Change Requests Research Articles

Research and development resources, coopetitive performance and cooperation: The case of standardization in 3GPP, 2004–2013

This study examines the interdependence between research and development (R&D) resources, coopetitive performance, and extent of cooperation in development-related standardization settings that involve network effects. Coopetitive performance is measured as the firm's influence on the change process of standards. Cooperation is measured as the number of firm technology partners in influencing industry technology standards. From a dataset of 152,959 decisions drawn from the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) change request (CR) database for the period 2004–2013, firm influence on the standardization change process is studied by identifying firm involvement in CR decisions. The study supports the hypothesis that R&D resources are associated with coopetitive performance in innovation-related coopetitive settings with network effects. In addition, for firms that have a stronger dependence on the output of cooperative industry technology development, R&D resources are associated with fewer partners when trying to influence industry technology standards.

The Charitable Deduction Games: Are the Laws in Your Favor?

The article considers why the United States only grants a deduction for charitable contributions made to US charities from a historic standpoint and why doing so is problematic in the fight against global ills. The Charitable Deduction Games examines an alternative approach to cross-border giving that is currently spreading throughout the European Union (“EU”) as a result of the 2009 landmark case Hein Persche v. Finanzamt Ludenscheid. After an examination of Persche, the article explores the UK model that has resulted in response to the decision and considers why the US should adopt a similar model. Next, the article considers why the Netherlands has been reluctant to adopt a similar model in light of its historic stance. Finally, The Charitable Deduction Games examines the responses of various EU Member States to Persche and concludes with a proposal of how Persche should affect US laws governing cross-border giving.  Associate Professor of Law, Pepperdine University School of Law, J.D. cum laude, Harvard Law School, 2003; A.B. Harvard College, magna cum laude. 70 COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF TAX LAW [Vol.5:69 INTRODUCTION 71 I. THE NOTION OF TERRITORIALITY: DEFINED, HISTORICALLY EXAMINED, AND FOUND WANTING 72 US – Current Notion of Territoriality 72 US – History of the Notion of Territoriality 73 1. Implementation as Justification 76 2. Inconsistency with Other Charitable Giving Provisions 77 a. Estate Tax and Gift Tax Deduction 77 b. Donations by Non-Charitable Domestic Trusts 77 c. Treaties in Force 78 d. Treaties Not in Force 79 II. WHY THE NOTION OF TERRITORIALITY IS PROBLEMATIC 80 Practical Standpoint 80 Ideological Standpoint 82 Implementation Issues 83 1. Looking to Prior Solutions 84 2. IRS Approved Lists 85 III. EUROPEAN MODEL 86 Persche – The Impetus for Change in the UK & other EU Member States .........86 Drawbacks of Persche 89 I.V. UK MODEL NEW NOTIONS IN LIGHT OF PERSCHE 90 UK History of Territoriality 90 Current UK Law 91 If the UK Did it, the US Should 93 V. THE NETHERLANDS – STARTING EARLY BUT FINISHING LATE IN THE CROSS-BORDER GAME 94 Current Law in the Netherlands 94 Request for Change 95 Historical Reasons for the Notion in the Netherlands 96 Falling Behind the Giving Times 97 VI. WAKE AFTER PERSCHE WITHIN THE EU 97 CONCLUSION 98 2013] THE CHARITABLE DEDUCTION GAMES: 71 ARE THE LAWS IN YOUR FAVOR?

AO Patient Outcomes Center: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Software Application for the Collection of Patient-Reported Outcome Measures in Orthopedic Outpatient Clinics.

