Improving the Software Homologation Process through Peer Review: An Experience Report on Android Development Environment

In the current technological market environment, ensuring the quality of new products has become a complex challenge. In this scenario, companies have been investing in solutions that aim to reduce the execution time of software testing and lead to cost efficiency. However, companies that have a complex and specialized testing environment usually face barriers related to costly testing processes, especially in distributed settings. Sidia Institute of Technology works on research and development for the Android platform for mobile devices in Latin America. As we work in a global software development (GSD) scope, we have faced barriers caused by failures detected lately that have caused delays in the homologation release process on Android projects. Thus, we adopt an Internal Review process, using as an alternative to reduce these failures. In this paper it was presented the experience of a homologation team adopting an Internal Review process in order to increase the performance through of improving test efficiency. Using this approach, it was possible to realize a substantial improvement in quality, reliability and timeliness of our deliveries. Through the quantitative analyses, it was possible identify a positive growth in homologation efficiency of 6% after adoption of the process. In addition, we performed a qualitative analysis from the collected data through an online questionnaire. In particular, results show that association between failure reduction and review process adoption provides the most quality that has a positive effect on project milestones. We hope this report can be helpful to other companies and the scientific community to improve their process thereby increasing competitive advantages.

Reducing Later Life Loneliness: A Systematic Literature Review of Loneliness Interventions

Later life loneliness is a social issue that is increasing alongside an upward global population trend. As a society, one way that we have responded to this social challenge is through developing non-pharmacological interventions such as befriending services, activity clubs, meet-ups, etc. Through a systematic literature review, this paper suggests that currently there is an underrepresentation of radical innovation, and underutilization of digital technologies in developing loneliness interventions for older adults. This paper examines intervention studies that were published in English language, within peer reviewed journals between January 2005 and December 2014 across 4 electronic databases. In addition to academic databases, interventions found in grey literature in the form of websites, blogs, and Twitter were also included in the overall review. This approach yielded 129 interventions that were included in the study. A systematic approach allowed the minimization of any bias dictating the selection of interventions to study. A coding strategy based on a pattern analysis approach was devised to be able to compare and contrast the loneliness interventions. Firstly, interventions were categorized on the basis of their objective to identify whether they were preventative, supportive, or remedial in nature. Secondly, depending on their scope, they were categorized as one-to-one, community-based, or group based. It was also ascertained whether interventions represented an improvement, an incremental innovation, a major advance or a radical departure, in comparison to the most basic form of a loneliness intervention. Finally, interventions were also assessed on the basis of the extent to which they utilized digital technologies. Individual visualizations representing the four levels of coding were created for each intervention, followed by an aggregated visual to facilitate analysis. To keep the inquiry within scope and to present a coherent view of the findings, the analysis was primarily concerned the level of innovation, and the use of digital technologies. This analysis highlights a weak but positive correlation between the level of innovation and the use of digital technologies in designing and deploying loneliness interventions, and also emphasizes how certain existing interventions could be tweaked to enable their migration from representing incremental innovation to radical innovation for example. This analysis also points out the value of including grey literature, especially from Twitter, in systematic literature reviews to get a contemporary view of latest work in the area under investigation.

The Application of Action Research to Integrate the Innovation in Learning Experience in a Design Course

This case study used the action research concept as a tool to integrate the innovation in a learning experience on a design course. The action research was investigated at Prince Sultan University, College of Engineering in the Interior Design and Architecture Department in January 2015, through the Higher Education Academy program. The action research was presented first with the definition of the research, leading to how it was used and how solutions were found. It concluded by showing that once the action research application in interior design and architecture were studied it was an effective tool to improve student’s learning, develop their practice in design courses, and it discussed the negative and positive issues that were encountered.

A Framework for Ranking Quality of Information on Weblog

The vast amount of information on the World Wide Web is created and published by many different types of providers. Unlike books and journals, most of this information is not subject to editing or peer review by experts. This lack of quality control and the explosion of web sites make the task of finding quality information on the web especially critical. Meanwhile new facilities for producing web pages such as Blogs make this issue more significant because Blogs have simple content management tools enabling nonexperts to build easily updatable web diaries or online journals. On the other hand despite a decade of active research in information quality (IQ) there is no framework for measuring information quality on the Blogs yet. This paper presents a novel experimental framework for ranking quality of information on the Weblog. The results of data analysis revealed seven IQ dimensions for the Weblog. For each dimension, variables and related coefficients were calculated so that presented framework is able to assess IQ of Weblogs automatically.

Enhancing Soft Skills through Peer Review Activity in a Technical Writing Class

Peer review is an activity where students review their classmates- writing and then evaluate the content, development, unity and organization. Studies have shown that peer review activities benefit both the reviewer and the writer in developing their reading and writing skills. Furthermore, peer review activities may also enhance students- soft skills. This study was conducted to find out the benefits of peer review activity in a technical writing class based on engineering students- perceptions. The study also highlights how these benefits could improve the students- soft skills. A set of questionnaire was given to 200 undergraduate students of a technical writing course. The results of the study indicate that the activity could help improve their critical thinking skills, written and oral communication skills, as well as team work. This paper further discusses how the implications of these benefits could help enhance students- soft skills.

Collaborative Document Evaluation: An Alternative Approach to Classic Peer Review

Research papers are usually evaluated via peer review. However, peer review has limitations in evaluating research papers. In this paper, Scienstein and the new idea of 'collaborative document evaluation' are presented. Scienstein is a project to evaluate scientific papers collaboratively based on ratings, links, annotations and classifications by the scientific community using the internet. In this paper, critical success factors of collaborative document evaluation are analyzed. That is the scientists- motivation to participate as reviewers, the reviewers- competence and the reviewers- trustworthiness. It is shown that if these factors are ensured, collaborative document evaluation may prove to be a more objective, faster and less resource intensive approach to scientific document evaluation in comparison to the classical peer review process. It is shown that additional advantages exist as collaborative document evaluation supports interdisciplinary work, allows continuous post-publishing quality assessments and enables the implementation of academic recommendation engines. In the long term, it seems possible that collaborative document evaluation will successively substitute peer review and decrease the need for journals.

PRO-Teaching – Sharing Ideas to Develop Capabilities

In this paper, the action research driven design of a context relevant, developmental peer review of teaching model, its implementation strategy and its impact at an Australian university is presented. PRO-Teaching realizes an innovative process that triangulates contemporaneous teaching quality data from a range of stakeholders including students, discipline academics, learning and teaching expert academics, and teacher reflection to create reliable evidence of teaching quality. Data collected over multiple classroom observations allows objective reporting on development differentials in constructive alignment, peer, and student evaluations. Further innovation is realized in the application of this highly structured developmental process to provide summative evidence of sufficient validity to support claims for professional advancement and learning and teaching awards. Design decision points and contextual triggers are described within the operating domain. Academics and developers seeking to introduce structured peer review of teaching into their organization will find this paper a useful reference.

How to Modernise the European Competition Network (ECN)

This paper argues that networks, such as the ECN and the American network, are affected by certain small events which are inherent to path dependence and preclude the full evolution towards efficiency. It is advocated that the American network is superior to the ECN in many respects due to its greater flexibility and longer history. This stems in particular from the creation of the American network, which was based on a small number of cases. Such a structure encourages further changes and modifications which are not necessarily radical. The ECN, by contrast, was established by legislative action, which explains its rigid structure and resistance to change. This paper is an attempt to transpose the superiority of the American network on to the ECN. It looks at concepts such as judicial cooperation, harmonisation of procedure, peer review and regulatory impact assessments (RIAs), and dispute resolution procedures.