Search

Maintainability is an important quality attribute of code, and so should be a key learning outcome for software engineering programmes. This raises the question of how to assess this learning outcome. In this practical report we describe how we exploited the code review mechanism provided by GitHub, the “pull request”, to assess students’ understanding of maintainability. It requires a slightly non-standard workflow by the students and a reporting tool to assemble the code review comments in a form suitable for assessment. We give the details of what we learned to make it work that should allow others to conduct similar kinds of assessment.

In New Zealand, there is currently no shared Electronic Health Record (EHR) system integrated between major healthcare organisations, such as hospitals, medical centres, and specialists. Thanks to its characteristics, blockchain technology can be a suitable platform for building a large-scale EHR system for New Zealand. In this paper, we present MedBloc, a blockchain-based secure EHR system that enables patients and healthcare providers to access and share health records in a usable yet privacy-preserving manner. MedBloc captures a longitudinal view of the patient's health story and enables patients to give or withdraw consent for regulating access to their records. To protect medical data, MedBloc uses an encryption mechanism and enforces a smart contract based access control mechanism for regulating access. MedBloc not only demonstrates how the blockchain can establish New Zealand's first shared EHR system but it shows how blockchain can potentially disrupt the entire medical technology domain.

Recently, there has been a strong demand for talented ICT (Information and Communication Technology) graduates in the software industry in New Zealand. To meet this demand, in 2015, the government of New Zealand provided funding for three new ICT Graduate Schools. The challenge for the schools was twofold: to provide a qualification for students transitioning into ICT and to prepare those with an ICT education for the workforce. Each of the Schools offer different programmes. We offer two postgraduate programmes for growing talent and knowledge to support the New Zealand's ICT sector. In this paper, we describe our experience with delivering one of the postgraduate programmes, the Postgraduate Certificate in Information Technology. The programme consists of two courses, Programming for Industry and Programming with Web Technologies. The courses focus on providing industry-focused education to students with non-ICT backgrounds for a career in IT. The programme has been running for 2 years and runs over one semester (12 weeks) in a "boot-camp" style, which has proved to be successful. In this paper, we provide an overview of the features of the programme, which incorporates industry-focused activities for building students' knowledge relevant to the software industry. Finally, we discuss key challenges and identify directions for improvement.

This study deals with retailer's ordering policy under dependent delay payments period. Most of the published articles dealing with retailer's inventory model with delay payments independent of cycle time interval. Therefore, this study will be modifi ed above assumption and assumed the delay payments period dependent on the cycle time interval and develop the retailer's inventory model under the total relevant cost for the retailer minimized to fi t practical situations. In addition, we use a diff erent approach to obtain the retailer's optimal ordering decision based on simple cost comparison not by derivatives. Finally, numerical examples are provided to illustrate the proposed model and obtain some managerial insights.

Textual entailment in Chinese differs from the way handling English because of the lack of word delimiters and capitalization. Information from word segmentation and Wikipedia often plays an important role in textual entailment recognition. However, the inconsistency of boundaries of word segmentation and matched Wikipedia titles should be resolved first. This paper proposed 4 ways to incorporate Wikipedia title matching and word segmentation, experimented in several feature combinations. The best system redoes word segmentation after matching Wikipedia titles. The best feature combination for BC task uses content words and Wikipedia titles only, which achieves a macro-average F-measure of 67.33% and an accuracy of 68.9%. The best MC RITE system also achieves a macro-average F-measure of 46.11% and an accuracy of 58.34%. They beat all the runs in NTCIR-10 RITE-2 CT tasks.

There are diverse stakeholders for requirements documents in many development environments, and yet these requirements documents should be presented in such a way that all stakeholders will be able to engage them successfully. In order to produce effective requirements documents, analysts need guidance when developing new documents. They also need a convenient and accurate way to evaluate the effectiveness of existing documents. We have been exploring whether our three-factor measurement of document “transparency” would be useful in these ways. Our experimental results, presented in this article, support the hypothesis that transparency can be usefully characterised by accessibility, understandability, and relevance.

We proposed a definition of transparency in software development to improve communication among stakeholders. The notion of transparency is important, because it enables stakeholders to identify and understand the information exchanged during communication. We designed a survey to gather evidence to support or refute our beliefs about transparency in software development. We discovered a superiority bias in our respondents when answering questions regarding communication problems. In this paper, we present our survey design and preliminary results of our survey.