155,341 research outputs found

    Validating Work System Principles for Use in Systems Analysis and Design

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    This research validates 24 work system principles that emerged from the effort to develop the work system method, whose goal is to help business professionals understand and analyze systems in organizations in their own terms, and also to help bridge the communication gaps that have undermined IS projects and reduced business/IT alignment. The research validates the principles based on questionnaire responses submitted by six cohorts of Executive MBA students, who rated each of the work system principles on two criteria: 1) normatively, to what extent should work systems in their organizations conform to each principle, and 2) descriptively, to what extent do most existing work systems in their organizations actually conform to each principle. An analysis of the results reveals statistically significant gaps between their perceptions of normative principles and their perceptions of how well typical work systems operate in organizations. The findings are statistically significant for all 24 principles

    Medical Cyber-Physical Systems Development: A Forensics-Driven Approach

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    The synthesis of technology and the medical industry has partly contributed to the increasing interest in Medical Cyber-Physical Systems (MCPS). While these systems provide benefits to patients and professionals, they also introduce new attack vectors for malicious actors (e.g. financially-and/or criminally-motivated actors). A successful breach involving a MCPS can impact patient data and system availability. The complexity and operating requirements of a MCPS complicates digital investigations. Coupling this information with the potentially vast amounts of information that a MCPS produces and/or has access to is generating discussions on, not only, how to compromise these systems but, more importantly, how to investigate these systems. The paper proposes the integration of forensics principles and concepts into the design and development of a MCPS to strengthen an organization's investigative posture. The framework sets the foundation for future research in the refinement of specific solutions for MCPS investigations.Comment: This is the pre-print version of a paper presented at the 2nd International Workshop on Security, Privacy, and Trustworthiness in Medical Cyber-Physical Systems (MedSPT 2017

    Design for validation: An approach to systems validation

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    Every complex system built is validated in some manner. Computer validation begins with review of the system design. As systems became too complicated for one person to review, validation began to rely on the application of adhoc methods by many individuals. As the cost of the changes mounted and the expense of failure increased, more organized procedures became essential. Attempts at devising and carrying out those procedures showed that validation is indeed a difficult technical problem. The successful transformation of the validation process into a systematic series of formally sound, integrated steps is necessary if the liability inherent in the future digita-system-based avionic and space systems is to be minimized. A suggested framework and timetable for the transformtion are presented. Basic working definitions of two pivotal ideas (validation and system life-cyle) are provided and show how the two concepts interact. Many examples are given of past and present validation activities by NASA and others. A conceptual framework is presented for the validation process. Finally, important areas are listed for ongoing development of the validation process at NASA Langley Research Center

    Validation of Expert Systems: Personal Choice Expert -- A Flexible Employee Benefit System

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    A method for validating expert systems, based on psychological validation literature and Turing\u27s imitation game, is applied to a flexible benefits expert system. Expert system validation entails determining if a difference exists between expert and novice decisions (construct validity), if the system uses the same inputs and processes to make its decisions as experts (content validity), and if the system produces the same results as experts (criterionrelated validity). If these criteria are satisfied, then the system is indistinguishable from experts for its domain and satisfies Turing\u27s imitation game. The methods developed in this paper are applied to a human resource expert system, Personal Choice Expert (PCE), designed to help employees choose a benefits package in a flexible benefits system. Expert and novice recommendations are compared to those generated by PCE. PCE\u27s recommendations do not significantly differ from those given by experts. High inter-expert agreement exists for some benefit recommendations (e.g. Dental Care and Long-Term Disability) but not for others (e.g. Short-Term Disability and Life Insurance). Insights offered by this method are illustrated and examined

    Scottish Agricultural College

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    What to Fix? Distinguishing between design and non-design rules in automated tools

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    Technical debt---design shortcuts taken to optimize for delivery speed---is a critical part of long-term software costs. Consequently, automatically detecting technical debt is a high priority for software practitioners. Software quality tool vendors have responded to this need by positioning their tools to detect and manage technical debt. While these tools bundle a number of rules, it is hard for users to understand which rules identify design issues, as opposed to syntactic quality. This is important, since previous studies have revealed the most significant technical debt is related to design issues. Other research has focused on comparing these tools on open source projects, but these comparisons have not looked at whether the rules were relevant to design. We conducted an empirical study using a structured categorization approach, and manually classify 466 software quality rules from three industry tools---CAST, SonarQube, and NDepend. We found that most of these rules were easily labeled as either not design (55%) or design (19%). The remainder (26%) resulted in disagreements among the labelers. Our results are a first step in formalizing a definition of a design rule, in order to support automatic detection.Comment: Long version of accepted short paper at International Conference on Software Architecture 2017 (Gothenburg, SE
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