacts like sketches, drawings, physical models and explorative prototypes – used and developed in designers’ everyday work. Our main intention to carry out this kind of research is to develop technologies to support designers’ everyday practices. We believe that with the emergence of ubiquitous computing, there is a growing need to focus on personal, emotional and social side of people’s everyday experiences. By focusing on the experiential practices of designers, we can provide a holistic view in the design of new interactive technologies

What makes industries believe in formal methods

The introduction of formal methods in the design and development departments of an industrial company has far reaching and long lasting consequences. In fact it changes the whole environment of methods, tools and skills that determine the design culture of that company. A decision to replace current design practice by formal methods, therefore, appears a vital one and is not lightly taken. The past has shown that efforts to introduce formal methods in industry has faced a lot of controversy and opposition at various hierarchical levels in companies, resulting in a marginal spread of such methods. This paper revisits the requirements for formal description techniques and identifies some critical success and inhibiting factors associated with the introduction of formal methods in the industrial practice. One of the inhibiting factors is the often encountered lack of appropriateness of the formal model to express and manipulate the design concerns that determine the world of the engineer. This factor motivated our research in the area of architectural and implementation design concepts. The last two sections of this paper report on some results of this research

Enablers and Impediments for Collaborative Research in Software Testing: An Empirical Exploration

When it comes to industrial organizations, current collaboration efforts in software engineering research are very often kept in-house, depriving these organizations off the skills necessary to build independent collaborative research. The current trend, towards empirical software engineering research, requires certain standards to be established which would guide these collaborative efforts in creating a strong partnership that promotes independent, evidence-based, software engineering research. This paper examines key enabling factors for an efficient and effective industry-academia collaboration in the software testing domain. A major finding of the research was that while technology is a strong enabler to better collaboration, it must be complemented with industrial openness to disclose research results and the use of a dedicated tooling platform. We use as an example an automated test generation approach that has been developed in the last two years collaboratively with Bombardier Transportation AB in Sweden