Quality Measurement of Business Web Application

With the development of the Internet culture applications are becoming simpler and simpler, users need less IT knowledge than earlier; from the ‘reader’ status they have reached that of the content creator and editor. In our days, the effects of the web are becoming stronger and stronger— computer-aided work is conventional almost everywhere. The spread of the Internet applications has several reasons: first of all, their accessibility is widespread; second, their use is not limited to only one computer or network on which they have been installed. Also, the quantity of accessible information now and earlier is not even comparable. Not counting the applications which need high broadband or high counting capacity (for example video editing), Internet applications are reaching the functionality of the thick clients associates. The most serious disadvantage of Internet applications – for security reasons — is that the resources of the client computer are not fully accessible or accessible only to a restricted extent. Still thick clients do have some advantages: better multimedia perdormance with more flexibility due to local resources and the possibility for offline working.

On the Feasibility of Steering Swallowable Microsystem Capsules Using Computer-Aided Magnetic Levitation

Swallowable capsule endoscopy is used for non-invasive diagnosis of some gastrointestinal (GI) organs. However, control over the position of the capsule is a major unresolved issue. This study presents a design for steering the capsule based on magnetic levitation. The levitation is stabilized with the aid of a computer-aided feedback control system and diamagnetism. Peristaltic and gravitational forces to be overcome were calculated. A levitation setup was built to analyze the feasibility of using Hall Effect sensors to locate the in- vivo capsule. CAD software Maxwell 3D (Ansoft, Pittsburgh, PA) was used to determine the dimensions of the resistive electromagnets required for levitation and the feasibility of building them was examined. Comparison based on design complexity was made between positioning the patient supinely and upright.

Signal processing and information fusing algorithms for the synthesis of an alternative electromyogram/eye gaze tracking computer cursor control system

This research pursued the conceptualization and real-time verification of a system that allows a computer user to control the cursor of a computer interface without using his/her hands. The target user groups for this system are individuals who are unable to use their hands due to spinal dysfunction or other afflictions, and individuals who must use their hands for higher priority tasks while still requiring interaction with a computer. ^ The system receives two forms of input from the user: Electromyogram (EMG) signals from muscles in the face and point-of-gaze coordinates produced by an Eye Gaze Tracking (EGT) system. In order to produce reliable cursor control from the two forms of user input, the development of this EMG/EGT system addressed three key requirements: an algorithm was created to accurately translate EMG signals due to facial movements into cursor actions, a separate algorithm was created that recognized an eye gaze fixation and provided an estimate of the associated eye gaze position, and an information fusion protocol was devised to efficiently integrate the outputs of these algorithms. ^ Experiments were conducted to compare the performance of EMG/EGT cursor control to EGT-only control and mouse control. These experiments took the form of two different types of point-and-click trials. The data produced by these experiments were evaluated using statistical analysis, Fitts' Law analysis and target re-entry (TRE) analysis. ^ The experimental results revealed that though EMG/EGT control was slower than EGT-only and mouse control, it provided effective hands-free control of the cursor without a spatial accuracy limitation, and it also facilitated a reliable click operation. This combination of qualities is not possessed by either EGT-only or mouse control, making EMG/EGT cursor control a unique and practical alternative for a user's cursor control needs. ^

Application of multivariable control using artificial neural networks in a debutanizer distillation column

LOPES, Jose Soares Batista et al. Application of multivariable control using artificial neural networks in a debutanizer distillation column.In: INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING - COBEM, 19, 5-9 nov. 2007, Brasilia. Anais... Brasilia, 2007

Ensidesapplikationers kodkvalitet och förvaltningsbarhet : En jämförelse av förvaltningsbarhet hos single-page applications utvecklade med AngularJS och React