BackgroundPatient-reported outcomes are increasingly utilized in routine orthopedic clinical care. Computer adaptive tests (CATs) from the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) offer a brief and precise assessment that is well suited for collection within busy clinical environments. However, software apps that support the administration and scoring of CATs, provide immediate access to patient-reported outcome (PRO) scores, and minimize clinician burden are not widely available.ObjectiveOur objective was to design, implement, and test the feasibility and usability of a Web-based system for collecting CATs in orthopedic clinics.MethodsAO Patient Outcomes Center (AOPOC) was subjected to 2 rounds of testing. Alpha testing was conducted in 3 orthopedic clinics to evaluate ease of use and feasibility of integration in clinics. Patients completed an assessment of PROMIS CATs and a usability survey. Clinicians participated in a brief semistructured interview. Beta-phase testing evaluated system performance through load testing and usability of the updated version of AOPOC. In both rounds of testing, user satisfaction, bugs, change requests, and performance of PROMIS CATs were captured.ResultsPatient feedback supported the ease of use in completing an assessment in AOPOC. Across both phases of testing, clinicians rated AOPOC as easy to use but noted difficulties in integrating a Web-based software application within their clinics. PROMIS CATs performed well; the default assessment of 2 CATs was completed quickly (mean 9.5 items) with a satisfactory range of measurement.ConclusionAOPOC was demonstrated to be an easy-to-learn and easy-to-use software application for patients and clinicians that can be integrated into orthopedic clinical care. The workflow disruption in integrating any type of PRO collection must be addressed if patients’ voices are to be better integrated in clinical care.

A multilevel neo-institutional analysis of infection prevention and control in English hospitals: coerced safety culture change?

Despite committed policy, regulative and professional efforts on healthcare safety, little is known about how such macro-interventions permeate organisations and shape culture over time. Informed by neo-institutional theory, we examined how inter-organisational influences shaped safety practices and inter-subjective meanings following efforts for coerced culture change. We traced macro-influences from 2000 to 2015 in infection prevention and control (IPC). Safety perceptions and meanings were inductively analysed from 130 in-depth qualitative interviews with senior- and middle-level managers from 30 English hospitals. A total of 869 institutional interventions were identified; 69% had a regulative component. In this context of forced implementation of safety practices, staff experienced inherent tensions concerning the scope of safety, their ability to be open and prioritisation of external mandates over local need. These tensions stemmed from conflicts among three co-existing institutional logics prevalent in the NHS. In response to requests for change, staff flexibly drew from a repertoire of cognitive, material and symbolic resources within and outside their organisations. They crafted 'strategies of action', guided by a situated assessment of first-hand practice experiences complementing collective evaluations of interventions such as 'pragmatic', 'sensible' and also 'legitimate'. Macro-institutional forces exerted influence either directly on individuals or indirectly by enriching the organisational cultural repertoire.

Communication that is maladaptive for middle-class couples is adaptive for socioeconomically disadvantaged couples.

Demands for change in a relationship, particularly when met by behavioral withdrawal, foreshadow declines in relationship satisfaction. Yet demands can give partners opportunities to voice concerns, and withdrawal can serve to de-escalate conflict, stabilizing satisfaction instead (e.g., Overall, Fletcher, Simpson, & Sibley, 2009). We aim to reconcile these competing possibilities by arguing that withdrawal in response to requests for change will be detrimental among couples who possess the social, educational, and economic capital needed to address these requests, whereas withdrawal in response to partner demands will be constructive among couples with fewer resources for making the requested changes. Study 1 (N = 515 couples; 18-month follow-up) replicates the harmful effects of observed demand/withdraw communication on changes in wives' satisfaction among relatively affluent couples, while documenting benefits of demand/withdraw communication among relatively disadvantaged couples. Using 4 waves of observational data, Study 2 (N = 431 couples; 9-, 18- and 27-month follow-ups) shows that socioeconomic risk moderates the covariation between the demand/withdraw pattern and wives' relationship satisfaction, with higher levels of withdrawal again proving to be beneficial when socioeconomic risk is high. In both studies, behavioral withdrawal by men appears to be maladaptive when couples have resources and capacities to enact desired changes, but may be adaptive when those resources and capacities are lacking. Efforts to change couple communication without appreciating the larger social and economic contexts of those behaviors may be counterproductive. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

An Interaction-Aware Lane Change Behavior Planner for Automated Vehicles on Highways Based on Polygon Clipping

This letter presents automated driving using polygon clipping (A-D-PolyC), a novel framework for lane change behavior planning of automated vehicles on highways. It assumes that a mission planning layer generates lane change requests. In crowded traffic scenes, various variants for the lane change execution arise. The developed algorithm identifies the maneuver variants deterministically and in bounded runtime using polygon clipping in spatiotemporal domain. The variants are represented using a graph that captures the scene topology. Afterward, it efficiently samples optimal lateral and longitudinal trajectories with regard to vehicle dynamics. The satisfaction of hard constraints is checked. Finally, a scene prediction is conducted for a subset of the sampled trajectories. In comparison with most state of the art approaches, the framework accounts for traffic interaction and collects meaningful features. A novel measure based on generalized kinetic energies for the impact of a maneuver execution on the whole traffic scene is introduced. A-D-PolyC is a hierarchical, holistic, modular, and parallelizable concept that can be coupled with different scene prediction engines and lower-level local trajectory planners. The performance of A-D-PolyC is statistically evaluated using randomized simulation runs and compared to a state of the art approach.

