A Methodology for Safety Case Development

This paper will outline a safety case methodology that seeks to minimise safety risks and commercial risks by constructing a demonstrable safety case. The safety case ideas presented here were initially developed in an EU-sponsored SHIP project [1] and was then further developed in the UK Nuclear Safety Research Programme (the QUARC Project [2]). Some of these concepts have subsequently been incorporated in safety standards such as MOD Def Stan 00-55, and have also been used to establish specific safety cases for clients. A generalisation of the concepts also appears in Def Stan 00-42 Part 2, in the form of the software reliability case

Bored with point and click?

Computers have the potential to be exploited as one of the most exciting examples of instructional media. Yet designers often fail to realize this potential. This is, in part, due to the limitations of hardware and software and, in part, due to the lack of good theory developed through conclusive research. Good examples of computer-based learning may owe more to the imaginative flair of the courseware designer than they do to the application of explicit design guidelines and good learning theory. This paper will therefore consider a variety of issues that may be blocking theoretical development and draw conclusions for future courses of action. This starts with a statement of the problem, first by considering the macro and micro issues, and then by looking at a recent call for help in ComputerBased Learning Environment (CBLE) design. Next, the contribution of instructional design theories will be presented together with a way forward for investigating the issues. Finally the implications for future progress are presented

Psychometric Evaluation and Design of Patient-Centered Communication Measures for Cancer Care Settings

Objective To evaluate the psychometric properties of questions that assess patient perceptions of patient-provider communication and design measures of patient-centered communication (PCC). Methods Participants (adults with colon or rectal cancer living in North Carolina) completed a survey at 2 to 3 months post-diagnosis. The survey included 87 questions in six PCC Functions: Exchanging Information, Fostering Health Relationships, Making Decisions, Responding to Emotions, Enabling Patient Self-Management, and Managing Uncertainty. For each Function we conducted factor analyses, item response theory modeling, and tests for differential item functioning, and assessed reliability and construct validity. Results Participants included 501 respondents; 46% had a high school education or less. Reliability within each Function ranged from 0.90 to 0.96. The PCC-Ca-36 (36-question survey; reliability=0.94) and PCC-Ca-6 (6-question survey; reliability=0.92) measures differentiated between individuals with poor and good health (i.e., known-groups validity) and were highly correlated with the HINTS communication scale (i.e., convergent validity). Conclusion This study provides theory-grounded PCC measures found to be reliable and valid in colorectal cancer patients in North Carolina. Future work should evaluate measure validity over time and in other cancer populations. Practice implications The PCC-Ca-36 and PCC-Ca-6 measures may be used for surveillance, intervention research, and quality improvement initiatives

Technical support for Life Sciences communities on a production grid infrastructure

Production operation of large distributed computing infrastructures (DCI) still requires a lot of human intervention to reach acceptable quality of service. This may be achievable for scientific communities with solid IT support, but it remains a show-stopper for others. Some application execution environments are used to hide runtime technical issues from end users. But they mostly aim at fault-tolerance rather than incident resolution, and their operation still requires substantial manpower. A longer-term support activity is thus needed to ensure sustained quality of service for Virtual Organisations (VO). This paper describes how the biomed VO has addressed this challenge by setting up a technical support team. Its organisation, tooling, daily tasks, and procedures are described. Results are shown in terms of resource usage by end users, amount of reported incidents, and developed software tools. Based on our experience, we suggest ways to measure the impact of the technical support, perspectives to decrease its human cost and make it more community-specific.Comment: HealthGrid'12, Amsterdam : Netherlands (2012

A Quality Model for Actionable Analytics in Rapid Software Development

Background: Accessing relevant data on the product, process, and usage perspectives of software as well as integrating and analyzing such data is crucial for getting reliable and timely actionable insights aimed at continuously managing software quality in Rapid Software Development (RSD). In this context, several software analytics tools have been developed in recent years. However, there is a lack of explainable software analytics that software practitioners trust. Aims: We aimed at creating a quality model (called Q-Rapids quality model) for actionable analytics in RSD, implementing it, and evaluating its understandability and relevance. Method: We performed workshops at four companies in order to determine relevant metrics as well as product and process factors. We also elicited how these metrics and factors are used and interpreted by practitioners when making decisions in RSD. We specified the Q-Rapids quality model by comparing and integrating the results of the four workshops. Then we implemented the Q-Rapids tool to support the usage of the Q-Rapids quality model as well as the gathering, integration, and analysis of the required data. Afterwards we installed the Q-Rapids tool in the four companies and performed semi-structured interviews with eight product owners to evaluate the understandability and relevance of the Q-Rapids quality model. Results: The participants of the evaluation perceived the metrics as well as the product and process factors of the Q-Rapids quality model as understandable. Also, they considered the Q-Rapids quality model relevant for identifying product and process deficiencies (e.g., blocking code situations). Conclusions: By means of heterogeneous data sources, the Q-Rapids quality model enables detecting problems that take more time to find manually and adds transparency among the perspectives of system, process, and usage.Comment: This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of a paper to be published by IEEE in the 44th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA) 2018. The final authenticated version will be available onlin

