Software Quality Revisited

Definitions of software quality have focused on software product quality factors. Quality that focuses on product quality is referred to by Kaoru Ishikawa as a narrow view of quality and he suggests that a broader more embracing and inclusive view is really necessary. The requirements of successful E-Commerce Web sites demonstrate this view. While the site might be considered as the product, Web site producers, owners and visitors also have a “quality” requirement. This broader view gives rises to the need to research and understand quality-of-development, quality-of-ownership, quality-of-engagement as well as quality-of-product. From the quality-of-product perspective, while many of the well established and understood software quality factors of McCall and Boehm still apply in this new domain, they need to be reinterpreted and they are no longer a complete set. Additional quality factors are needed for the WWW. Already identified are quality factors like visibility, intelligibility, credibility, engagibility and differentiation. In this new situation it is also necessary to take a step beyond MIS practice in order to achieve Web site quality and in this regard the paper further considers, proprietor development, engagibility, Software Quality - Metric Ratio Analysis (SQ-MRA) and progressive maintenance. Finally, having revisited software quality definitions and interpretations, it is appropriate to review original thinking regarding software quality factors in order to determine if lessons learned from this revisit apply to the quality of traditional Information Systems

Strategic Drivers of Software Quality: Beyond External and Internal Software Quality

Software quality is often considered in terms of the contractual requirements between the supplier and acquirer as described in ISO/IEC 12207 and focuses on software life cycle processes. However, beyond these processes acquirer organisations need to address other issues like complying with new legislation, securing return on investment, and achieving competitive support from their new software investments. Supplier organisations also have issues that they must manage. This paper addresses all of these issues and presents eleven issues, which it calls strategic drivers. Then, using the SOFTWARE QUALITY STAR, builds a new conceptual model where each strategic quality driver is defined and explained

A Theory and Practice of Website Engagibility

This thesis explores the domain of website quality. It presents a new study of website quality - an abstraction and synthesis, a measurement methodology, and analysis - and proposes metrics which can be used to quantify it. The strategy employed involved revisiting software quality, modelling its broader perspectives and identifying quality factors which are specific to the World Wide Web (WWW). This resulted in a detailed set of elements which constitute website quality, a method for quantifying a quality measure, and demonstrating an approach to benchmarking eCommerce websites. The thesis has two dimensions. The first is a contribution to the theory of software quality - specifically website quality. The second dimension focuses on two perspectives of website quality - quality-of-product and quality-of-use - and uses them to present a new theory and methodology which are important first steps towards understanding metrics and their use when quantifying website quality. Once quantified, the websites can be benchmarked by evaluators and website owners for comparison with competitor sites. The thesis presents a study of five mature eCommerce websites. The study involves identifying, defining and collecting data counts for 67 site-level criteria for each site. These counts are specific to website product quality and include criteria such as occurrences of hyperlinks and menus which underpin navigation, occurrences of activities which underpin interactivity, and counts relating to a site’s eCommerce maturity. Lack of automated count collecting tools necessitated online visits to 537 HTML pages and performing manual counts. The thesis formulates a new approach to measuring website quality, named Metric Ratio Analysis (MRA). The thesis demonstrates how one website quality factor - engagibility - can be quantified and used for website comparison analysis. The thesis proposes a detailed theoretical and empirical validation procedure for MRA

A process for appraising commerical usability evaluation methods.

Recent international quality standards and European Community legislation have identified new software quality factors. These new factors include suitability, installability and adaptability. Other quality factors need to be reviewed in the light of these developments. This has impacted on established commercial usability evaluation methods to the extent that it is appropriate to ask if these evaluation methods comply with the new standards and legislation. In order to answer this question the commercial evaluation methods need to be appraised (meta-evaluation) using a suitable method appraisal process. This paper describes such an appraisal process which specifically addresses the many considerations raised by the standards and the law. The appraisal method consists of two parts which provide an overview of the commercial method and a methodical analysis of how it complies. By combining this analysis with a weighting and rating technique the appraised method can achieve a score which can be compared with other commercial methods. The process is an essential tool for strategic managers who are responsible for usability evaluation during systems acquisition. It is also of benefit to supplier organisations who, in their efforts to develop the highest quality systems, need to demonstrate compliance with international standards and development process maturity models

Website Engagibility: A Step Beyond Usability.