The Role of Integrated Change Control in Project Success within the Telecommunication Industry in Uganda: A case of Airtel Networks LTD, Uganda

The purpose of this research study was to investigate the role of integrated change control in project success within the telecommunication industry in Uganda. Integrated change control allows for documentation of all the requested, approved or rejected changes to the project with an aim of reducing project risks, cost and time without having to consider the overall project objective plans. The target population for this study was the technical staff within IT department, change management team involved in implementing and configuring changes and the management team involved in approving or rejecting changes in Airtel Networks LTD Uganda. The study concluded that, change readiness, communication change plans, change management execution, trainings and change documentation availability and feedback elicitation from all relevant stakeholders play a bigger role in the level of project change success. It was noted further that it is necessary to have a unified change management process that incorporates an integrated change control section comprised of Change board that sits down to review, analyze, approve, reject or return change requests raised by different stakeholders of the organization at any point in time. The study recommended that Airtel Networks LTD Uganda continuously engages in the Change management process with emphasis on integrated change control to exploit fully its internal resources in the strategy implementation process while remaining relevant not only to its own operations but also to the ever-changing environmental dynamics in the telecommunication industry.

Towards functional change decision support based on COSMIC FSM method

Abstract Context: Managing requirements change is a central issue in the software development industry. In fact, inappropriate decisions about a change request may jeopardize the project development progress by going over budget/time or delivering a software with functional requirements that do not fully meet the user’s needs. Hence, a change decision support is required for the success of the software development. Objective: This paper has a three-fold objective: (i) explore the applicability of the ISO standard COSMIC FSM method to evaluate a change request; (ii) investigate the use of estimation models to predict the effort required to handle a functional change and its impact on the initially estimated software development effort; and (iii) propose a decision support method that offers the appropriate information for the change advisory board members to decide whether to accept, deny or defer a functional change request. Method: To guide the decision on a change request, the method proposed in this paper accounts for the most important factors when evaluating a change request, namely the functional change status, the preference of the change requester, and the effort required to handle the change. The functional change status is identified based on the sensitivity of the changed functionality and the functional size of the functional change. The functional change effort can be estimated using several ways including the COCOMO II model, the Simple Linear Regression Model and expert judgment. Furthermore, this paper proposes a prototype to determine automatically the functional change status and offers pertinent information that the change advisory board can use to determine how to handle a change request. The use of the decision support method and tool is illustrated through three case studies. Results: A decision support method to help decision-makers respond to a functional change request is provided. This method takes into account the functional change status, the preference of the change requester and the functional change effort. The empirical evaluation of the proposed method is illustrated through three case studies. The role of experiments here is primarily to provide a proof-of-concept rather than an exhaustive evaluation. Conclusion: Using COSMIC FSM method, it is possible to identify functional changes leading to a potential impact on the software development progress. Based on the evaluation of the functional change, the change advisory board members can make judicious decisions about whether to accept, defer or deny a functional change request.

Authoritarian populism in rural Belarus: distinction, commonalities, and projected finale

ABSTRACTThe paper inspects how agrarian debates apply to rural Belarus. Following the ‘persistence versus disappearance’ debate, it finds the moral economy alongside request for change. Pursuing the ‘adaptation versus resistance’ debate, it spots adaptability and exclusion of those failing to adapt. Here ‘lukascism’ surfaces resting on constructing the ‘other’. A rare case of agrarian populism employed by top authority, lukascism is otherwise humdrum. Proclaiming some principles of the moral economy while disregarding others, inconsistent lukascism undercuts the ‘coexistence scenario’ of households with large-scale farming. Change avoidance is a commonplace foretelling lukascism’s finale: its appeal is limited by the older generation..