Current capabilities, requirements and a proposed strategy for interdependency analysis in the UK

The UK government recently commissioned a research study to identify the state-of-the-art in Critical Infrastructure modelling and analysis, and the government/industry requirements for such tools and services. This study (Cetifs) concluded with a strategy aiming to bridge the gaps between the capabilities and requirements, which would establish interdependency analysis as a commercially viable service in the near future. This paper presents the findings of this study that was carried out by CSR, City University London, Adelard LLP, a safety/security consultancy and Cranfield University, defense academy of the UK

Integrating automated support for a software management cycle into the TAME system

Software managers are interested in the quantitative management of software quality, cost and progress. An integrated software management methodology, which can be applied throughout the software life cycle for any number purposes, is required. The TAME (Tailoring A Measurement Environment) methodology is based on the improvement paradigm and the goal/question/metric (GQM) paradigm. This methodology helps generate a software engineering process and measurement environment based on the project characteristics. The SQMAR (software quality measurement and assurance technology) is a software quality metric system and methodology applied to the development processes. It is based on the feed forward control principle. Quality target setting is carried out before the plan-do-check-action activities are performed. These methodologies are integrated to realize goal oriented measurement, process control and visual management. A metric setting procedure based on the GQM paradigm, a management system called the software management cycle (SMC), and its application to a case study based on NASA/SEL data are discussed. The expected effects of SMC are quality improvement, managerial cost reduction, accumulation and reuse of experience, and a highly visual management reporting system

How do Early Years Educators sustain and define their professionalism? A methodological approach to eliciting early years educators’ thinking

This research has been concerned with eliciting the voices and thinking of a group of early years’ educators across three Local Education Authorities in West Yorkshire. The early years of education require a reflective, articulate and highly qualified workforce. The ability to reflect on and evaluate practice, prescription and one’s own thoughts about it must be the key to professionalism in the early years. The objective of this research was to extrapolate the thinking of a small group of EYEs across three local education authorities (LEAs) in West Yorkshire. The methodology of eliciting teacher thinking was employed to gain access to their voices and discover what were their critical issues and interests, their professional and practical knowledge. Rather than directing the participants to responding to specific aspects, the research was conducted to enable them to demonstrate any areas of interest and critical issues arising from their professional roles.Teacher thinking’ is an effective methodology to determine the thinking and knowledge of experienced and complex professionals working in a variety of settings. This empirical research was undertaken to elicit educators' perspectives to determine their own understandings, with accounts in their own terms through in-depth open-ended interviews, questionnaires, personal/professional time-lines, video-reflective interviews on practice and focus group interviews. These varied different data collection strategies are key to the research as they elicited holistic and varied perspectives on the early years educators professionalism. The aim was to give early years educators a voice, promote recognition of the complexity of the phenomena to be studied and determine the most effective method of eliciting their thinking. This article presents the methodology and findings from this research

Towards the realisation of an integratated decision support environment for organisational decision making

Traditional decision support systems are based on the paradigm of a single decision maker working at a stand‐alone computer or terminal who has a specific decision to make with a specific goal in mind. Organizational decision support systems aim to support decision makers at all levels of an organization (from executive, middle management managers to operators), who have a variety of decisions to make, with different priorities, often in a distributed and dynamic environment. Such systems need to be designed and developed with extra functionality to meet the challenges such as collaborative working. This paper proposes an Integrated Decision Support Environment (IDSE) for organizational decision making. The IDSE distinguishes itself from traditional decision support systems in that it can flexibly configure and re‐configure its functions to support various decision applications. IDSE is an open software platform which allows its users to define their own decision processes and choose their own exiting decision tools to be integrated into the platform. The IDSE is designed and developed based on distributed client/server networking, with a multi‐tier integration framework for consistent information exchange and sharing, seamless process co‐ordination and synchronisation, and quick access to packaged and legacy systems. The prototype of the IDSE demonstrates good performance in agile response to fast changing decision situations