Design Quality

Coupling is considered by many to be an important concept in measuring design quality There is still much to be learned about which aspects of coupling affect design quality or other external attributes of software. Much of the existing work concentrates on direct coupling, that is, forms of coupling that exists between entities that are directly related to each other. A form of coupling that has so far received little attention is indirect coupling, that is, coupling between entities that are not directly related. What little discussion there is in the literature suggests that any form of indirect coupling is simple the transitive closure of a form of direct coupling. We demonstrate that this is not the case, that there are forms of indirect coupling that cannot be represented in this way and suggest ways to measure it. We present a tool that identifies a particular form of indirect coupling that is integrated in the Eclipse IDE.

The 3-D electrostatic particle/field simulation code SPIRAL is used to trace electron trajectories through a 180° bend in a spiral-line induction accelerator. Two specific issues were addressed. First, the vertical field coils were tested for their design quality by tracking single-particle orbits through the fields resulting from the coils. One important point was that the field index was relatively constant to about 3 cm from the reference orbit position, which indicated that the cosine φ coil positioning was well designed. Another point was that the proper placement of the vertical field terminations significantly reduces beam disruption as the beam traverses the transition into the vertical coils. The second issue addressed was that of the effect of stellarator fields on beam quality due to energy mismatch. It was found that the beam was not seriously degraded by an energy mismatch of up to 10%, and that the beam centroid motion due to the mismatch was tolerable

Design quality is an elusive counterpart in achieving successful outcomes in architecture. Design guidelines are a mechanism that are used to influence those outcomes, yet not utilised to their full capacity in contributing to design quality. This thesis is a study on finding parameters for improving design quality for new medium density residential subdivisions in New Zealand. This is achieved firstly by studying the theoretical definition of design quality, secondly by analysing a select number of existing design guidelines and their outcomes, thirdly by attempting to apply the precedent findings to a real-world development site and lastly by re-writing a set of existing design guidelines for the project site to implement the findings of the thesis.

The objective is to discover a method to guide design quality. The design project is used as a methodology to arrive at the outcome of a revised and workable set of design guidelines. It is a means of testing a hypothesis, it has a functional purpose and is only developed to a necessary point of preliminary design for this reason: the design project is not the main thesis outcome, it is a means to the thesis goal of determining effective design guidelines for the project site.

The main findings of the thesis have resulted in five outcomes, i) to provide a theoretical premise for understanding and determining design quality, ii) to outline an overview of the parameters that make existing design guidelines successful in creating design quality, iii) to develop a workable design proposition for an existing development site to use as an example, iv) re-writing a set of existing design guidelines for the proposed site to incorporate the findings of the precedent review and design proposition, and v) establishing that design itself is essential toward the development and assurance of design quality in design guidelines. It is hoped that this thesis will offer a contribution to knowledge in the field of architecture, and that with this research, design guidelines can more specifically enhance, protect and create an enduring future of design quality in architecture.

As object-oriented (OO) analysis and design techniques become more widely used, the demand on assessing the quality of OO designs increases substantially. Recently, there has been much research effort devoted to developing and empirically validating metrics for OO design quality. Complexity, coupling, and cohesion have received a considerable interest in the field. Despite the rich body of research and practice in developing design quality metrics, there has been less emphasis on dynamic metrics for OO designs. The ...

The current trend in embedded system design is towards an increasing percentage of the embedded SW development cost of the total embedded system design costs. There is a clear need of reducing SW generation cost while maintaining reliability and design quality. SystemC represents a step forward in ensuring these goals. In this chapter, the application of SystemC to embedded SW generation is discussed. The state of art of the existing techniques for SW generation is analyzed and their advantages and drawbacks presented. In addition, methods for systematic embedded software generation which reduce the software generation cost in a platform based HW/SW co-design methodology for embedded systems based on SystemC is presented. SystemC supports a single-source approach, that is, the use of the same code for system level specification and verification, and, after HW/SW partitioning, for HW/SW co-simulation and embedded SW generation.

With the objective of assisting in the process of designing Civil Engineering and Architecture infrastructure projects, this article presents a research that was carried out in the areas of Production and Mechanics Engineering in order to look for techniques and methodologies for the development of industrial products. Following the analysis of tools, such as Value Engineering (VE) and Quality Function Development (QFD), a methodology for the development of infrastructure conceptual product design has been proposed. The methodology was applied in the design of the Technological Center of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture of University of Passo Fundo. The results have shown that the proposed methodology helps in the development of infrastructure design process, allowing the development of alternative strategies, and provide quantitative elements for the adoption of the product conception suggested by the target users.