Software Quality Revisited

Definitions of software quality have focused on software product quality factors. Quality that focuses on product quality is referred to by Kaoru Ishikawa as a narrow view of quality and he suggests that a broader more embracing and inclusive view is really necessary. The requirements of successful E-Commerce Web sites demonstrate this view. While the site might be considered as the product, Web site producers, owners and visitors also have a “quality” requirement. This broader view gives rises to the need to research and understand quality-of-development, quality-of-ownership, quality-of-engagement as well as quality-of-product. From the quality-of-product perspective, while many of the well established and understood software quality factors of McCall and Boehm still apply in this new domain, they need to be reinterpreted and they are no longer a complete set. Additional quality factors are needed for the WWW. Already identified are quality factors like visibility, intelligibility, credibility, engagibility and differentiation. In this new situation it is also necessary to take a step beyond MIS practice in order to achieve Web site quality and in this regard the paper further considers, proprietor development, engagibility, Software Quality - Metric Ratio Analysis (SQ-MRA) and progressive maintenance. Finally, having revisited software quality definitions and interpretations, it is appropriate to review original thinking regarding software quality factors in order to determine if lessons learned from this revisit apply to the quality of traditional Information Systems

A Comparative Analysis of Maritime Universities Websites

Nowadays, the Internet, i.e. its leading services like the World Wide Web are unavoidable in communications, providing services and information sharing. Websites and a variety of Internet pages that make up the World Wide Web are the primary user interfaces for online business, providing information and promotional activities on the Internet. The rapid and progressive development of this medium has led to the fact that there is almost no maritime education institution without its own website, or at least a web page. The quality and success of the presentation via the Internet and the development of websites in a way to suit users’ needs still remain a problem, not only for designers and managers but also for owners, representing an incentive for the analysis and research in the field of maritime colleges. In evaluating user interfaces, including websites, different approaches and methods are used where the usability, due to its widespread use, is most often considered as the main factor of quality. In this paper, usability factors of websites are analyzed using the questionnaire method and available online tools for 20 maritime universities worldwide and the obtained results are presented as well as recommendations for further researches

Who Does Better with a Big Interface? Improving Voting Performance of Reading for Disabled Voters

This study shows how ballot interfaces variably affect the voting performance of people with different abilities. An interface with all information viewable simultaneously might either help orient or overwhelm a voter, depending on he/her skill-set. Voters with diagnosed reading disabilities performed significantly better on full-faced voting machines than those who demonstrated a high likelihood of similar, but undiagnosed, disabilities. In contrast, the diagnosed group performed worse than others when using standard-sized Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) systems. We suspect that this observed difference in performance is due to the interaction of system features with learned coping techniques, which allow diagnosed reading disabled voters to function effectively in other parts of everyday life. The full-faced system provides a means of orienting but not of guiding the voter, while the standard DRE guides the users through the voting process without giving the voter a means of orienting themselves. A hybrid design that incorporates the advantages of both these systems might be beneficial for both reading disabled and non-reading disabled voters

Strategic Drivers of Software Quality: Beyond External and Internal Software Quality

Software quality is often considered in terms of the contractual requirements between the supplier and acquirer as described in ISO/IEC 12207 and focuses on software life cycle processes. However, beyond these processes acquirer organisations need to address other issues like complying with new legislation, securing return on investment, and achieving competitive support from their new software investments. Supplier organisations also have issues that they must manage. This paper addresses all of these issues and presents eleven issues, which it calls strategic drivers. Then, using the SOFTWARE QUALITY STAR, builds a new conceptual model where each strategic quality driver is defined and explained

Когнитивни процеси, емоции и интелигентни интерфејси

Студијата презентира истражувања од повеќе научни дисциплини, како вештачка интелигенција, невронауки, психологија, лингвистика и филозофија, кои имаат потенцијал за креирање на интелигентни антропоморфни агенти и интерактивни технологии. Се разгледуваат системите од симболичка и конекционистичка вештачка интелигенција за моделирање на човековите когнитивни процеси, мислење, донесување одлуки, меморија и учење. Се анализираат моделите во вештачка интелигенција и роботика кои користат емоции како механизам за контрола на остварување на целите на роботот, како реакција на одредени ситуации, за одржување на процесот на социјална интеракција и за создавање на поуверливи антропормфни агенти. Презентираните интердисциплинарни методологии и концепти се мотивација за создавање на анимирани агенти кои користат говор, гестови, интонација и други невербални модалитети при конверзација со корисниците во интелигентните интерфејси

Designing a New Model for Organizational Websites Evaluation

The current web evaluation models are mainly based on the technical evaluation of the site and its appearance and usability from user's perspective. In other words, the site is evaluated as an independent entity from the underlying organization that it represents. The focus of this study is on evaluation of organizations' websites based on the quality management concepts. In this way, the measured performance indicators will be used to find the deficiencies of the websites and recommend corrections. For evaluating the organization’s success in its website function, the concept of quality management is used and since evaluation and improvement are the center of attention in this model, the model is called Ev-Imp, which Ev stands for evaluation and Imp stands for improvement. Model includes four main components consist of objectives, processes, criteria and feedback. With the use of feedback tools such as quantitative and qualitative questionnaire for groups of stakeholders and service providers ,the website’s weaknesses and strengths would be identified and with analyzing the website’s weaknesses required improvement would be determined and corrective action would be don

iVR Control: An immersive VR Simulation for Rover Navigation and Control

Tackling issues endemic to traditional remote rover control systems, such as cognitive workload arising from unfamiliarity with the robot, its characteristics, and its context, this thesis explores the use of a VR headset and immersive simulation to enable robot operators to view the robot being operated in its context. Needs, insights, and solutions were gathered through a study of relevant literature, rover operator interviews and job shadows, and three prototype development and testing sprints. These provide evidence that gestural controls coupled with immersive VR interfaces can improve rover operator’s abilities to establish situational awareness and complete traditionally complex tasks, such as robot arm repositioning and task switching. This thesis concludes with six key insights concerning the creation of VR control systems for rover operation: affordance, consistency, communicability, feedback loop, spatial memory, and simulation sickness

