A metrics paradigm for object-oriented analysis and design.

For several years, the software industry has been affected by a problem called the software crisis. Many software developers have worked hard to determine remedies for this crisis. The crisis deals with products being produced over costs, behind schedule, with low quality, and not meeting customer satisfaction. Processes are being used which waste resources and build low quality products. In dealing with the software crisis, software practitioners have used many tools, methodologies, and metrics to help produce better products, save resources, and increase productivity. Metrics are meaningful measures used to determine how well software is being produced, where weaknesses are in products, processes, or resources, and indicate where to make improvements. Today, the most popular methodology is the Object-Oriented (00) methodology. Users of this methodology want to prove that it helps resolve the software crisis. There is a belief that 00 systems are developed earlier, easier to understand and maintain, and contain reusable components. However, without metrics, the effectiveness of the 00 approach cannot be proven. Metrics must be used to show if the process or resources being used is responsible for the success or failure of software development, if management of the process is responsible, if the complexity or size of the product being produced is responsible, or if a lack of communication or misunderstandings of requirements is responsible. There are many, many reasons why metrics are used and can be seen in this Thesis. Many metrics are being used for traditional software development methodologies that deal with processes, products, and resources. However, there is no metric paradigm for the 00 development methodology. But, there is a small set of metrics proposed for 00 programming. We provide a 00 metric paradigm that contains metrics grouped into nine categories. We grouped the metrics into categories to make the selection of a particular· metric easier. These nine metrics fit nicely into the 00 methodology. The metrics can be used to measure processes, products, and resources. We provide a size estimation method that helps determine progress, costs, quality, effort, complexity, and schedule. The metrics can be used to prove the effectiveness of the 00 methodology and indicate areas for further improvement

Process Sustainability Evaluation for Manufacturing of a Component with the 6R Application

Sustainability in manufacturing can be evaluated at product, process and system levels. The 6R methodology for sustainability enhancement in manufacturing processes includes: reduced use of materials, energy, water and other resources; reusing of products/components; recovery and recycling of materials/components; remanufacturing of products; and redesigning of products to utilize recovered materials/resources. Although manufacturing processes can be evaluated by their productivity, quality and cost, process sustainability assessment makes it a complete evaluation. This paper presents a 6R-based evaluation method for sustainable manufacturing in terms of specific metrics within six major metrics clusters: environmental impact, energy consumption, waste management, cost, resource utilization and society/personnel health/operational safety. Manufacturing processes such as casting, welding, turning, milling, drilling, grinding, etc., can be evaluated using this methodology. A case study for machining processes is presented as an example based on the proposed metrics

Metric suite to Evaluate Reusability of Software Product Line

Metrics have long been used to measure and evaluate  software products and processes. Software product line architecture is a field in which few metrics have been applied, a surprising fact given the important role of software product line architecture in software product line development. Recently, Some metrics have been developed to assess software product line architecture. These metrics are useful but have not been widely used in industry. In this paper, some new metrics are provided to assess reusability of Software product line architecture. Our metrics are evaluated in action.DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijece.v4i2.513

Automated software quality visualisation using fuzzy logic techniques

In the past decade there has been a concerted effort by the software industry to improve the quality of its products. This has led to the inception of various techniques with which to control and measure the process involved in software development. Methods like the Capability Maturity Model have introduced processes and strategies that require measurement in the form of software metrics. With the ever increasing number of software metrics being introduced by capability based processes, software development organisations are finding it more difficult to understand and interpret metric scores. This is particularly problematic for senior management and project managers where analysis of the actual data is not feasible. This paper proposes a method with which to visually represent metric scores so that managers can easily see how their organisation is performing relative to quality goals set for each type of metric. Acting primarily as a proof of concept and prototype, we suggest ways in which real customer needs can be translated into a feasible technical solution. The solution itself visualises metric scores in the form of a tree structure and utilises Fuzzy Logic techniques, XGMML, Web Services and the .NET Framework. Future work is proposed to extend the system from the prototype stage and to overcome a problem with the masking of poor scores

Analysis of Collaboration Effectiveness and Individuals’ Contribution in FLOSS Communities

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development has proven itself over the years to be able to deliver high-quality software products.  However, it is not clear how quality emerges from the large amount of loosely organised activities of a FLOSS community.  This makes it difficult to apply traditional quality metrics and certification processes to FLOSS products. This paper investigates possible indicators of collaboration effectiveness and quality of individuals’ contribution that could be extracted from the data available in repositories of FLOSS projects. The ultimate purpose of this effort is to develop quantitative metrics for these indicators and merge such metrics into a global metric for FLOSS software quality to be used in a certification process