Single-page applications have historically been subject to strong market forces driving fast development and deployment in lieu of quality control and changeable code, which are important factors for maintainability. In this report we develop two functionally equivalent applications using AngularJS and React and compare their maintainability as defined by ISO/IEC 9126. AngularJS and React represent two distinct approaches to web development, with AngularJS being a general framework providing rich base functionality and React a small specialized library for efficient view rendering. The quality comparison was accomplished by calculating Maintainability Index for each application. Version control analysis was used to determine quality indicators during development and subsequent maintenance where new functionality was added in two steps. The results show no major differences in maintainability in the initial applications. As more functionality is added the Maintainability Index decreases faster in the AngularJS application, indicating a steeper increase in complexity compared to the React application. Source code analysis reveals that changes in data flow requires significantly larger modifications of the AngularJS application due to its inherent architecture for data flow. We conclude that frameworks are useful when they facilitate development of known requirements but less so when applications and systems grow in size. Sammanfattning: Ensidesapplikationer har historiskt sett påverkats av starka marknadskrafter som pådriver snabba utvecklingscykler och leveranser. Detta medför att kvalitetskontroll och förändringsbar kod, som är viktiga faktorer för förvaltningsbarhet, blir lidande. I denna rapport utvecklar vi två funktionellt ekvi-valenta ensidesapplikationer med AngularJS och React samt jämför dessa applikationers förvaltningsbarhet enligt ISO/IEC 9126. AngularJS och React representerar två distinkta angreppsätt på webbutveckling, där AngularJS är ett ramverk med mycket färdig funktionalitet och React ett mindre bibliotek specialiserat på vyrendering. Kvalitetsjämförelsen utfördes genom att beräkna förvaltningsbarhetsindex för respektive applikation. Versionshanteringsanalys användes för att bestämma andra kvalitetsindikatorer efter den initiala utvecklingen samt två efterföljande underhållsarbeten. Resultaten visar inga markanta skillnader i förvaltningsbarhet för de initiala applikationerna. I takt med att mer funktionalitet lades till sjönk förvaltnings-barhetsindex snabbare för AngularJS-applikationen, vilket motsvarar en kraftigare ökning i komplexitet jämfört med React-applikationen. Versionshanteringsanalys visar att ändringar i dataflödet kräver större modifikationer för AngularJS-applikationen på grund av dess förbestämda arkitektur. Utifrån detta drar vi slutsatsen att ramverk är användbara när de understödjer utvecklingen mot kända krav men att deras nytta blir begränsad ju mer en applikation växer i storlek.

Application of multivariable control using artificial neural networks in a debutanizer distillation column

LOPES, Jose Soares Batista et al. Application of multivariable control using artificial neural networks in a debutanizer distillation column.In: INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING - COBEM, 19, 5-9 nov. 2007, Brasilia. Anais... Brasilia, 2007

Predicting the performance of passenger ships using computer simulation

When designing a new passenger ship or naval vessel or modifying an existing design, how do we ensure that the proposed design is safe from an evacuation point of view? In the wake of major maritime disasters such as the Herald of Free Enterprise and the Estonia and in light of the growth in the numbers of high density, high-speed ferries and large capacity cruise ships, issues concerned with the evacuation of passengers and crew at sea are receiving renewed interest. In the maritime industry, ship evacuation models are now recognised by IMO through the publication of the Interim Guidelines for Evacuation Analysis of New and Existing Passenger Ships including Ro-Ro. This approach offers the promise to quickly and efficiently bring evacuation considerations into the design phase, while the ship is "on the drawing board" as well as reviewing and optimising the evacuation provision of the existing fleet. Other applications of this technology include the optimisation of operating procedures for civil and naval vessels such as determining the optimal location of a feature such as a casino, organising major passenger movement events such as boarding/disembarkation or restaurant/theatre changes, determining lean manning requirements, location and number of damage control parties, etc. This paper describes the development of the maritimeEXODUS evacuation model which is fully compliant with IMO requirements and briefly presents an example application to a large passenger ferry.

Early investigation towards defining and measuring sustainability as a quality attribute in software systems

Sustainability in software system is still a new practice that most software developers and companies are trying to incorporate into their software development lifecycle and has been largely discussed in academia. Sustainability is a complex concept viewed from economic, environment and social dimensions with several definitions proposed making sometimes the concept of sustainability very fuzzy and difficult to apply and assess in software systems. This has hindered the adoption of sustainability in the software industry. A little research explores sustainability as a quality property of software products and services to answer questions such as; How to quantify sustainability as a quality construct in the same way as other quality attributes such as security, usability and reliability? How can it be applied to software systems? What are the measures and measurement scale of sustainability? The Goal of this research is to investigate the definitions, perceptions and measurement of sustainability from the quality perspective. Grounded in the general theory of software measurement, the aim is to develop a method that decomposes sustainability in factors, criteria and metrics. The Result is a method to quantify and access sustainability of software systems while incorporating management and users concern. Conclusion: The method will empower the ability of companies to easily adopt sustainability while facilitating its integration to the software development process and tools. It will also help companies to measure sustainability of their software products from economic, environmental, social, individual and technological dimension.

Transmission electron tomography: quality assessment and enhancement for three-dimensional imaging of nanostructures