A Theory and Practice of Website Engagibility

This thesis explores the domain of website quality. It presents a new study of website quality - an abstraction and synthesis, a measurement methodology, and analysis - and proposes metrics which can be used to quantify it. The strategy employed involved revisiting software quality, modelling its broader perspectives and identifying quality factors which are specific to the World Wide Web (WWW). This resulted in a detailed set of elements which constitute website quality, a method for quantifying a quality measure, and demonstrating an approach to benchmarking eCommerce websites. The thesis has two dimensions. The first is a contribution to the theory of software quality - specifically website quality. The second dimension focuses on two perspectives of website quality - quality-of-product and quality-of-use - and uses them to present a new theory and methodology which are important first steps towards understanding metrics and their use when quantifying website quality. Once quantified, the websites can be benchmarked by evaluators and website owners for comparison with competitor sites. The thesis presents a study of five mature eCommerce websites. The study involves identifying, defining and collecting data counts for 67 site-level criteria for each site. These counts are specific to website product quality and include criteria such as occurrences of hyperlinks and menus which underpin navigation, occurrences of activities which underpin interactivity, and counts relating to a site’s eCommerce maturity. Lack of automated count collecting tools necessitated online visits to 537 HTML pages and performing manual counts. The thesis formulates a new approach to measuring website quality, named Metric Ratio Analysis (MRA). The thesis demonstrates how one website quality factor - engagibility - can be quantified and used for website comparison analysis. The thesis proposes a detailed theoretical and empirical validation procedure for MRA

Learning designs incorporating animated pedagogical agents: Their potential for improving academic writing competence, writing self-efficacy, and reducing writing anxiety

Academic writing can be extremely challenging, especially for new university students. This is compounded by the mass-migration of courses to online delivery, which further increases the complexity of acquiring writing skills. Animated pedagogical agents (APAs) have shown promise in addressing these problems, because they simulate authentic face-to-face social interactions thereby potentially increasing student engagement, motivation, and favourable emotions conducive to learning. This study’s first aim was to examine the impact of learning designs employing APAs on novice learners’ academic writing, writing anxiety, and writing self-efficacy. Its second aim was to examine the influence of various delivery options (didactic delivery or scaffolded questioning) with support messages (emotional, motivational or neither) on writing competence, writing anxiety and writing self-efficacy. These aims were achieved in a mixed-method study that included six experimental conditions tested using two multimedia academic writing lessons provided to 106 participants who were new to Australian tertiary studies. Quantitative data were collected immediately before and after the lessons (Phase 1), while qualitative data were obtained by interviews with a subset of participants after Lesson 2 (Phase 2). The impact of the independent variable combinations on the dependent variables were examined quantitatively (General Linear Modelling, t-tests) and qualitatively (thematic analysis). The results demonstrate that completing two academic writing lessons with APAs can increase writing competence and self-efficacy, and reduce writing anxiety. However, no significant differences were found between the support and delivery groups. Despite the lack of significant inter-group differences, more participants from the emotional group reported that their negative emotions were reduced because of the lesson. Also, all the participants in the motivational group reported perceptions of writing improvement as a result of attending the lessons. The overall positive result suggests promising possibilities for writing support delivered online to counter student under preparedness for academic writing

Heuristics for use case descriptions.

Use cases, as part of the Unified Modelling Language, have become an industry standard. The major focus has been on the use case diagram. It is only recently that any detailed attention has been paid to the use case description. The description should be written in such a way as to make it communicable to its reader. However, this does not always appear to be the case. This thesis presents the 7 C's of Communicability as quality features of use case descriptions that make them more comprehensible. The 7 C's are derived from software engineering best practice on use case descriptions and from theories of text comprehension. To help in writing descriptions, the CP Use Case Writing Rules are proposed, a small set of guidelines derived from the 7 C's. Going beyond requirements, software engineers often employ use case descriptions to help them build initial design models of the proposed system. Despite Jacobson's claim that "objects naturally fall out of use cases", fording design-oriented classes and objects in use case descriptions is shown not to be straightforward. This thesis proposes a Question Set which allows the engineer to interrogate the description for important elements of specification and design. Experimentation shows that the CP Writing Rules furnish descriptions that are as comprehensible as those written by other guidelines proposed in the literature. It is also suggested that descriptions be written from the perspective of their intended audience. The limitations of conducting requirements engineering experiments using students are considered and it is suggested that experimenters should not expect large effects from the results. An industrial case study shows that although the CP Rules could not be applied to all events in the use case descriptions, they were applied to most and at varying levels of abstraction. The case study showed that the 7 C's did identify problems with the written descriptions. The Question Set was well received by the case study stakeholders, but it was considered time consuming. One of the overriding findings from the case study was that project time constraints would not allow the company to use the techniques suggested, although they recognised the need to do so. Automation would make industrial application of the CP Rules and 7 C's more feasible