Realizing quality improvement through test driven development: results and experiences of four industrial teams

Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development practice that has been used sporadically for decades. With this practice, a software engineer cycles minute-by-minute between writing failing unit tests and writing implementation code to pass those tests. Test-driven development has recently re-emerged as a critical enabling practice of agile software development methodologies. However, little empirical evidence supports or refutes the utility of this practice in an industrial context. Case studies were conducted with three development teams at Microsoft and one at IBM that have adopted TDD. The results of the case studies indicate that the pre-release defect density of the four products decreased between 40% and 90% relative to similar projects that did not use the TDD practice. Subjectively, the teams experienced a 15–35% increase in initial development time after adopting TDD.

Control of visual conditions for open-plan offices

This paper reports insights about energy savings in buildings dedicated to tertiary activity. The goal is to employ as much as possible natural light flows to minimize the artificial light source consumption. Although the solar energy is power-efficient to light and heat a room, this natural source remains complex to manage and can generate inconveniences related to occupants visual comfort. The authors propose a global solution to deal with visual comfort by controlling the daylight contribution to the indoor light atmosphere. This control structure is based on the use of an innovative sensor of light conditions and it was implemented within an experimental room equipped with classic Venetian blinds. This paper focuses on the control laws to apply in order to meet visual needs for current tasks performed in offices.     

On the Fracture Toughness of Advanced Materials

Few engineering materials are limited by their strength; rather they are limited by their resistance to fracture or fracture toughness. It is not by accident that most critical structures, such as bridges, ships, nuclear pressure vessels and so forth, are manufactured from materials that are comparatively low in strength but high in toughness. Indeed, in many classes of materials, strength and toughness are almost mutually exclusive. From a fracture‐mechanics perspective, the ability of a microstructure to develop toughening mechanisms acting either ahead or behind the crack tip can result in resistance‐curve (R‐curve) behavior where the fracture resistance actually increases with crack extension; the implication here is that toughness is often developed primarily during crack growth and not for crack initiation. Biological materials are perfect examples of this; moreover, they offer microstructural design strategies for the development of new materials for structural applications demanding combinations of both strength and toughness.     

Fabrication methods for the manufacture of sapphire microparts

There is an increasing demand for microparts to be fabricated from an extremely hard-wearing, durable material such as sapphire but machining it to demanding specifications and tolerances poses considerable challenges. This paper describes experimental results obtained from laser machining and diamond machining of sapphire and concludes that, for optimum machining, a combination of these two techniques is required.     

A damage-tolerant glass

Owing to a lack of microstructure, glassy materials are inherently strong but brittle, and often demonstrate extreme sensitivity to flaws. Accordingly, their macroscopic failure is often not initiated by plastic yielding, and almost always terminated by brittle fracture. Unlike conventional brittle glasses, metallic glasses are generally capable of limited plastic yielding by shear-band sliding in the presence of a flaw, and thus exhibit toughness-strength relationships that lie between those of brittle ceramics and marginally tough metals. Here, a bulk glassy palladium alloy is introduced, demonstrating an unusual capacity for shielding an opening crack accommodated by an extensive shear-band sliding process, which promotes a fracture toughness comparable to those of the toughest materials known. This result demonstrates that the combination of toughness and strength (that is, damage tolerance) accessible to amorphous materials extends beyond the benchmark ranges established by the toughest and strongest materials known, thereby pushing the envelope of damage tolerance accessible to a structural metal.     

Incorporating Performance Testing in Test-Driven Development

Our performance-testing approach required manually inspecting the performance logs. During the project's development, JUnit-based performance testing tools, such as JUnitPerf, weren't available. Such tools provide better visibility of performance problems than manual inspection of performance logs. Although we believe manual inspection of performance trends is necessary, specifying the bottom-line performance in assert-based test cases can complement the use of performance log files, making the TFP testing results more visible to the developers. We're investigating the design of assert-based performance testing to improve the TFP process. Another direction of future work is automatic performance test generation. In this project, we relied on the performance architect's experience to identify the execution paths and measurement points for performance testing. We can derive this crucial information for performance testing from the performance requirements and system design. We plan to find guidelines for specifications of performance requirements and system design to make the automation possible     

