Software process improvement (SPI) has emerged as a critical area for organizations involved in software development. There is now considerable evidence that SPI can provide substantial gains in quality, productivity, and cycle time. Currently, most organizations that embark upon a SPI program tend to use a framework like the Capability Maturity Model for their process improvement. In this arti...

It is difficult to improve software quality by relying on conformance to industry standards by continuously upgrading from one standard or model to another standard or model because this exercise is complicated for some software organizations. ‘Many multinational companies, developed internal standards based on the military standards, and then sought to improve the standard even further as thei...

In his Grundlegung zur Metapbysik de Sitten , Immanuel Kant argues for the necessity of seeing human beings as ends in themselves, rather than as means to other ends: "So act as tc treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only".' This principle has importance in many contexts even in analysing poverty, pro­ gress an'd pl...

the current study aims to examine and identify team performance dimensions and factors in iran’s public organizations. for this purpose, exploratory method was used and data were gathered through quantitative approach. the targeted population consisted of two parts including experts in the field and managers and experts in public organizations in ilam. the sample size included twelve (12) exper...

In this paper, we propose a model to develop robots’ covert perceptual capability using reinforcement learning. Covert perceptual behavior is treated as action selected by a motivational system. We apply this model to vision-based navigation. The goal is to enable a robot to learn road boundary type. Instead of dealing with problems in controlled environments with a low-dimensional state space,...

This study identifies an integrated model of a firm’s sustainable competitive advantages that helps understand how market orientation is related to organization’s advantage. An empirical test the proposed framework utilized data from 312 top management team members or project managers in Korea access and evaluate resource input levels, organizational capabilities, overall environmental contexts...

The main purpose of the present study was to assess the ecological capability of agricultural soils using geographic information system (GIS). This research was conducted during 2014 in Hamedan Province, Iran. A cross-sectional study was conducted mapping the 10 factors of soil characteristics (texture, depth, erosion, and aggregation, percentage of slope, direction of slope, height, soil salin...

This paper presents the objective, design, implementation, execution, and evaluation, of a new learning model focusing on the capability to understand and solve new problems and to answer new questions. This model has inherited ideas from Problem Based Learning, Project Organized Curricula, Double-Loop Learning, Reflection-in-Action, Socratic Leadership, Team Learning, and others. The core comp...