MaramaAIC: tool support for consistency management and validation of requirements

Requirements captured by requirements engineers (REs) are commonly inconsistent with their client’s intended requirements and are often error prone. There is limited tool support providing end-to-end support between the REs and their client for the validation and improvement of these requirements. We have developed an automated tool called MaramaAIC (Automated Inconsistency Checker) to address these problems. MaramaAIC provides automated requirements traceability and visual support to identify and highlight inconsistency, incorrectness and incompleteness in captured requirements. MaramaAIC provides an end-to-end rapid prototyping approach together with a patterns library that helps to capture requirements and check the consistency of requirements that have been expressed in textual natural language requirements and then extracted to semi-formal abstract interactions, essential use cases (EUCs) and user interface prototype models. It helps engineers to validate the correctness and completeness of the EUCs modelled requirements by comparing them to “best-practice” templates and generates an abstract prototype in the form of essential user interface prototype models and concrete User Interface views in the form of HTML. We describe its design and implementation together with results of evaluating our tool’s efficacy and performance, and user perception of the tool’s usability and its strengths and weaknesses via a substantial usability study. We also present a qualitative study on the effectiveness of the tool’s end-to-end rapid prototyping approach in improving dialogue between the RE and the client as well as improving the quality of the requirements.

Comparison of medication policies to guide nursing practice across seven Victorian health services

Objectives The objective of this paper is to review and compare the content of medication management policies across seven Australian health services located in the state of Victoria. Methods The medication management policies for health professionals involved in administering medications were obtained from seven health services under one jurisdiction. Analysis focused on policy content, including the health service requirements and regulations governing practice. Results and Conclusions The policies of the seven health services contained standard information about staff authorisation, controlled medications and poisons, labelling injections and infusions, patient self-administration, documentation and managing medication errors. However, policy related to individual health professional responsibilities, single- and double-checking medications, telephone orders and expected staff competencies varied across the seven health services. Some inconsistencies in health professionals' responsibilities among medication management policies were identified. What is known about the topic? Medication errors are recognised as the single most preventable cause of patient harm in hospitals and occur most frequently during administration. Medication management is a complex process involving several management and treatment decisions. Policies are developed to assist health professionals to safely manage medications and standardise practice; however, co-occurring activities and interruptions increase the risk of medication errors. What does this paper add? In the present policy analysis, we identified some variation in the content of medication management policies across seven Victorian health services. Policies varied in relation to medications that require single- and double-checking, as well as by whom, nurse-initiated medications, administration rights, telephone orders and competencies required to check medications. What are the implications for practitioners? Variation in medication management policies across organisations is highlighted and raises concerns regarding consistency in governance and practice related to medication management. Lack of practice standardisation has previously been implicated in medication errors. Lack of intrajurisdictional concordance should be addressed to increase consistency. Inconsistency in expectations between healthcare services may lead to confusion about expectations among health professionals moving from one healthcare service to another, and possibly lead to increased risk of medication errors.

The state of legislation and policy protecting Australia's mangrove and salt marsh and their ecosystem services

Saline coastal wetlands, such as mangrove and coastal salt marsh, provide many ecosystem services. In Australia, large areas have been lost since European colonization, particularly as a result of drainage, infilling and flood-mitigation works, often starting in the mid-19th century and aimed primarily towards converting land to agricultural, urban or industrial uses. These threats remain ongoing, and will be exacerbated by rapid population growth and climate change in the 21st century. Establishing the effect of wetland loss on the delivery of ecosystem services is confounded by the absence of a nationally consistent approach to mapping wetlands and defining the boundaries of different types of coastal wetland. In addition, climate change and its projected effect on mangrove and salt marsh distribution and ecosystem services is poorly, if at all, acknowledged in existing legislation and policy. Intensifying climate change means that there is little time to be complacent; indeed, there is an urgent need for proper valuation of ecosystem services and explicit recognition of ecosystem services within policy and legislation. Seven actions are identified that could improve protection of coastal wetlands and the ecosystem services they provide, including benchmarking and improving coastal wetland extent and health, reducing complexity and inconsistency in governance arrangements, and facilitating wetland adaptation and ecosystem service delivery using a range of relevant mechanisms. Actions that build upon the momentum to mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon – ‘blue carbon’ – could achieve multiple desirable objectives, including climate-change mitigation and adaptation, floodplain rehabilitation and habitat protection.

Wine prices and quality eatings: a meta-regression analysis

This article examines the empirical support for the hypothesized hedonic theoretical relation between the price of wine and its quality. The examination considers over 180 hedonic wine price models developed over 20 years, covering many countries. The research identifies that the relation between the price of wine and its sensory quality rating is a moderate partial correlation of +0.30. This correlation exists despite the lack of information held by consumers about a wine’s quality and the inconsistency of expert tasters when evaluating wines. The results identify a moderate price-quality correlation, which suggests the existence of strategic buying opportunities for better informed consumers. Strategic price setting possibilities may also exist for wine producers given the incomplete quality information held by consumers. The results from the meta-regression analysis point to the absence of any publication bias, and attribute the observed asymmetry in estimates to study heterogeneity. The analysis suggests the observed heterogeneity is explained by the importance of a wine’s reputation, the use of the 100-point quality rating scale, the analysis of a single wine variety/style, and the employed functional form. The most important implication from the analysis is the relative importance of a wine’s reputation over its sensory quality, inferring that producers need to sustain the sensory quality of a wine over time to extract appropriate returns. The reputation of the wine producer is found not to influence the strength of the price quality relationship. This finding does not contradict the importance of wine producer reputation in directly influencing prices.