Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)
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Item Implementation of Lean management in family practice to decrease overall clinic visit time(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Nursing, 2020) Quist, Rochelle Eileen; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Angela JukkalaVariations in the patient rooming process have created inefficient practices for staff in a clinic setting. Negative impacts from these variations have been correlated with increased patient wait times, delayed patient care and decreased patient satisfaction. Through patient complaints with frustrations in delayed care and wait times, this scholarly project found discrepancies in the patient flow process. Variations existed within several primary care patient settings based on individual provider training and personal habits, style, and preferences. Utilizing Lean Management ideals to improve rooming and throughput were strongly indicated within recent healthcare journals as a means to reduce waste and improve efficiency in patient care processes. Developing interventions based on Lean Management principles discovered in the literature review will be outlined for execution. Following implementation of interventions, a follow up time study will be completed to compare to the original data, as well as repeat patient satisfaction surveys. This scholarly project expands nursing knowledge by addressing the gaps in past studies by examining throughput in an outpatient clinic setting, potentially decreasing patient wait times, delays in care and increasing patient and provider satisfaction.Item An extensible, hierarchical architecture for analysis of software quality assurance(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2021) Rice, David Mark; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Clemente IzurietaAs software becomes integrated into most aspects of life, a need to assess and guarantee the quality of a software product is paramount. Poor software quality can lead to traffic accidents, failure of life-saving devices, government destabilization, and economic ruin. To assess software quality, quality researchers design quality models. A common quality model will decompose quality concepts such as 'total quality', 'maintainability', and 'confidentiality' into a hierarchy that can eventually be linked to specific lines of code in a software system. However, a problem persists in the domain of quality modeling: quality assessment through use of quality models is not finding acceptance by industry practitioners. This thesis reviews the weaknesses of modern modeling attempts and aims to improve the processes surrounding quality assessment from the perspective of both researchers and academic practitioners. The analysis uses the Goal/Question/Metric paradigm. Two closely related goals are presented that aim to analyze a process of generating, validating, and operationalizing quality models for the purpose of improvement with respect to cost, experimentative capability, collaborative opportunity, and acceptability. A system is designed, PIQUE, that provides functionality to generate experimental quality models. Test cases and exercises are run on the models generated by PIQUE to supply metric data used to answer the questions and goals. The results show that-in the context of a PIQUE-generated quality model compared to a similar non-PIQUE quality model-improvement can be achieved with respect to development cost and experimentative capability. Clear improvement was not found in the context of model operationalization difficulty and output acceptability. Ultimately, partial achievement of both goals is realized. The work concludes that the current problems in the domain of quality modeling can be improved upon, and systems like PIQUE are a valuable approach toward that goal.Item The identification, categorization, and evaluation of model-based behavioral decay in design patterns(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2019) Reimanis, Derek Kristaps; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Clemente Izurieta; Clemente Izurieta was a co-author of the article, 'Evaluations of behavioral technical debt in design patterns: a multiple longitudinal case study' submitted to the journal 'IEEE transactions on software engineering' which is contained within this thesis.Software quality assurance (QA) techniques seek to provide software developers and managers with the methods and tools necessary to monitor their software product to encourage fast, on-time, and bug-free releases for their clients. Ideally, QA methods and tools provide significant value and highly-specialized results to product stakeholders, while being fully incorporated into an organization's process and with actionable and easy-to-interpret outcomes. However, modern QA techniques fall short on these goals because they only feature structural analysis techniques, which do not fully illuminate all intricacies of a software product. Additionally, many modern QA methods are not capable of capturing domain-specific concerns, which suggests their results are not fulfilling their potential. To assist in the remediation of these issues, we have performed a comprehensive study to explore an unexplored phenomenon in the field of QA, namely model-based behavioral analysis. In this sense, behavioral analysis refers to the mechanisms that occur in a software product as the product is executing its code, at system run-time. We approach this problem from a model-based perspective because models are not tied to program-specific behaviors, so findings are more generalizable. Our procedure follows an intuitive process, involving first the identification of model-based behavioral issues, then the classification and categorization of these behavioral issues into a taxonomy, and finally the evaluation of them in terms of their effect on software quality. Our results include a taxonomy that captures and provides classifications for known model-based behavioral issues. We identified relationships between behavioral issues and existing