Harmonizing professional standards in ergonomics while recognizing diversity

Abstract

High quality performance is an aspiration of all professions and processes of quality assurance are normally carefully defined. These include the design of educational programmes to ensure that graduates achieve a high standard of performance and are able to compete in the world market and meet consumers' needs; a method of evaluating the relevance and standard of that education; and a means of ensuring continuing competence in practice. The diversity of paths taken to become an ergonomist offers a challenge to ergonomics societies to define effective and equitable approaches to quality assurance. This paper advocates the definition of core ergonomics competencies as a linking resource for educational planning, accreditation processes and certification procedures. Such an approach could provide the basis for harmonization in the recognition of ergonomists with varying educational backgrounds, expertise and experience.     

Quality assurance in micro production

Quality assurance is essential for an efficient support of all developing and manufacturing processes and activities with the forefront objective to reach robust processes with a high throughput of parts meeting their functional requirements. Due to the lack of a broad base of experiences regarding the still developing manufacturing technologies in micro production an adequate quality assurance plays an even more important role in order to efficiently support the transition of micro production processes from non-robust to stable processes. Thereby, quality assurance faces particular challenges in micro production, which render a reasonable application of common quality methods difficult or even impossible. Consequently, it is essential to develop new concepts or adjust widely applied quality assurance methods in order to support and continuously improve the development- and manufacturing processes in micro production. Within the scope of the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 499 “Design, production and quality assurance of primary shaped micro components manufactured in ceramic and metallic materials” the approach of the subproject working on the topic quality assurance is threefold: (i) An efficient and process-accompanying information management has been implemented and will be enhanced further on. (ii) Specifically adjusted preventive methods of quality assurance have been developed and applied. (iii) In order to implement an efficient operational quality assurance performance data of the manufacturing processes has been collected and provided. In the future this supply of data will be used to control and improve the manufacturing processes.     

Software testing and preventive quality assurance for metrology

Software controlled measuring systems can be approved with the help of different kinds of conformity assessment techniques based either on the final product, the product design or corresponding development and production processes. To validate the software as an integral part of the measuring system, different approaches of software quality assurance have to be applied for different conformity assessment procedures. There are two essential categories of software quality assurance, both of which supplement each other. On the one hand side, analytical methods of software testing, static analysis, and code inspection are used in the scope of conformity assessments of final or intermediate products. On the other hand, preventive audits of software development processes are applied to evaluate and improve appropriate software processes and to consequently support process related conformity assessment procedures. Depending on the validation objectives, validation methods, audit areas, and the appropriate requirements have to be selected and refined. A major problem of validation efforts, namely the process of defining and refining testable requirements, can be solved with the help of international software standards. In Germany, the accredited software testing laboratory at PTB supports software quality in metrology.     

Supporting design of primary shaped micro parts and systems through provision of experience

Nowadays, miniaturization is one observable trend in the development of new technical systems. Based on the miniaturization of existing macroscopic production technologies e.g. powder injection molding, a new process chain for the development of primary shaped microparts and systems is being developed in the collaborative research center 499 “design, production and quality assurance of molded micro components made of metallic and ceramic materials”. Because of the constantly evolving miniaturization and growing complexity of the developed microparts and systems, new development processes and methods are needed. Because of the mostly restrictive influence of the downstream phases (production and quality assurance) over the design phase, micro-specific design processes require well-founded knowledge about micro-specific manufacturing techniques (e.g. restrictions) which may be stored in form of design rules. However, many micro-specific aspects cannot be represented in design rules. In this paper the authors propose a new approach to ensure this other kind of knowledge.     

Integrative quality assurance of micro-parts using Microfeatures

The article introduces the Microfeature Catalogue as an information database that is structured by Microfeatures and can be used for preventive and non-preventive quality assurance. The Microfeature conception is adapted and evaluated in the specific fabrication environment of micro mechanical components. The production of micro parts demands a further development of the new fabrication technologies on the one hand and an appropriate development of the concomitant processes such as the quality assurance process on the other hand. A coherent information cycle between design, fabrication and quality assurance is put into practice.     

Software Quality Assurance

This paper describes the status of software quality assurance as a relatively new and autonomous field. The history of its development from hardware quality assurance programs is discussed, current methods are reviewed, and future directions are indicated.     