Characterization of the Human Eccrine Sweat Proteome—A Focus on the Biological Variability of Individual Sweat Protein Profiles

The potential of eccrine sweat as a bio-fluid of interest for diagnosis and personalized therapy has not yet been fully evaluated, due to the lack of in-depth sweat characterization studies. Thanks to recent developments in omics, together with the availability of accredited sweat collection methods, the analysis of human sweat may now be envisioned as a standardized, non-invasive test for individualized monitoring and personalized medicine. Here, we characterized individual sweat samples, collected from 28 healthy adult volunteers under the most standardized sampling methodology, by applying optimized shotgun proteomics. The thorough characterization of the sweat proteome allowed the identification of 983 unique proteins from which 344 were identified across all samples. Annotation-wise, the study of the sweat proteome unveiled the over-representation of newly addressed actin dynamics, oxidative stress and proteasome-related functions, in addition to well-described proteolysis and anti-microbial immunity. The sweat proteome composition correlated with the inter-individual variability of sweat secretion parameters. In addition, both gender-exclusive proteins and gender-specific protein abundances were highlighted, despite the high similarity between human female and male sweat proteomes. In conclusion, standardized sample collection coupled with optimized shotgun proteomics significantly improved the depth of sweat proteome coverage, far beyond previous similar studies. The identified proteins were involved in many diverse biological processes and molecular functions, indicating the potential of this bio-fluid as a valuable biological matrix for further studies. Addressing sweat variability, our results prove the proteomic profiling of sweat to be a promising bio-fluid analysis for individualized, non-invasive monitoring and personalized medicine.     

CdTe solar cell with industrial Al:ZnO on soda-lime glass

One avenue to enhance CdTe cell performance is to improve the optical transmission of the transparent conductive oxide (TCO)/window layer stack. In this paper, we examine soda-lime float glass coated with an Al-doped ZnO layer and a buffer layer. The possible advantages of using a ZnO-based TCO include reduced surface roughness, improved transparency, and an integrated buffer layer that can be optimized for use in a CdTe PV device. Device processing was modified to address the chemical and thermal differences between the ZnO-based TCO stack produced by Saint-Gobain and the TCOs previously used at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). These process modifications produced ~ 8% efficiency for devices without a buffer layer. Incorporation of buffer layers has already produced devices with ~ 11% and > 12% efficiency for CdTe deposition temperatures of 570° and 500°C, respectively.     

A new method for volume segmentation of PET images, based on possibility theory

18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (18FDG PET) has become an essential technique in oncology. Accurate segmentation and uptake quantification are crucial in order to enable objective follow-up, the optimization of radiotherapy planning, and therapeutic evaluation. We have designed and evaluated a new, nearly automatic and operator-independent segmentation approach. This incorporated possibility theory, in order to take into account the uncertainty and inaccuracy inherent in the image. The approach remained independent of PET facilities since it did not require any preliminary calibration. Good results were obtained from phantom images [percent error =18.38% (mean) ± 9.72% (standard deviation)]. Results on simulated and anatomopathological data sets were quantified using different similarity measures and showed the method was efficient (simulated images: Dice index =82.18% ± 13.53% for SUV =2.5 ). The approach could, therefore, be an efficient and robust tool for uptake volume segmentation, and lead to new indicators for measuring volume of interest activity.     

A novel biomimetic approach to the design of high-performance ceramic–metal composites

The prospect of extending natural biological design to develop new synthetic ceramic–metal composite materials is examined. Using ice-templating of ceramic suspensions and subsequent metal infiltration, we demonstrate that the concept of ordered hierarchical design can be applied to create fine-scale laminated ceramic–metal (bulk) composites that are inexpensive, lightweight and display exceptional damage-tolerance properties. Specifically, Al₂O₃/Al–Si laminates with ceramic contents up to approximately 40 vol% and with lamellae thicknesses down to 10 µm were processed and characterized. These structures achieve an excellent fracture toughness of 40 MPa√m at a tensile strength of approximately 300 MPa. Salient toughening mechanisms are described together with further toughening strategies.