There is a continuing need for quality eCommerce websites which satisfy their owner’s perspective of quality of design and visitor’s perspective of quality of use. More particularly there is a need for website owners to be able to specify what constitutes a website that will fully engage site visitors and consequently what needs to be designed into the website in order to insure return on investment. This paper argues that the term usability is inappropriate to quality websites and that website engagibility is a step beyond usability. The paper reports continuing research which seeks to identify the requirements of website engagibility, and to provide a mathematical solution for measuring and comparing website performance. The research relies on the Software Quality Star to provide an end-to-end conceptual model for studying website quality. In particular it focuses on the potential of a website’s design to support the engagibility of visitors. Using a comprehensive set of Quality-of-product criteria and counts for a set of eCommerce websites the paper explains how a ratio value can be calculated for a website. These metrics specifically avoid reliance on website traffic data and visitor statistics and the study concerns itself with website structure and design criteria. The approach is influenced by assessment and predictive measurement theory. Then, using Metric Ratio Analysis the paper shows how website engagibility performance ratings can be determined

Software quality challenges.

This paper sets out a number of challenges facing the software quality community. These challenges relate to the broader view of quality and the consequences for software quality definitions. These definitions are related to eight perspectives of software quality in an end-to-end product life cycle. Research and study of software quality has traditionally focused on product quality for management information systems and this paper considers the challenge of defining additional quality factors for alternative domains like the World Wide Web

The prevalence of severe sepsis or septic shock in an Irish emergency department

Severe sepsis and septic shock are among the leading causes of death globally. Despite the central role the emergency department (ED) plays in the early identification of patients presenting to hospital with sepsis, the prevalence of severe sepsis and septic shock in the Irish ED setting has not been described. The primary aim of this study was to measure the prevalence of severe sepsis or septic shock in an Irish adult ED setting. The clinical records of patients presenting to the ED over a four-week period were retrospectively reviewed to determine if they met the current Health Service Executive (HSE) criteria for severe sepsis or septic shock. Overall, 3,585 adult patients attended the ED during the study period, with 42 patients meeting the criteria for severe sepsis or septic shock. The ED prevalence of severe sepsis or septic shock was 11.7 patients (95% CI 8.1 – 15.4%) per 1000 ED attendances

Prospective study design and data analysis in UK Biobank

Population-based prospective studies, such as UK Biobank, are valuable for generating and testing hypotheses about the potential causes of human disease. We describe how UK Biobank's study design, data access policies, and approaches to statistical analysis can help to minimize error and improve the interpretability of research findings, with implications for other population-based prospective studies being established worldwide.</p

Meta-analysis of heterogeneous Down Syndrome data reveals consistent genome-wide dosage effects related to neurological processes

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Down syndrome (DS; trisomy 21) is the most common genetic cause of mental retardation in the human population and key molecular networks dysregulated in DS are still unknown. Many different experimental techniques have been applied to analyse the effects of dosage imbalance at the molecular and phenotypical level, however, currently no integrative approach exists that attempts to extract the common information.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We have performed a statistical meta-analysis from 45 heterogeneous publicly available DS data sets in order to identify consistent dosage effects from these studies. We identified 324 genes with significant genome-wide dosage effects, including well investigated genes like <it>SOD1</it>, <it>APP</it>, <it>RUNX1 </it>and <it>DYRK1A </it>as well as a large proportion of novel genes (N = 62). Furthermore, we characterized these genes using gene ontology, molecular interactions and promoter sequence analysis. In order to judge relevance of the 324 genes for more general cerebral pathologies we used independent publicly available microarry data from brain studies not related with DS and identified a subset of 79 genes with potential impact for neurocognitive processes. All results have been made available through a web server under <url>http://ds-geneminer.molgen.mpg.de/</url>.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our study represents a comprehensive integrative analysis of heterogeneous data including genome-wide transcript levels in the domain of trisomy 21. The detected dosage effects build a resource for further studies of DS pathology and the development of new therapies.</p