product quality

This study addresses the limitations of traditional construction quality control, which relies on lagging inspections that hinder timely intervention and often lead to rework and schedule delays. The authors propose the first component-level digital twin framework tailored for the construction phase, integrating inspection records, material production and concrete placement data, early-age sensor measurements, and strength prediction models to enable dynamic representation of quality status and readiness-driven decision support. By shifting quality assessment from passive document review to real-time, data-driven proactive management, the framework facilitates structured decisions—such as releasing or halting components—well before standard strength tests are completed. This approach significantly enhances the timeliness of interventions, traceability, and overall management efficiency in construction quality control.

To reconcile the stringent DO-178C Level A safety certification requirements with the escalating complexity of avionics software, this paper proposes an airworthiness-compliant, customized Scrum framework. The method introduces a multidisciplinary Product Owner role, dual acceptance criteria—functional and certification-oriented—separate independent test/documentation teams, and a dedicated Certification Coordinator. It integrates continuous integration/delivery, automated documentation generation, and rigorous configuration management. These innovations enable deep coupling between agile iteration and regulatory compliance. Empirical evaluation demonstrates significant improvements over the traditional waterfall model: a 76% reduction in average requirement effort per engineer, 75% faster defect detection, 78% higher defect resolution efficiency, and over 50% lower defect density—all while fully satisfying DO-178C Level A certification objectives.

This study addresses the challenge of effectively monitoring early-stage agent systems, where structural flaws often obscure task-level errors. The authors propose a three-dimensional (quality, suitability, efficiency) and three-granularity (intra-run, inter-run, structural) monitoring and triaging framework tailored for low-maturity agent systems. They introduce a novel system maturity staging model based on the coefficient of variation and monitoring granularity, integrated with a severity classification adapted from FMEA to guide human review. The resulting transferable monitoring architecture supports document-driven, multi-stage workflows, enhanced by a synthetic testbed with controlled error injection. Experimental results demonstrate that structural defects significantly mask task-level signals; 97% of issues can be automatically traced, with only 2% requiring human intervention, and each granularity level precisely identifies its corresponding defect type (coefficients of variation: 0.02, 1.25, and 0.00, respectively).

Existing research lacks systematic methods to assess how requirements engineering (RE) impacts downstream development activities, hindering RE process optimization. Method: This paper proposes the first fitness-for-purpose RE impact assessment model, integrating a systematic literature review with multi-source empirical data to identify and structure 24 downstream development activities affected by requirements and 16 quantifiable attributes. Contribution/Results: The model bridges two critical gaps in requirements quality assessment—namely, the “activity dimension” and “measurability of impact”—by enabling empirical analysis of how specific requirements artifacts and processes concretely influence development practices. It provides a theoretically grounded framework and evidence-based decision support for precise, targeted optimization of the RE phase.

This work addresses the problem of implementation drift in evolving distributed systems, where runtime behavior gradually deviates from the original design. To tackle this issue, the paper proposes a design conformance assessment method based on distributed tracing data. It introduces, for the first time in the domain of distributed systems, conformance checking techniques from process mining, leveraging runtime traces collected via the OpenTelemetry standard and automatically comparing them against behavioral models defined at design time to quantify their alignment. The key contribution lies in establishing persistent, monitorable conformance metrics that enable continuous, automated evaluation of deviations between system implementation and design. This approach is readily applicable to modern distributed systems widely adopting OpenTelemetry for observability.

This work addresses the challenge of balancing software quality, testability, and maintainability under rapid iteration and frequent requirement changes. It proposes Algorithm-Driven Development (ADD), a novel approach that unifies requirements specification and technical design by using algorithm flowcharts as a single, coherent artifact. This integration enables end-to-end modeling of requirements, architecture, and testing. Leveraging this model, the system automatically generates high-coverage acceptance tests and incorporates continuous integration with code coverage feedback. Industrial adoption at Dassault Systèmes demonstrates that ADD achieves over 95% code coverage, substantially reduces defect density, and ensures a stable delivery cadence, outperforming conventional test-driven development and test-after approaches.

This study addresses the quality control challenges in additive manufacturing arising from its layer-by-layer fabrication process and high degree of customization. It presents the first systematic adaptation of the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology tailored to this context. By integrating multi-source sensing and measurement data across the entire manufacturing chain—including materials, design, process parameters, and post-processing—the work employs advanced techniques such as deep learning, machine learning, design of experiments, simulation, ontological analysis, and network science to model the complex relationships among design inputs, process variations, and final part quality. The proposed optimization framework enables real-time anomaly detection and simultaneously optimizes lead time and energy consumption, thereby significantly enhancing the quality stability and process controllability of additive manufacturing systems.

This study addresses the challenge of transforming stakeholder requirements into product requirements in software-driven automotive systems. Leveraging a dataset of 8,082 stakeholder requirements and 5,870 product requirements provided by Infineon, the research employs a hybrid methodology integrating structural statistics, decision modeling, traceability mining, textual analysis, and hardware-software linkage to systematically analyze the requirement refinement process. It reveals, for the first time, that requirement complexity primarily stems from ambiguous architectural scope and missing contextual information rather than linguistic redundancy. The work establishes a classification framework for mapping stakeholder to product requirements, identifies systematic differences across abstraction levels, and proposes key improvements in requirement validation, deviation management, and contextual tooling to support efficient and reusable automotive development.

This work proposes a systematic approach to derive task effectiveness requirements in the absence of explicit user needs. The method deconstructs task intent into context, functionality, constraints, critical dimensions, performance attributes, and architectural solutions, and introduces a task complexity factor to quantify the impact of external challenges and technology maturity. By integrating Best-Worst Scaling, it prioritizes critical dimensions based on stakeholder judgments. Through task decomposition modeling and quantitative complexity analysis, the framework supports integration with UAF/SysML artifacts and establishes a traceable mechanism for generating Tier 1 and Tier 2 requirements. The approach is validated using a close air support mission case study, effectively addressing a critical gap in requirements engineering when clear initial inputs are unavailable.