Software process improvement (SPI) is a widely recognized approach that software companies implement to improve quality, productivity, and time-to-market. Assessing and analyzing performance improvements are important SPI activities. However, many SPI managers have found it difficult to develop and implement effective performance measurement programs for SPI, in part because guidelines for cond...

BACKGROUND The surgeon's individual performance is a key component of total quality management (TQM) in cardiac surgery. Early mortality as well as postoperative complications can be stratified in order to develop a surgeon performance index (SPI). MATERIAL AND METHODS In three consecutive annual periods (3703 patients) data of board-certified cardiac surgeons were compared. Risk-adjustment o...

When starting the software process improvement (SPI) journey, there are many SPI standards toselect from. Selecting good SPI standards can be a technical problem, from a software engineeringpoint of view, but it can also be a political problem, some standards fitting more with internal politicalagendas than others. As it is well-known that SPI without management commitment can have<...

BACKGROUND Previous reports suggest that beneficial effects of soy on bone quality are due to the estrogenic actions of isoflavone phytochemicals associated with the protein. However, mechanistic studies comparing the effects of soy diet and estrogens on bone, particularly in rapidly growing animals are lacking. METHODOLOGY AND PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We studied the effects of short term feeding o...

The spectrometer SPI is one of the main detectors of ESA’s INTEGRAL mission. The instrument offers two interesting and valuable capabilities for the detection of the prompt emission of Gamma-ray bursts. Within a field of view of 16 degrees, SPI is able to localize Gamma-ray bursts with an accuracy of 10 arcmin. The large anticoincidence shield, ACS, consisting of 512 kg of BGO crystals, detects...

Context: Software Process Improvement initiatives have been around for many years with the growing globalisation of software development is making them increasingly important. Objective: The objective of this exploratory research is to gain an in-depth understanding of barriers that can undermine SPI, in the context of Global Software Development, from the perspective of software development pr...

When starting the software process improvement (SPI) journey, there are many SPI standards to select from. Selecting good SPI standards can be a technical problem, from a software engineering point of view, but it can also be a political problem, some standards fitting more with internal political agendas than others. As it is well-known that SPI without management commitment can have disastrou...

Previously it was shown that the Ets proteins, PU.1 and Spi-B, exhibit functional redundancy in B lymphocytes. To investigate the possibility that PU.1 or Spi-B or both share overlapping roles with Ets-1 or Elf-1, PU.1(+/-)Ets-1(-/-), PU.1(+/-)Elf-1(-/-), and Spi-B(-/-)Ets-1(-/-) animals were generated. No blood cell defects were observed in these animals except those previously reported for Et...

Overexpression of the transcription factor Spi-1/PU.1 in mice leads to acute erythroleukemia characterized by a differentiation block at the proerythroblastic stage. In this study, we made use of a new cellular system allowing us to reach graded expression of Spi-1 in preleukemic cells to dissect mechanisms of Spi-1/ PU-1 in erythroleukemogenesis. This system is based on conditional production ...

Acute leukemias are characterized by deregulation of transcriptional networks that control the lineage specificity of gene expression. The aberrant overexpression of the Spi-1/PU.1 transcription factor leads to erythroleukemia. To determine how Spi-1 mechanistically influences the transcriptional program, we combined a ChIP-seq analysis with transcriptional profiling in cells from an erythroleu...