We present an empirical study of the impact of design patterns on quality attributes in the context of software maintenance and evolution. Our first hypothesis verifies software engineering lore: design patterns impact software quality positively. We show that, contrary to popular beliefs, design patterns in practice impact negatively several quality attributes, thus providing concrete evidence...

Using an interpretive case study approach, this chapter describes the data quality problems in two companies: (1) a Multi-Facility Healthcare Medical Group (MHMG), and (2) a Regional Health Insurance Company (RHIS). These two interpretive cases examine two different processes of the healthcare supply chain and their integration with a business intelligence system. Specifically, the issues exami...

In spite of the rich literature on software reliability growth models, it is not always easy to find correct or sufficiently detailed information on these models. As an attempt to improve upon this situation, we present a general documentation structure for software reliability growth models based on best practices from statistics. To illustrate our documentation structure, we sketch the detail...

Many doctors in developing countries provide considerably lower levels of quality to their patients than they have been trained to provide. The gap between best practice and actual performance is difficult to measure for individual doctors who differ in levels of training and experience and who face very different types of patients. We exploit the Hawthorne effect—in which doctors change their ...

Most body sensor networks (BSN) only offer best-effort service delivery, which may compromise the successful operation of emergency healthcare (e-emergency) applications. Due to its real-time nature, e-emergency systems must provide quality of service (QoS) support, in order to provide a pervasive, valuable and fully reliable assistance to patients with risk abnormalities. But what is the real ...

In order to guarantee deadlines of real-time messages, it is necessary to construct connections or realtime channels before the actual transmission of the messages. An increasing number of distributed realtime systems that are related to multimedia and command and control systems require flexible network resource management. Those schemes proposed before couldn’t accept channel construction req...

The importance of information as a resource and competitive factor in today’s society and economy is constantly rising. As a consequence, it becomes necessary for organizations to manage the risks that arise from poor information quality (IQ) in the same way other operational and strategic risks are managed. Information is, however, an unique and intangible resource that requires special method...

This paper introduces a framework for answering questions regarding the conditions on the network load that allow a best-effort network like the Internet to support connections of given duration that require a certain quality of service. Such quality of service is expressed in terms of the percentage of time the bandwidth allocated to a connection may drop below a certain level or the maximum a...

The Internet today offers primarily a best-effort service. Research and technology development efforts are currently underway to allow provisioning of better than besteffort Quality of Service (QoS) assurances. In this article, we develop a spot pricing framework for intradomain expected bandwidth contracts with loss based QoS guarantees. The framework builds on a nonlinear pricing scheme for c...

The paper proposes an admission control scheme based on adaptive bandwidth reservation to provide QOS guarantees for multimedia traffic carried in highspeed wireless cellular networks. The proposed scheme allocates bandwidth to a connection in the cell where the connection request originates and reserves bandwidth in all neighboring cells. It combines admission The proposed scheme adjusts the a...