Negotiated assessment criteria and peer assessment in software engineering group project work: A case study

The core second level course in Software Engineering for Computer Science students at the University of Kent has, for many years, included a substantial design-and-build group project component. In recent years, this has been enhanced to address a number of issues crucial to students' development as reflective, professional practitioners. These include: . group allocation and formation . appropriate technical and non-technical goal-setting within the context of the taught material. These goals are used both to guide practice and as a basis for assessment. . students' critical evaluation of their own and others' achievements, in the context of moderated self and peer assessment. Although the work is assessed as a group, it has proved possible to account for variations between individuals' efforts using a novel questionnaire based approach initially developed by the University of Exeter. Problems (for both staff and students) in the implementation of these enhancements to the group learning and educational experience are addressed, and identified beneficial solutions are described. The value of this approach is situated firstly in terms of changes to the students' approach to subsequent, less constrained, project work, and secondly against the stated learning outcomes of the project; their improved technical and professional practices

Civil Society Hearing “Whose Partnership for Whose Development?: Corporate Accountability in the UN System beyond the Global Compact”

Peter Utting’s speech to the International Forum on the Social-Science Policy Nexus highlights a number of institutional developments and forms of regulatory policies to promote corporate accountability

A Negotiating Agents Model for the Provision of Flexible Telephony Services

Current telephone systems suffer from a service interface bottleneck problem, wherein network resources are under-utilised and customer requirements are often not met, in spite of these resources' ability to satisfy such requirements. This bottleneck is primarily due to a coarse-grain service interface, coupled with the inability to support arbitrary terminal types, and the inability to inter-operate with other systems. This paper outlines a new model for telephony services, based on the concept of negotiating agents. In this model, functionality is not made available to users in the form of services, as has been the case traditionally. Instead, users specify policies that describe how they wish their calls to be handled. These policies are used to guide agents appointed to act on behalf of users. The paper also describes a prototype that was built to demonstrate the capabilities of the model

Corporate Responsibility and Labour Issues in China: Reflections on a Beijing Conference

Brief notes on some of the issues discussed at a conference in Beijing concerning corporate responsibility and labor issues in China. The discussion centers on whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) can move on from the current experimental phase into a broader system for “regulating” business practices. Further, it reviews the main factors and conditions that encourage or oblige individual companies to engage with the CSR agenda, and that need to be in place if CSR is to be scaled-up

Conference News: Business, Social Policy and Corporate Political Influence in Developing Countries

This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.UNRISD_Conference_BusSocPolCorpPoliInfluence.pdf: 1114 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Regulation

This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.UNRISD_CoportateSocialResponsibilityAndBusinessRegulation_2004.pdf: 4087 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

A Taxonomy of model-based testing

Model-based testing relies on models of a system under test and/or its environment to derive test cases for the system. This paper provides an overview of the field. Seven different dimensions define a taxonomy that allows the characterization of different approaches to model-based testing. It is intended to help with understanding benefits and limitations of model-based testing, understanding the approach used in a particular model-based testing tool, and understanding the issues involved in integrating model-based testing into a software development process. To illustrate the taxonomy, we classify several approaches embedded in existing model-based testing tools

The Global Compact: Why All the Fuss?

Brief article providing an outline of the Global Compact and the polarized opinions of critics and supporters of the nine principles embodied within it. It also discusses the trade-offs and diversions that the compact generates

Improving our fitnesse: From concrete executions to partial specification

Fitnesse and FIT [5] allow systems tests to be written by non-programmers using a Wiki or HTML style of input. However, there is little support for syntactic and semantic checks as the tests are being designed. This paper describes a support tool for designing table-based test cases that gives deep semantic analysis about a set of test cases. It uses a variety of strategies such as pairwise analysis, boundary value analysis and test case subsumption to suggest missing test cases and to generalise concrete tests into more abstract tests. The goal is to interactively improve the quality of test suites during the test design phase

The ODO project: a Case Study in Integration of Multimedia Services

Recent years have witnessed a steady growth in the availability of wide-area multi-service networks. These support a variety of traffic types including data, control messages, audio and video. Consequently they are often thought of as integrated media carriers. To date, however, use of these networks has been limited to isolated applications which exhibit very little or no integration amongst themselves. This paper describes a project which investigated organisational, user interfacing and programming techniques to exploit this integration of services at the application level