Nanotechnology has revolutionised humanity's capability in building microscopic systems by manipulating materials on a molecular and atomic scale. Nan-osystems are becoming increasingly smaller and more complex from the chemical perspective which increases the demand for microscopic characterisation techniques. Among others, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is an indispensable tool that is increasingly used to study the structures of nanosystems down to the molecular and atomic scale. However, despite the effectivity of this tool, it can only provide 2-dimensional projection (shadow) images of the 3D structure, leaving the 3-dimensional information hidden which can lead to incomplete or erroneous characterization. One very promising inspection method is Electron Tomography (ET), which is rapidly becoming an important tool to explore the 3D nano-world. ET provides (sub-)nanometer resolution in all three dimensions of the sample under investigation. However, the fidelity of the ET tomogram that is achieved by current ET reconstruction procedures remains a major challenge. This thesis addresses the assessment and advancement of electron tomographic methods to enable high-fidelity three-dimensional investigations. A quality assessment investigation was conducted to provide a quality quantitative analysis of the main established ET reconstruction algorithms and to study the influence of the experimental conditions on the quality of the reconstructed ET tomogram. Regular shaped nanoparticles were used as a ground-truth for this study. It is concluded that the fidelity of the post-reconstruction quantitative analysis and segmentation is limited, mainly by the fidelity of the reconstructed ET tomogram. This motivates the development of an improved tomographic reconstruction process. In this thesis, a novel ET method was proposed, named dictionary learning electron tomography (DLET). DLET is based on the recent mathematical theorem of compressed sensing (CS) which employs the sparsity of ET tomograms to enable accurate reconstruction from undersampled (S)TEM tilt series. DLET learns the sparsifying transform (dictionary) in an adaptive way and reconstructs the tomogram simultaneously from highly undersampled tilt series. In this method, the sparsity is applied on overlapping image patches favouring local structures. Furthermore, the dictionary is adapted to the specific tomogram instance, thereby favouring better sparsity and consequently higher quality reconstructions. The reconstruction algorithm is based on an alternating procedure that learns the sparsifying dictionary and employs it to remove artifacts and noise in one step, and then restores the tomogram data in the other step. Simulation and real ET experiments of several morphologies are performed with a variety of setups. Reconstruction results validate its efficiency in both noiseless and noisy cases and show that it yields an improved reconstruction quality with fast convergence. The proposed method enables the recovery of high-fidelity information without the need to worry about what sparsifying transform to select or whether the images used strictly follow the pre-conditions of a certain transform (e.g. strictly piecewise constant for Total Variation minimisation). This can also avoid artifacts that can be introduced by specific sparsifying transforms (e.g. the staircase artifacts the may result when using Total Variation minimisation). Moreover, this thesis shows how reliable elementally sensitive tomography using EELS is possible with the aid of both appropriate use of Dual electron energy loss spectroscopy (DualEELS) and the DLET compressed sensing algorithm to make the best use of the limited data volume and signal to noise inherent in core-loss electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) from nanoparticles of an industrially important material. Taken together, the results presented in this thesis demonstrates how high-fidelity ET reconstructions can be achieved using a compressed sensing approach.

Continuous Quality Assurance and Optimisation in Cloud-Based Virtual Enterprises

Part 18: Optimization in Collaborative Networks

Adaptive Software Fault Prediction Approach Using Object-Oriented Metrics

As users continually request additional functionality, software systems will continue to grow in their complexity, as well as in their susceptibility to failures. Particularly for sensitive systems requiring higher levels of reliability, faulty system modules may increase development and maintenance cost. Hence, identifying them early would support the development of reliable systems through improved scheduling and quality control. Research effort to predict software modules likely to contain faults, as a consequence, has been substantial. Although a wide range of fault prediction models have been proposed, we remain far from having reliable tools that can be widely applied to real industrial systems. For projects with known fault histories, numerous research studies show that statistical models can provide reasonable estimates at predicting faulty modules using software metrics. However, as context-specific metrics differ from project to project, the task of predicting across projects is difficult to achieve. Prediction models obtained from one project experience are ineffective in their ability to predict fault-prone modules when applied to other projects. Hence, taking full benefit of the existing work in software development community has been substantially limited. As a step towards solving this problem, in this dissertation we propose a fault prediction approach that exploits existing prediction models, adapting them to improve their ability to predict faulty system modules across different software projects.

Precisão experimental em ensaios com a cultura do feijão

A avaliação do coeficiente de variação (CV) como medida da precisão dos experimentos tem sido feita com diversas culturas, espécies animais e forrageiras por meio de trabalhos sugerindo faixas de classificação dos valores, considerando-se a média, o desvio padrão e a distribuição dos valores de CV das diversas variáveis respostas envolvidas nos experimentos. Neste trabalho, objetivouse estudar a distribuição dos valores de CV de experimentos com a cultura do feijão, propondo faixas que orientem os pesquisadores na avaliação de seus estudos com cada variável. Os dados utilizados foram obtidos de revisão em revistas que publicam artigos científicos com a cultura do feijão. Foram consideradas as variáveis: rendimento, número de vagens por planta, número de grãos por vagem, peso de 100 grãos, estande final, altura de plantas e índice de colheita. Foram obtidas faixas de valores de CV para cada variável tomando como base a distribuição normal, utilizando-se também a distribuição dos quantis amostrais e a mediana e o pseudo-sigma, classificando-os como baixo, médio, alto e muito alto. Os cálculos estatísticos para verificação da normalidade dos dados foram implementados por meio de uma função no software estatístico livre R. Os resultados obtidos indicaram que faixas de valores de CV diferiram entre as diversas variáveis apresentando ampla variação justificando a necessidade de utilizar faixa de avaliação específica para cada variável.