Monitoring Networked Applications With Incremental Quantile Estimation

Networked applications have software components that reside on different computers. Email, for example, has database, processing, and user interface components that can be distributed across a network and shared by users in different locations or work groups. End-to-end performance and reliability metrics describe the software quality experienced by these groups of users, taking into account all the software components in the pipeline. Each user produces only some of the data needed to understand the quality of the application for the group, so group performance metrics are obtained by combining summary statistics that each end computer periodically (and automatically) sends to a central server. The group quality metrics usually focus on medians and tail quantiles rather than on averages. Distributed quantile estimation is challenging, though, especially when passing large amounts of data around the network solely to compute quality metrics is undesirable. This paper describes an Incremental Quantile (IQ) estimation method that is designed for performance monitoring at arbitrary levels of network aggregation and time resolution when only a limited amount of data can be transferred. Applications to both real and simulated data are provided.Comment: This paper commented in: [arXiv:0708.0317], [arXiv:0708.0336], [arXiv:0708.0338]. Rejoinder in [arXiv:0708.0339]. Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000583 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Study the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral intervention on the quality of life, job satisfaction, and nurses' organizational performance

Background and aims: Quality of life is an important concept in how to play the role of nursing care. In addition, the performance and job satisfaction of nurses as components of the effective health systems to provide better services to clients are in a particular significance. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral intervention on the quality of life, organizational performance, and job satisfaction of nurses. Methods: The current study is a quasi-experimental research with pre-test and post-test with control group. The first experimental group received cognitive-behavioral training and the second group without training is studied. Both groups response the pre-test and post-test at the same time. The population studied in this research study comprised nurses who were working in Tabriz hospitals in the second half 2016. The primary samples in this study were 205 nurses who were determined in convenience after the implementation of a pilot study. 40 nurses first with lower scores on tests were selected and divided into two experimental and control groups (each 20 people). Tools of the research were questionnaires of The World Health Organization Quality of Life, Paterson Organizational Performance, Berry Field and Ruth job satisfaction questionnaire and Content of the Sessions of Cognitive Therapy Group. Data were analyzed using SPSS software and multivariate covariance analysis test. Results: The results of the research showed that the education of cognitive-behavioral intervention on the variables of quality of life, job satisfaction and organizational performance nurses have a significant positive effect (P<0.05). Conclusion: Regarding the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral intervention training, it is recommended interventional programs for nurses be used in order to improve quality of life and increase job satisfaction and their organizational performance

Groupware Support for Software Inspections: The Impact of Group Interaction and Interface on Performance

The software inspection meeting is one of the best- known techniques for quality assurance in software development and has become a standard practice in many software development groups (Ebenau and Strauss, 1994). The application of groupware has been suggested as a particularly promising way to improve the inspection process (Johnson, 1998). This paper discusses a “research in progress” study that concerns the application of groupware to software inspection meetings. A controlled experimental study involving eighty teams is presently being conducted to address two fundamental research questions relating to the use of groupware to support software inspections: 1) Is it more effective to use groupware in an interactive or nominal group mode?; and 2) Is it worthwhile to incorporate task structure into the design of the groupware interface? The research design is a 2 X 2 factorial design using the inspection team as the unit of analysis. One independent variable manipulates the type of group interaction (nominal vs. interactive) and the second independent variable manipulates task structure (a partitioned groupware interface vs. an unpartitioned interface). The dependent variable will be team performance

The Impact of Corporate Engagement in Open-Source Enterprise Systems Community on Release Performance

With the rise of corporate-sponsored open-source software (OSS) projects in the software industry, open-source enterprise systems (OS-ES) have become essential alternatives for small businesses to adopt and use the advanced business software packages. With a longitudinal study of a mature, collectively developed open source software project, we examine how corporate-communal engagement affects OS-ES performance through the theoretical perspective of group faultlines. Further, we propose that various release types can moderate the relationship between corporate-communal engagement and OS-ES release performance. Using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression with a final data set consisting of 124 data points (i.e., releases periods), we find that the relationship between corporate-communal engagement and OS-ES release performance is best characterized as a curvilinear relationship (U-shape relationship). That is, the evenness of corporate-communal engagement results in a reduced OS-ES release performance, and the unevenness of corporate-communal engagement can increase the OS-ES release performance in the forms of improved quality and innovativeness. Moreover, this curvilinear relationship is likely to be weaker in consolidating releases than in expanding releases. We find that our propositions are supported by the data. This dissertation provides various theoretical and practical contributions. Theoretically, we advance a theoretical framework to understand the effects and outcomes of corporate-communal engagement and release type contingencies by applying group faultlines theory to explain our research model. Further, we propose an alternative perspective on understanding software releases by distinguishing OS-ES releases into consolidating and expanding releases. Practically, this study provides suggestions and insights for corporate managers, open-source leaders, and small businesses to better engage in OS-ES development and adopt proper OS-ES products