Design Implications of Model-Generated Urban Data

Published by the Architectural Research Centers Consortium under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.The staggering complexity of urban environment and long timescales in the causal mechanisms prevent designers to fully understand the implications of their design interventions. In order to investigate these causal mechanisms and provide measurable trends, a model that partially replicates urban complexity has been developed. Using a cellular automata approach to model land use types and markets for products, services, labour and property, the model has enabled numerical experiments to be carried out. The results revealed causal mechanisms and performance metrics obtained in a much shorter timescale than the real-life processes, pointing to a number of design implications for urban environments.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Environmental Benchmarking of Suppliers in the UK Food Sector

This paper aims to develop an audit toolkit that enables companies in the food sector to benchmark their suppliers in terms of environmental management. The paper reviews environmental practices and performance metrics in the food value chain by developing a custom designed survey to gather results, allow auditing and enable benchmarking of the best practice, common practice and areas for improvement among the suppliers. Some of the key areas in which the suppliers represented best practice include the separation and recycling of their waste streams and efforts to reduce the use of raw materials, energy, water, pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers. Some suppliers were actively engaging with stakeholders in their value chain to collaborate on products and processes that reduced environmental impacts. Notably the supplier with the best environmental performance had both developed an Environmental Management Policy and also implemented it systematically.The areas that the study showed needed improvement included the need for all suppliers to implement an Environmental Management System, the need for more renewable sourcing for materials and energy, the need for systematic measurement of the food miles of products, and the carbon and water footprints of their business processes. Both the approach taken and the results of this study have already proved beneficial for the collaborating partner, Reynolds Catering Supplies Ltd. as they anticipate its use for promoting improved environmental management among their suppliers

Green engineering and gate-to gate life cycle assessments for pharmaceutical products

The research of this thesis focused on the environmental and processing metrics during the development of two different drugs. Previous research in life cycle assessments and green engineering have focused on other products and processes, but only a limited amount of studies have been conducted for pharmaceutical applications. This analysis concerned a gate-to-gate analysis of two distinct pharmaceutical products along with the development of a solvent selection table. The goal of this research was to determine how various processing and environmental metrics were affected by process improvements. The first drug was the pravastatin, which was made via a fermentation route. Four lab scale routes were investigated for this drug. The second study tracked the processing and environmental metrics of another drug through three different scales; labscale, glass-scale, and pilot-scale. A solvent selection table was also developed as part of the research for this project and included in this paper. Some of the conclusions for this analysis were that over time the processing metrics and the environmental metrics decreased for different reasons. The factors that contributed to a decrease in environmental factors were increased yield, solvent substitution and the removal of process equipment

Method of project portfolio optimization based on metrics in the context of IT transformation .

У статті досліджуються причини необхідності застосування сучасних підходів до впровадження нових продуктів та послуг для клієнтів банківських установ, розглядаються підходи до оптимізації та переформатування портфелів проектів шляхом застосування метрик та ключових показників ефективності впровадження нових продуктів та послуг. На конкретних прикладах розглядаються ті метрики та показники ефективності, що в комплексі можуть значно скоротити витрати на впровадження нового функціоналу та збільшити фінансові надходження за рахунок своєчасності та якості продуктів та послуг для клієнта. Аналізується трансформація роботи ІТ підрозділів за рахунок оптимізації процесів в стратегії отримання максимального прибутку. Детально пояснюється тісний та комплексний взаємозв‘язок між системою метрик, які відображають оцінку поточних процесів впровадження продуктів та послуг, з встановленими цільовими показниками для ІТ підрозділу. Зроблено висновки про тренди метрик та показників технологічності по впровадженню ІТ проектів та їх вплив на розвиток банківського бізнесу та сфери в цілому. Окремо висвітлено питання щодо запровадження нових технологій та навіть цілих програмних комплексів, що визнані світовою банківської спільнотою для прискорення впровадження продуктів та послуг, і водночас орієнтованих на суттєві скорочення витрат з боку ІТ підрозділів.The article explores the reasons for the need of applying modern approaches to implementation of new products and services for customers of banking institutions, examines approaches to optimizing and reformatting project portfolios by applying metrics and key performance indicators to the implementation of new products and services. With specific examples, those metrics and performance indicators that in the complex can significantly reduce the cost of implementing new functionality and increase financial returns due to the timeliness and quality of products and services for the client are envisaged. Transformation of work of IT departments is analyzed through optimization of processes in the strategy of obtaining maximum profit in terms of minimum required but sufficient investment in the bank‘s IT development. Close and integrated relationship between the system of metrics reflecting an assessment of current processes for implementing products and services and the established targets for IT department is explained in detail. In addition to the metric system, key indicators (KPIs) with established normative values are considered, interrelations between them are described and degree of their influence is analyzed, and their reciprocal complementation as an integrated system for measuring and improving processes of implementation of products and services is provided. Conclusions are made about trends in metrics and performance indicators for the implementation of IT projects and their impact on the development of banking business and the sphere as a whole. The issues of implementing new technologies and even whole software complexes that are recognized in the world by banking community for accelerating implementation of products and services, while simultaneously targeting significant cost reductions in the part of IT departments, are highlighted