1,132 research outputs found
Soft Tissue Grafting to Improve Implant Esthetics
Dental implants are becoming the treatment of choice to replace missing teeth, especially if the adjacent teeth are free of restorations. When minimal bone width is present, implant placement becomes a challenge and often resulting in recession and dehiscence around the implant that leads to subsequent gingival recession. To correct such defect, the author turned to soft tissue autografting and allografting to correct a buccal dehiscence around tooth #24 after a malpositioned implant placed by a different surgeon. A 25-year-old woman presented with the chief complaint of gingival recession and exposure of implant threads around tooth #24. The patient received three soft tissue grafting procedures to augment the gingival tissue. The first surgery included a connective tissue graft to increase the width of the keratinized gingival tissue. The second surgery included the use of autografting (connective tissue graft) to coronally position the soft tissue and achieve implant coverage. The third and final surgery included the use of allografting material Alloderm to increase and mask the implant from showing through the gingiva. Healing period was uneventful for the patient. After three surgical procedures, it appears that soft tissue grafting has increased the width and height of the gingiva surrounding the implant. The accomplished thickness of gingival tissue appeared to mask the showing of implant threads through the gingival tissue and allowed for achieving the desired esthetic that the patient desired. The aim of the study is to present a clinical case with soft tissue grafting procedures
Towards a scope management of non-functional requirements in requirements engineering
Getting business stakeholders’ goals formulated clearly and project scope defined realistically increases the chance of success for any application development process. As a consequence, stakeholders at early project stages acquire as much as possible knowledge about the requirements, their risk estimates and their prioritization. Current industrial practice suggests that in most software projects this scope assessment is performed on the user’s functional requirements (FRs), while the non-functional requirements (NFRs) remain, by and large, ignored. However, the increasing software complexity and competition in the software industry has highlighted the need to consider NFRs as an integral part of software modeling and development. This paper contributes towards harmonizing the need to build the functional behavior of a system with the need to model the associated NFRs while maintaining a scope management for NFRs. The paper presents a systematic and precisely defined model towards an early integration of NFRs within the requirements engineering (RE). Early experiences with the model indicate its ability to facilitate the process of acquiring the knowledge on the priority and risk of NFRs
Early Quantitative Assessment of Non-Functional Requirements
Non-functional requirements (NFRs) of software systems are a well known source of uncertainty in effort estimation. Yet, quantitatively approaching NFR early in a project is hard. This paper makes a step towards reducing the impact of uncertainty due to NRF. It offers a solution that incorporates NFRs into the functional size quantification process. The merits of our solution are twofold: first, it lets us quantitatively assess the NFR modeling process early in the project, and second, it lets us generate test cases for NFR verification purposes. We chose the NFR framework as a vehicle to integrate NFRs into the requirements modeling process and to apply quantitative assessment procedures. Our solution proposal also rests on the functional size measurement method, COSMIC-FFP, adopted in 2003 as the ISO/IEC 19761 standard. We extend its use for NFR testing purposes, which is an essential step for improving NFR development and testing effort estimates, and consequently for managing the scope of NFRs. We discuss the advantages of our approach and the open questions related to its design as well
Scope Management of Non-Functional Requirements
In order to meet commitments in software projects, a realistic assessment must be made of project scope. Such an assessment relies on the availability of knowledge on the user-defined project requirements and their effort estimates and priorities, as well as their risk. This knowledge enables analysts, managers and software engineers to identify the most significant requirements from the list of requirements initially defined by the user. In practice, this scope assessment is applied to the Functional Requirements (FRs) provided by users who are unaware of, or ignore, the Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs). This paper presents ongoing research which aims at managing NFRs during the software development process. Establishing the relative priority of each NFR, and obtaining a rough estimate of the effort and risk associated with it, is integral to the software development process and to resource management. Our work extends the taxonomy of the NFR framework by integrating the concept of the "hardgoal". A functional size measure of NFRs is applied to facilitate the effort estimation process. The functional size measurement method we have chosen is COSMICFFP, which is theoretically sound and the de facto standard in the software industry
Non-functional requirements: size measurement and testing with COSMIC-FFP
The non-functional requirements (NFRs) of software systems are well known to add a degree of uncertainty to process of estimating the cost of any project. This paper contributes to the achievement of more precise project size measurement through incorporating NFRs into the functional size quantification process. We report on an initial solution proposed to deal with the problem of quantitatively assessing the NFR modeling process early in the project, and of generating test cases for NFR verification purposes. The NFR framework has been chosen for the integration of NFRs into the requirements modeling process and for their quantitative assessment. Our proposal is based on the functional size measurement method, COSMIC-FFP, adopted in 2003 as the ISO/IEC 19761 standard. Also in this paper, we extend the use of COSMIC-FFP for NFR testing purposes. This is an essential step for improving NFR development and testing effort estimates, and consequently for managing the scope of NFRs. We discuss the merits of the proposed approach and the open questions related to its design
Treatment of Gingival Recession
Gingival recession is an intriguing and complex phenomenon. Recession frequently disturbs patients because of sensitivity and esthetics. Many surgical techniques have been introduced to treat gingival recession, including those involving autogenous tissue grafting, various flap designs, orthodontics, and guided tissue regeneration (GTR). This article describes different clinical approaches to treat gingival recession with emphasis on techniques that show promising results and root coverage
Exploiting a Goal-Decomposition Technique to Prioritize Non-functional Requirements
Business stakeholders need to have clear and realistic goals if they want to meet commitments in application development. As a consequence, at early stages they prioritize requirements. However, requirements do change. The effect of change forces the stakeholders to balance alternatives and reprioritize requirements accordingly. In this paper we discuss the problem of priorities to non-functional requirements subjected to change. We, then, propose an approach to help smooth the impact of such changes. Our approach favors the translation of nonoperational specifications into operational definitions that can be evaluated once the system is developed. It uses the goal-question-metric method as the major support to decompose non-operational specifications into operational ones. We claim that the effort invested in operationalizing NFRs helps dealing with changing requirements during system development. Based on\ud
this transformation and in our experience, we provide guidelines to prioritize volatile non-functional requirements
Anaerobic membrane bioreactors: Are membranes really necessary?
Membranes themselves represent a significant cost for the full scale application of anaerobic membrane bioreactors (AnMBR). The possibility of operating an AnMBR with a self-forming dynamic membrane generated by the substances present in the reactor liquor would translate into an important saving. A self-forming dynamic membrane only requires a support material over which a cake layer is formed, which determines the rejection properties of the system. The present research studies the application of self-forming dynamic membranes in AnMBRs. An AnMBR was operated under thermophilic and mesophilic conditions, using woven and non woven materials as support for the dynamic membranes. Results showed that the formation of a cake layer over the support materials enables the retention of more than 99% of the solids present in the reactor. However, only low levels of flux were achieved, up to 3 L/m2 x h, and reactor operation was unstable, with sudden increases in filtration resistance, due to excessive cake layer formation. Further fine-tuning of the proposed technology involves looking for conditions that can control effectively cake layer formatio
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