Total Quality Management Practices and Organizational Performance

This article examined Total Quality Management (TQM) practices and organizational performance using data gathered from Cway Water Group, Lagos to consummate the study. Total quality management aims at enhancing the quality of products, services and processes in all departments and sections in an organization. Sometimes improvement in quality gives rise to increased cost. The paper, therefore, critically examined the extent to which drive for total quality ultimately impinges on corporate performance. Descriptive research design was adopted. Data were gathered from respondents using structured questionnaire.  A total of 325 respondents were used as sample size for the study. The data gathered were analyzed using tables and percentages.  Three hypotheses were formulated and tested using SPSS statistical software with regression and correlation analysis. The test of hypotheses revealed that TQM has significant effect on organizational performance as the P-Value was found to be less than 0.05 occasioning the rejection of the null hypothesis.  The test also revealed that TQM has positive effect on customer satisfaction.  The paper recommended that top management of organizations should make TQM practices top priority in their operations in the interest of sustainable performance

Total Quality Management Practices and Organizational Performance

This article examined Total Quality Management (TQM) practices and organizational performance using data gathered from Cway Water Group, Lagos to consummate the study. Total quality management aims at enhancing the quality of products, services and processes in all departments and sections in an organization. Sometimes improvement in quality gives rise to increased cost. The paper, therefore, critically examined the extent to which drive for total quality ultimately impinges on corporate performance. Descriptive research design was adopted. Data were gathered from respondents using structured questionnaire.  A total of 325 respondents were used as sample size for the study. The data gathered were analyzed using tables and percentages.  Three hypotheses were formulated and tested using SPSS statistical software with regression and correlation analysis. The test of hypotheses revealed that TQM has significant effect on organizational performance as the P-Value was found to be less than 0.05 occasioning the rejection of the null hypothesis.  The test also revealed that TQM has positive effect on customer satisfaction.  The paper recommended that top management of organizations should make TQM practices top priority in their operations in the interest of sustainable performance

Reevaluating Assembly Evaluations with Feature Response Curves: GAGE and Assemblathons

In just the last decade, a multitude of bio-technologies and software pipelines have emerged to revolutionize genomics. To further their central goal, they aim to accelerate and improve the quality of de novo whole-genome assembly starting from short DNA reads. However, the performance of each of these tools is contingent on the length and quality of the sequencing data, the structure and complexity of the genome sequence, and the resolution and quality of long-range information. Furthermore, in the absence of any metric that captures the most fundamental "features" of a high-quality assembly, there is no obvious recipe for users to select the most desirable assembler/assembly. International competitions such as Assemblathons or GAGE tried to identify the best assembler(s) and their features. Some what circuitously, the only available approach to gauge de novo assemblies and assemblers relies solely on the availability of a high-quality fully assembled reference genome sequence. Still worse, reference-guided evaluations are often both difficult to analyze, leading to conclusions that are difficult to interpret. In this paper, we circumvent many of these issues by relying upon a tool, dubbed FRCbam, which is capable of evaluating de novo assemblies from the read-layouts even when no reference exists. We extend the FRCurve approach to cases where lay-out information may have been obscured, as is true in many deBruijn-graph-based algorithms. As a by-product, FRCurve now expands its applicability to a much wider class of assemblers -- thus, identifying higher-quality members of this group, their inter-relations as well as sensitivity to carefully selected features, with or without the support of a reference sequence or layout for the reads. The paper concludes by reevaluating several recently conducted assembly competitions and the datasets that have resulted from them.Comment: Submitted to PLoS One. Supplementary material available at http://www.nada.kth.se/~vezzi/publications/supplementary.pdf and http://cs.nyu.edu/mishra/PUBLICATIONS/12.supplementaryFRC.pd