软件测试和软件质量管理的分析与研究

软件质量是软件的生命,开发人员和用户都十分重视软件的质量问题。因此,软件开发过程必需伴有质量保证活动,而软件测试是最至关重要的质量保证活动。本文首先介绍了软件测试和软件质量保证的概念,以及软件测试的v模型和软件质量度量模型,并从提高软件质量的角度出发,阐述了软件测试的基本方法和如何将软件质量保证环节做得更好,从而真正提高软件质量。     

SME and quality performance in networking environment

In this study, a step-by-step management approach is developed in order to help small manufacturing enterprise to reach better quality level in term of quality management, quality assurance, quality control and continuous improvement process, despite their area of operation and level of expertise in quality matter. This research is justified by the fact that some large factories and other foreign business are continuously raising their quality requirement at all level. Therefore, one way to acquire expertise is to exchange knowledge and know-how in networking environment.     

An Effective and Secure Quality Assurance System for a Computer Science Program

Improving the quality assurance (QA) processes and acquiring accreditation are top priorities for academic programs. The learning outcomes (LOs) assessment and continuous quality improvement represent core components of the quality assurance system (QAS). Current assessment methods suffer deficiencies related to accuracy and reliability, and they lack well-organized processes for continuous improvement planning. Moreover, the absence of automation, and integration in QA processes forms a major obstacle towards developing efficient quality system. There is a pressing need to adopt security protocols that provide required security services to safeguard the valuable information processed by QAS as well. This research proposes an effective methodology for LOs assessment and continuous improvement processes. The proposed approach ensures more accurate and reliable LOs assessment results and provides systematic way for utilizing those results in the continuous quality improvement. This systematic and well-specified QA processes were then utilized to model and implement automated and secure QAS that efficiently performs quality-related processes. The proposed system adopts two security protocols that provide confidentiality, integrity, and authentication for quality data and reports. The security protocols avoid the source repudiation, which is important in the quality reporting system. This is achieved through implementing powerful cryptographic algorithms. The QAS enables efficient data collection and processing required for analysis and interpretation. It also prepares for the development of datasets that can be used in future artificial intelligence (AI) researches to support decision making and improve the quality of academic programs. The proposed approach is implemented in a successful real case study for a computer science program. The current study serves scientific programs struggling to achieve academic accreditation, and gives rise to fully automating and integrating the QA processes and adopting modern AI and security technologies to develop effective QAS.     

软件研制的过程质量管理

软件的质量保证措施主要有2个方面：软件研制过程的质量保证和软件产品的质量评估。本文认为软件研制过程的质量管理是软件质量保证的关键,归纳了现阶段国内软件研制中影响软件质量的主要因素,详细分析了这些因素对于软件质量、软件研制及维护成本的影响,论述了软件研制的过程管理与软件质量的关系,结合长期软件研制工作经验,总结了面向软件质量保证的软件研制过程管理措施的主要内容。     

Design for instrumentation: high quality measurement of formal technical review

All current software quality assurance methods incorporate some form of formal technical review (FTR), because structured analysis of software artefacts by a team of skilled technical personnel has demonstrated an ability to improve quality. However, FTR methods come in a wide variety of forms with varying effectiveness, incur significant overhead on technical staff, and have little computer support. Measurements of these FTR methods are coarse-grained, frequently low quality, and expensive to obtain. This paper describes CSRS, a highly instrumented, computer-supported system for formal technical review, and shows how it is designed to collect high quality, fine-grained measures of FTR process and products automatically. The paper also discusses some results from over one year of experimentation with CSRS; describes how CSRS improves current process improvement approaches to FTR; and overviews several novel research projects on FTR that are made possible by this system.     

Role of collective ownership and coding standards in coordinating expertise in software project teams

Software development is a complex undertaking that continues to present software project teams with numerous challenges. Software project teams are adopting extreme programming (XP) practices in order to overcome the challenges of software development in an increasingly dynamic environment. The ability to coordinate software developers' efforts is critical in such conditions. Expertise coordination has been identified as an important emergent process through which software project teams manage non-routine challenges in software development. However, the extent to which XP enables software project teams to coordinate expertise is unknown. Drawing on the agile development and expertise coordination literatures, we examine the role of collective ownership and coding standards as processes and practices that govern coordination in software project teams. We examine the relationship between collective ownership, coding standards, expertise coordination, and software project technical quality in a field study of 56 software project teams comprising 509 software developers. We found that collective ownership and coding standards play a role in improving software project technical quality. We also found that collective ownership and coding standards moderated the relationship between expertise coordination and software project technical quality, with collective ownership attenuating the relationship and coding standards strengthening the relationship. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.     

