Fat hardness/softness directly affects efficiency of processing and fat also contributes to the desirable eating attributes of meat. In terms of meat quality, fat quality attributes of colour, hardness and texture are important for certain markets. The quality of fat can markedly affect the carcase value at the wholesale level—particularly that for the Japanese market, which prefers soft white ...

Software quality is evolving beyond static measurement to a wider scope of quality definition. Previous studies have indicated the importance of human aspect in software quality. But software quality models have not included comprehensively this aspect together with the behavioural aspect of the quality. This research has proposed a Pragmatic Quality Factors (or PQF) as a software quality measu...

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...

We address the fundamental question: what does it mean for data in a database to be of high quality? We motivate our discussion with examples, where traditional views on data quality are found to be unsatisfactory. Our work is founded on the premise that data values are primarily linguistic signs that convey meaning from their producer to their user through senses and referents. In this setting...

Cell and gene-based therapies represent a novel therapeutic modality that has the potential to provide a treatment option for a range of medical conditions. There are, however, numerous processing and manufacturing challenges that must be addressed before such therapies are considered commercially and clinically viable. A significant challenge associated with the manufacture of such therapies i...

Developers and designers always strive for quality software. Quality software tends to be robust, reliable and easy to maintain, and thus reduces the cost of software development and maintenance. Several methods have been applied to improve software quality. Refactoring is one of those methods. The goal of this paper is to validate/invalidate the claims that refactoring improves software qualit...

This study provides deeper insight in the link between service quality and customer satisfaction. The traditional assumption of a linear relationship is challenged by exploring asymmetries and dynamics. The simultaneous influence of service quality and customer experience on satisfaction is examined by means of nonlinear structural equation modeling. Results show that functional-utilitarian qua...

The process of producing microarray data involves multiple steps, some of which may suffer from technical problems and seriously damage the quality of the data. Thus, it is essential to identify those arrays with low quality. Our Mahalanobis Distance Quality Control (MDQC) is a multivariate quality assessment method for microarrays that is based on the similarity of quality measures across arra...

Software quality is a complex concept containing a large number of quality criteria. These quality criteria are usually interactive where preference outcome of one criterion over another criterion is always influenced by the remaining criteria. However, to avoid complexity researchers always tend to construct independent criteria which causing some bias effect in evaluation. This paper presents...

To sustain the qualities of a software system during evolution, and to adapt the quality attributes as the requirements evolve, it is necessary to have a clear software architecture that is understood by all developers and to which all changes to the system adheres. This software architecture can be created beforehand, but must also be updated as the domain of the software, and hence the requir...