Journal of Integrated Design and Process Science

A number of designers of different nationality and design backgrounds were interviewed about their experiences working in teams made up mostly of designers of either a Sino or occidental background. The aim was to identify key issues that are at play with the management of multinational design teams and how they can best be managed for greater success. Key findings included evidence that background (cultural, national and economic) can affect how a designer approached problems and works. This is especially so with regards to framing and goal analysis. This in turn can affect how successful a designer can be when they are working in a team with designers from another background, who operate differently. Designers with a low level attitude toward design and a lower level of emotional intelligence tend to be less able to work in such teams. However, the chance of success can be increased with the introduction of information technology tools to increase shared cognition and situational awareness. Further, through the use of constraints on design practice via standardisation, differences can cause fewer real issues. Finally, while it was found that background did affect design skill and practice, the evidence also suggests that this is not permanent.

Scientific computing infrastructures need reliable software within pressing deadlines due to communities¡¯ requirements they support. Concerning the Grid, computing researchers have been developing software projects without exploiting solutions for discovering defects early enough in the implementation process. This has led to spending energy maintaining and correcting software once released. Achieving high reliability is therefore one of the most important challenges to be faced in the Grid context during the software development life cycle. Although developers perceive quality improvement solutions as limiting factors to their productivity, in our opinion enhancing quality enables us to eliminate mistakes and, as a consequence, reduce costs and delays; the software quality models and metrics represent the mainstream to reach high reliability by balancing both effort and results.

In this paper, we aim to provide an extension of a mathematical model that connects software best practices with a set of metrics to periodically predict the quality at any stage of code development and to determine its problems at any early phase. For data statistical properties, we used a risk-threshold-based discriminant analysis technique to analyze the defined model and to detect fault-prone and non fault-prone components. We gathered input data for this model from several European Middleware Initiative packages having different scopes and characteristics, whilst outputs were derived from measures of all specified metrics. At the end we attempted to understand if the model is a true picture of the software under evaluation.

This paper presents the development of an integrated computer program for blade design of small to medium wind turbine generators. Since the blade design process is time consuming and recursive, an integrated computer program with combination of aerodynamic and structural considerations is developed to make the entire design process faster and more efficient. In this software package, there are five embedded sub-functions, including an aerodynamic coefficient generator, an airfoil database, an automatic blade modeler, a wind flow generator and the performance evaluation under operating conditions. This is a window based PC program written in visual C language and designed to cooperate with the commercial CAD and FEA software. The blade profile can be built automatically once all the design parameters are specified. Furthermore, intensive aerodynamic analyses of the blade design can be carried out with the aid of wind flow generator. This integrated computer program has been employed for the blade design of the laboratory scale 150KW wind turbine generator to verify its efficacy.