GQM+Strategies is an approach that aligns the business goals at each level of an organization to strategies to achieve overall business goals and assesses the achievement of such goals. Strategies are extracted from business goals based on rationales (contexts and assumptions). Using the proposed approach, which refines the GQM+Strategies model by extracting rationales based on the analysis of ...

The maximum possible throughput (or the rate of job completion) a multi-server system is typically sum service rates individual servers. Recent work shows that launching multiple replicas and canceling them as soon one copy finishes can boost throughput, especially when time distribution has high variability. This means redundancy can, in fact, create synergy among servers such their overall gr...

To achieve overall business goals, GQM+Strategies® is an approach that aligns the business goals at each level of an organization to strategies and assesses the achievement of goals. Strategies derived from business goals are based on rationales (context factors and assumptions). Because extracting all rationales is an important process in the GQM+Strategies approach, we propose Context-Assumpt...

Conservation tillage (CT) systems have a number of potential benefits including lower crop production costs and the ability to reduce soil erosion that have made them common in several regions of the world. Although CT systems have been researched and successfully implemented on some farms in California's San Joaquin Valley (SJV), overall adoption is low and the reasons for the region's compara...

Learners sometimes have incoherent and fragmented intuitive prior knowledge that is (partly) "incompatible" with the to-be-learned contents. Such knowledge in pieces can cause conceptual disorientation and cognitive overload while learning. We hypothesized that a pre-training intervention providing a generalized schema as a structuring framework for such knowledge in pieces would support (re)or...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study is to investigate the pursuit of achievement goals in medical students and to assess the relationship between achievement goals, learning strategy, and motivation. METHODS Two hundred seventy freshman and sophomore premedical students and sophomore medical school students participated in this study, which used the Achievement Goals Scale and the Self-Regulate...

Adopting classic redundancy-based fault-tolerant schemes in highly dynamic distributed computing systems does not necessarily result in the anticipated improvement in dependability. This primarily stems from statically predefined redundancy configurations employed within many classic dependability strategies, which as well known may negatively impact the schemes' overall effectiveness. In this ...

Redundancy allocation is one of the common techniques to increase the reliability of the bridge systems. Many studies on the general redundancy allocation problems assume that the redundancy strategy for each subsystem is predetermined and fixed. In general, active redundancy has received more attention in the past. However, in real world, a particular system design contains both active and col...