Analysis of transient thermal sensation for “overheating” and “subcooling” conditions in a room

Thermal comfort is a very important issue for the design of HVAC systems. The aspects of thermal comfort are also significant in the operation of the heating/cooling systems in rooms. Many investigations studied the stationary boundary conditions, while transient conditions were not in focus. Therefore, this paper describes measurements carried out in a climate room under transient conditions. After an introduction, the second part of this paper gives an overview about the experimental setup and the methodology of the dynamic investigations. The third part describes the main results of the analyzes. The fourth part includes a discussion of these results and the contribution to potential regulation systems and further investigations. As a result of these analysis, it can be stated, that the individual comfort temperature as set by the user is mostly (operative room temperature). With regard to the dynamic behavior, it must be concluded that most subjects accept a room temperature increase of without directly expressing a change request. When the operative temperature falls below the individual comfort temperature, the desire for an increase in the operative temperature is immediately expressed, even in the case of small deviations. The paper ends with a summary of the results.

Opportunity discovery in initiated and emergent change requests

When a change request is raised in an engineering project anad hocteam often forms to manage the request. Prior research shows that practitioners often view engineering changes in a risk-averse manner. As a project progresses the cost of changes increases. Therefore, avoiding changes is reasonable. However, a risk-averse perspective fails to recognize that changes might harbor discoverable and exploitable opportunities. In this research, we investigated how practitioners ofad hocteams used practices and praxes aimed at discovering and exploiting opportunities in engineering change requests. A single case study design was employed using change request records and practitioner interviews from an engineering project. 87 engineering change requests were analyzed with regards to change triggers, time-to-decision and rejection rate. In total, 25 opportunities were discovered and then 17 exploited. Three practices and six praxes were identified, used by practitioners to discover and exploit opportunities. Our findings emphasize the importance of the informal structure ofad hocteams, to aid in opportunity discovery. The informal structure enables cross-hierarchal discussions and draws on the proven experience of the team members. Thus, this research guides project managers and presumptivead hocteams in turning engineering changes into successful opportunities.

Design model for the cost calculation of product-service systems in single and small series production

Due to increasingly specific customer requirements, complex value-added processes and services characterize the single and small series production. A low degree of automation and insufficient knowledge management complicate the efficient accomplishment of projects, especially for the transparent calculation of new offers and change requests. The dissemination of product-service systems causes the additional challenge of calculating intangible services accurately. Innovative information and communication technologies (ICT) offer new potential for effective and efficient design of the calculation process. The availability of data along the entire product lifecycle, especially during the design phase, increases the transparency and allows the identification of interdependencies as well as prognosis possibilities. However, current calculation models only insufficiently consider the use of ICT. The solution presented in this paper considers the development of a design model for the holistic calculation of product-service systems in single and small series production that integrates and processes all cost-relevant data, both internally and externally. In order to filter important information, it includes the usage of suitable data analysis and enables a continuous learning process as well as sustainable knowledge management along the entire calculation process.

A Preventive Approach for Consistent OWL 2 DL Ontology Versions

Knowledge is continually changing over time. As such, semantic modelling knowledge formalisms, such as ontologies, must follow this evolution and change accordingly. However, ontology changes should never affect consistency. An ontology needs to remain in a consistent state along the whole ontology engineering process. In the literature, most of the approaches check/repair ontology inconsistencies in an a posteriori manner. This costs time and resources. In this article, an inconsistency prevention approach is proposed. It relies on OWL 2 DL change kits, which anticipate inconsistencies upon each change request. The proposed approach predicts potential inconsistencies, provides an a priori repair action, and applies the required changes. Consistency rules are defined and used to check logical inconsistencies, but also syntactical invalidities or style issues. A protégé extension is implemented to validate the proposal.