System security assurance: A systematic literature review

System security assurance provides the confidence that security features, practices, procedures, and architecture of software systems mediate and enforce the security policy and are resilient against security failure and attacks. Alongside the significant benefits of security assurance, the evolution of new information and communication technology (ICT) introduces new challenges regarding information protection. Security assurance methods based on the traditional tools, techniques, and procedures may fail to account new challenges due to poor requirement specifications, static nature, and poor development processes. The common criteria (CC) commonly used for security evaluation and certification process also comes with many limitations and challenges. In this paper, extensive efforts have been made to study the state-of-the-art, limitations and future research directions for security assurance of the ICT and cyber–physical systems (CPS) in a wide range of domains. We conducted a systematic review of requirements, processes, and activities involved in system security assurance including security requirements, security metrics, system and environments and assurance methods. We highlighted the challenges and gaps that have been identified by the existing literature related to system security assurance and corresponding solutions. Finally, we discussed the limitations of the present methods and future research directions.     

Java语言编码过程中的质量保证方法和工具

在基于Java软件产品开发过程申,如何保证编码阶段的质量,是软件开发人员关注的关键问题之一.软件质量中的方法和工具是保证软件质量的关键,介绍了软件质量的基本概念和模型,说明了基于Java语言编码过程质量保证的关键方法和工具.     

Going soft on quality?:Process management in the Scottish software industry

Despite their proliferation within the industry, quality assurance standards are insufficient to ensure effective software development. Scottish software companies are now highly sensitive to limitations imposed by the standards movement, flagging the need for more explicit attention to work organization and human resource issues. This article examines efforts to broaden the focus of quality management within the software industry, charting the impact of theoretical and practical initiatives and identifying the mediating role of commercial pressures, the consultancy marketplace and, crucially, staff reactions.     

Web应用开发方法研究

目前,Web系统开发缺乏严格和系统的方法,大多数应用开发和管理实践在很大程度上依赖于开发人员个人的知识和经验,造成的后果是所开发的Web系统大多是低质量的产品。而传统的软件工程方法不能适应Web设计的要求,为此人们研究提出了众多的Web开发方法。这些研究旨在提供全面支持Web应用开发生命周期的模型和方法,但由于这些方法本身存在的局限性及其它方面的原因,还没有得到广泛的应用。论文首先讨论了成熟的Web开发方法应该具有什么样的特性和功能,然后分析了现有Web开发方法各自的特点,最后总结了这些方法所存在的问题和今后的研究重点。     

Putting software terminology to the test

Project management relies on testing personnel's expertise to ensure software quality. However, contractual and management issues also determine a project's quality. Such issues might even control testing itself. Consider the situation in which a client hires a vendor to build a piece of software. The client could specify the type, schedule, and extent of testing in its contract. Such terms might include compressing the time allotted to quality assurance or substituting certain tests for others. To successfully meet software quality goals, all parties involved must fully understand what testing the contract requires. However, testing literature, practitioners, and project management often have different understandings of common testing concepts. I describe two specific inconsistencies in testing vocabulary that can put a software project at risk     

Metrological assurance at industrial enterprise: Problems and solutions

Conceptual and systematic issues regarding the design of metrological assurance system at an industrial enterprise are considered. The system is constructed as a part of quality management system of the enterprise; process approach forms methodological foundation in development and operation of the system. The processes of implementing metrological functions, as well as the system of enterprise standards regulating control mechanisms for these processes are described.     

军用实时系统开发中质量保证模型

提出项目管理和过程技术相结合的质量保证模型,一方面规范项目管理,对承制单位进行国家军用标准资质认证,建立有效的质量管理体系,对软件开发实施全程质量跟踪管理控制;另一方面不断改进和提高开发过程中所应用的技术、方法,采取迭代开发模式,并在开发过程科学有效地开展需求管理、同行评审、软件测试等一系列的质量保证活动.