The Importance of Computerized Mortuary Registers: A Study Conducted in Sri Lanka

Monitoring of the trends and patterns seen in judicial autopsies is critical for planning interventions in the health sector. Statistical analyses about judicial post-mortems are not adequately performed to date. Anyhow, if there are computerized mortuary registers, such statistical analysis will be an easy task. This research enables the identification of pertinent demographic data, manner and cause of death, inquest types and police jurisdictions in the postmortem examinations conducted in a tertiary care hospital in Sri Lanka. A retrospective descriptive study was conducted over a 5-year period, from January 2015 to December 2019. The data were analyzed with SPSS software and Microsoft Excel 365.  The p value, < .05 was set as significant in the chi-square test. Details of 4760 post-mortems were analyzed in total. The autopsies had a male to female ratio of 3.7:1. The number of postmortems performed varied by month, and no clear pattern was discernible. There was a nearly twofold increase in autopsies performed on people aged 50 and under. There was no significant relationship between the ability to provide the cause of death and sex. Significant associations were observed between age and the ability to provide the cause of death, between the ability to provide the cause of death and the type of inquest, and between the type of inquest and the manner of death.  The ratio of magisterial inquests to those conducted by the Inquirer into Sudden Deaths (ISDs) was 1:11.5.  The ratio of natural to unnatural to undetermined autopsies was 5:2:1. Mt Lavinia, Dehiwala, and Piliyandala were the three police areas most heavily involved. It is emphasized in this study that combining findings with a Geographic Information System in the context of geospatial technology can widely be used in the field of Forensic medicine too. KEYWORDS:   cause of death, manner of death, inquest type, judicial postmortems, Geographic Information System (GIS), computerized mortuary register

Game Design Feedback Collection Methods in Pre-Release Game Development

The development of games is secretive in nature due to its creative constraints, and a project can run over the course of a few years. With the advent of agile methodologies, software projects have involved customers in the development process to iterate on received feedback. By exploring the different methods game developers employ to involve customers or tackle issues that interfere with the value of the final product, this study offers an insight into what practitioners actually do to collect the feedback they deem useful. We find that there are two main categories of feedback methods, those that are internal to the company and those that involve potential customers. Within these categories, different mechanisms are employed with differing goals and targets at different stages of the development process. While there are clear patterns on what constitutes useful feedback to practitioners, the implementation of those feedback collection mechanisms differs across the industry

Learning from the Past: a Process Recommendation System for Video Game Projects using Postmortems Experiences

Context: The video game industry is a billion dollar industry that faces problems in the way games are developed. One method to address these problems is using developer aid tools, such as Recommendation Systems. These tools assist developers by generating recommendations to help them perform their tasks. Objective: This article describes a systematic approach to recommend development processes for video game projects, using postmortem knowledge extraction and a model of the context of the new project, in which “postmortems” are articles written by video game developers at the end of projects, summarizing the experience of their game development team. This approach aims to provide reflections about development processes used in the game industry as well as guidance to developers to choose the most adequate process according to the contexts they’re in. Method: Our approach is divided in three separate phases: in the the first phase, we manually extracted the processes from the postmortems analysis; in the second one, we created a video game context and algorithm rules for recommendation; and finally in the third phase, we evaluated the recommended processes by using quantitative and qualitative metrics, game developers feedback, and a case study by interviewing a video game development team. Contributions: This article brings three main contributions. The first describes a database of developers’ experiences extracted from postmortems in the form of development processes. The second defines the main attributes that a video game project contain, which it uses to define the contexts of the project. The third describes and evaluates a recommendation system for video game projects, which uses the contexts of the projects to identify similar projects and suggest a set of activities in the form of a process

Oral Communication in Genre Theory and Software Development Workplaces

My dissertation defines how software developers have abandoned traditional documentation practices for other kinds of media that work better in their workplace practices. Ultimately, even though other media like white boards, sticky notes, and “oral communication” are vastly different than traditional, written software documentation, they match the fast paced, decision-making situations of contemporary developer communities. I focus particularly on oral communication because it is the most unacceptable means to “document,” according to traditional standards. I use North American Genre Theory to describe those decision-making situations contemporary developers and note how the theory does not account for all the documentation I expect to find. Via several projects and interviews I confirm that oral communication is a new means of “documentation” and reconciles North American Genre Theory