Fuzzy Delphi Method for Evaluating HyTEE Model (Hybrid Software Change Management Tool with Test Effort Estimation)

When changes are made to a software system during development and maintenance, they need to be tested again i.e. regression test to ensure that changes behave as intended and have not impacted the software quality. This research will produce an automated tool that can help the software manager or a maintainer to search for the coverage artifact before and after a change request. Software quality engineer can determine the test coverage from new changes which can support cost estimation, effort, and schedule estimation. Therefore, this study is intended to look at the views and consensus of the experts on the elements in the proposed model by benefitting the Fuzzy Delphi Method. Through purposive sampling, a total of 12 experts from academic and industrial have participated in the verification of items through 5-point linguistic scales of the questionnaire instrument. Outcome studies show 90% of elements in the proposed model consists of change management, traceability support, test effort estimation support, regression testing support, report and GUI meet, the value threshold (d construct) is less than 0.2 and the percentage of the expert group is above 75%. It is shown that elements of all the items contained in the venue are needed in the HyTEE Model (Hybrid Software Change Management Tool with Test Effort Estimation) based on the consensus of experts.

Multilevel Ontology Framework for Improving Requirements Change Management in Global Software Development

Requirements engineering is one of the most important pillars of software engineering. Its success contributes greatly to that of the software as a whole. In fact, the software development process is not devoid from changing requirements, which affects the cost, time, and quality of the final software. The change problem is unavoidable and also swells when the development of the software is made globally. Therefore, there is a need to improve the quality of requirements change management (RCM), especially in global software development (GSD) environments. Our research hypothesis is that the RCM is naturally a knowledge-intensive process that can benefit substantially from ontology. Indeed, we assume that using a multilevel ontology framework will greatly support RCM in GSD environments by ensuring the semantic correctness of the requirement change request and accordingly solving miscommunication and misunderstanding problems. The framework was successfully evaluated using a questionnaire and a case study. The results indicate that using the proposed framework can intensely improve the semantic correctness of requirement change requests. Accordingly, the entire RCM process is then improved by increasing the reliability of the change and reducing the time consumed for dealing with semantically wrong change requests.

An intelligent order allocation system for effective order fulfilment under changing customer demand

In today's intense global competition, problems still exist under the umbrella of Just-in-Time application in the field of order management. The management of a firm usually faces difficulty in allocating stock to fulfil customer order, especially in the case of receiving a sudden change request from customers. In order to ease order allocation issues aroused by JIT, an intelligent system, namely, Intelligent Sales Order Handling System (ISOAS), is developed through the integration of fuzzy-AHP approach for decision making process in order allocation. This approach enables the selection of desired sales orders based on multiple criteria which may be quantitative or qualitative in nature, according to the judgment of scholars and domain experts. With ISOAS, customer orders are prioritized with respect to the values according to their performance under each decision making attributes. The degree of confidence of the decision judgements are quantified through the spread of fuzzy numbers with fuzzy pairwise comparison calculations. The approach can transform the fuzziness of human preference into the measurable number, enabling the operation of the AI-based system to assist humans in decision-making. An order allocation case study in a logistics department is demonstrated in this study. Results indicate an improved efficiency during the decision making process.

Lições Aprendidas Baseadas em Mudanças em Projetos e seus Impactos na Aprendizagem Organizacional: Survey com Gerentes de Projetos

As mudanças em projetos são comuns e podem ser percebidas como benéficas e fontes de lições valiosas, ou como prejudiciais e problemáticas. Com o objetivo de avaliar em que medida ocorre o aproveitamento das lições aprendidas baseadas em mudanças em projetos na aprendizagem organizacional, foram utilizados métodos quantitativos como mapeamento bibliométrico, aplicação de survey e modelagem de equações estruturais. A pesquisa quantitativa contou com 139 respondentes de 11 países que colaboraram para a elaboração de um conjunto de recomendações que possuem estatisticamente potencial de influenciar de forma positiva a aprendizagem organizacional. Constatou-se que o aproveitamento das lições aprendidas na aprendizagem organizacional é incipiente. Adicionalmente, constatou-se que as ferramentas “solicitação de mudança no projeto” e “gestão da mudança” produzem impactos positivos na geração de lições aprendidas, bem como no registro de novos conhecimentos e práticas, mas que a “gestão da mudança” influencia timidamente a aprendizagem organizacional. Releva-se o desafio da institucionalização de novos papeis para a “solicitação de mudança do projeto” como uma ferramenta de solução de problemas e geração de conhecimentos.

Nearing final design of the ITER EC H&CD Upper Launcher

The ITER ECRH system consists of 24 gyrotrons with up to 24 MW installed millimeter wave heating power at 170 GHz, power supplies, control system, transmission lines, one Equatorial and the four Upper Launchers. With its high frequency and small beam focus the ECRH has the unique capability of driving locally current. While the Equatorial Launcher mainly acts for central heating and current profile shaping, the Upper Launchers aim on suppressing MHD instabilities, especially neoclassical tearing modes (NTM) triggering plasma disruptions. The Upper Launchers inject millimeter waves through a quasi-optical section consisting of three fixed and the front steering mirror set. The eight overlapping beams have focal points optimized for suppression of the q = 3/2 and q = 2/1 NTMs.Several project change requests required the redesign of the Upper Launchers and the connected ex-vessel system. This redesign includes a new boundary geometry of the launchers as well as a newly designed cooling system for the Blanket Shield Module (BSM), a modified flange of the BSM to the structural main frame and a refined optical design. Additionally shield blocks with integrated in-vessel waveguides were added and the closure plate with waveguide and supply line feedthroughs was adapted. Further changes, not all caused by PCRs, include newly designed ex-vessel waveguide components with a reduced aperture and redesigned ultra low-loss CVD diamond windows. Finally several components originally foreseen as off-the-shelf components have become part of the design scope. The new launcher design status is presented with selected results on numerical design validation.

Revisiting the Performance Evaluation of Automated Approaches for the Retrieval of Duplicate Issue Reports

Issue tracking systems (ITSs), such as Bugzilla, are commonly used to track reported bugs, improvements and change requests for a software project. To avoid wasting developer resources on previously-reported (i.e., duplicate) issues, it is necessary to identify such duplicates as soon as they are reported. Several automated approaches have been proposed for retrieving duplicate reports, i.e., identifying the duplicate of a new issue report in a list of $n$ candidates. These approaches rely on leveraging the textual, categorical, and contextual information in previously-reported issues to decide whether a newly-reported issue has previously been reported. In general, these approaches are evaluated using data that spans a relatively short period of time (i.e., the classical evaluation). However, in this paper, we show that the classical evaluation tends to overestimate the performance of automated approaches for retrieving duplicate issue reports. Instead, we propose a realistic evaluation using all the reports that are available in the ITS of a software project. We conduct experiments in which we evaluate two popular approaches for retrieving duplicate issues (BM25F and REP) using the classical and realistic evaluations. We find that for the issue tracking data of the Mozilla foundation, the Eclipse foundation and OpenOffice, the realistic evaluation shows that previously proposed approaches perform considerably lower than previously reported using the classical evaluation. As a result, we conclude that the reported performance of approaches for retrieving duplicate issue reports is significantly overestimated in literature. In order to improve the performance of the automated retrieval of duplicate issue reports, we propose to leverage the resolution field of issue reports. Our experiments show that a relative improvement in the performance of a median of 7-21.5 percent and a maximum of 19-60 percent can be achieved by leveraging the resolution field of issue reports for the automated retrieval of duplicates.

A NOVEL EFFORT ESTIMATION MODEL FOR SOFTWARE REQUIREMENT CHANGES DURING SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PHASE

Software Requirements Changes is a typical phenomenon in any software development project. Restricting incoming changes might cause user dissatisfaction and allowing too many changes might cause delay in project delivery. Moreover, the acceptance or rejection of the change requests become challenging for software project managers when these changes are occurred in Software Development Phase. Where in Software Development Phase software artifacts are not in consistent state such as: some of the class artifacts are Fully Developed, some are Half Developed, some are Major Developed, some are Minor Developed and some are Not Developed yet. However, software effort estimation and change impact analysis are the two most common techniques which might help software project managers in accepting or rejecting change requests during Software Development Phase. The aim of this research is to develop a new software change effort estimation model which helps software project manager in estimating the effort for software Requirement Changes during Software Development Phase. Thus, this research has analyzed the existing effort estimation models and change impact analysis techniques for Softwrae Development Phase from the literature and proposed a new software change effort estimation model by combining change impact analysis technique with effort estimation model. Later, the new proposed model has been evaluated by selecting four small size software projects as case selections in applying experimental approch. The experiment results show that the overall Mean Magnitude Relative Error value produced by the new proposed model is under 25%. Hence it is concluded that the new proposed model is applicable in estimating the amount of effort for requirement changes during SDP.