structural issues to illustrate that the inclusion of behavioral analysis provides a new perspective into the inner mechanisms of software systems. We extended an existing state-of-the-art operational software quality measurement technique to incorporate these newfound behavioral issues. Finally, we used this quality extension to evaluate the effects of behavioral issues on system quality, and found that software quality has a strong inverse relationship with behavioral issues.Item Evaluation of molecular mechanisms impacting beef quality and carcass characteristics(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2018) Blatter, Sarah Anne; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Jennifer ThomsonTenderness has been stated as being one of the most important traits for consumers with regards to purchasing steak. However, too often there is much variation in tenderness in steaks that grade the same quality. Research in the past has done little to expand on the impact that genetics has on meat tenderness. This study was designed to attempt to illuminate this question by looking at the genes being differentially expressed between quality grades, and the pathways they impact. Angus crossbred steers (15) were fed to the end points of Standard, Select and Choice. Intermuscular and subcutaneous adipose tissue and muscle samples were snap frozen for gene expression analysis, as well as a loin kept from each animal for shear force analysis. Shear force analysis showed a significant difference between Choice and Standard graded animals (P<0.05), showing that the Choice animals in this study were more tender than Standard. RNA extracted from the adipose and muscle samples were sent to Novogene for RNAseq analysis. The results of the gene expression analysis showed 4 genes down regulated and 29 up regulated in the comparison of Select to Standard adipose tissue, with 8 genes down regulated and 15 up regulated with Select to Choice adipose tissue. The largest difference occurred between Standard to Choice adipose tissue with 49 genes down regulated and 113 up regulated. With regards to the muscle, 15 genes were down regulated while 20 were up regulated in the Standard to Choice. In the Select to Choice, 1 gene was down regulated with 4 up regulated. When comparing Select to Standard, there was not a large enough difference in genes being expressed. This study emphasized the need for additional functional studies on the impacts of gene expression on marbling deposition.Item Anomaly detection through spatio-temporal data mining, with application to near real-time outlying sensor identification(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2017) Galarus, Douglas Edward; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: John Paxton; Rafal A. Angryk (co-chair)There is a need for robust solutions to the challenges of near real-time spatio-temporal outlier and anomaly detection. In our dissertation, we define and demonstrate quality measures for evaluation and comparison of overlapping, real-time, spatio-temporal data providers and for assessment and optimization of data acquisition, system operation and data redistribution. Our measures are tested on real-world data and applications, and our results show the need and potential to develop our own mechanisms for outlier and anomaly detection. We then develop a representative, near real-time solution for the identification of outlying sensors that far outperforms state of the art methods in terms of accuracy and is computationally efficient. When applied to a real-world, meteorological data set, we identify numerous problematic sites that otherwise have not been flagged as bad. We identify sites for which metadata is incorrect. We identify observations that have been mislabeled by provider quality control processes. And, we demonstrate that our method outperforms enhanced versions of state of the art methods for assessment of accuracy using comparable or less computation time. There are many quality-related problems with real data sets and, in the absence of an approach like ours, these problems may have largely gone unidentified. Our approach is novel for the simple but effective way that it accounts for spatial and temporal variation, and that it addresses more than just accuracy. Collectively these contributions form an overarching data-mining framework and example that can be used and extended for data-mining method development, model building and evaluation of spatio-temporal outlier and anomaly detection processes.Item A study of the effect of fertilizers upon the sugar content of apples, with special reference to a new method of sugar analysis(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 1934) Evans, Cyril D.Item Quality assurance in a free software environment(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 1998) Wangsmo, Michael RayItem New statistical methods for analyzing proteomics data from affinity isolation lc-ms/ms experiments(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2007) Sharp, Julia Lynn; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: John J. BorkowskiThe field of proteomics is exploding with statistical problems waiting to be explored. To obtain information on protein complexes, interactions between protein pairs is initially examined. This exploration is performed using `bait-prey' pro- tein pull-down assays that use a protein affnity agent and an LC-MS/MS (liquid chromatography-tandem mass-spectrometry)-based protein identifcation method. An experiment generates a protein association matrix wherein each column represents a sample from one bait protein, each row represents one prey protein and each cell contains a presence/absence association indicator. The prey protein presence/absence pattern is assessed with a Likelihood Ratio Test (LRT) and simulated LRT p-values. Fisher's Exact Test and a conditional frequency distribution test using generating functions are also used to assess the prey protein observation pattern. Based on the p-value, each prey protein is assigned a category (Specific or Non-Specific) and appraised with respect to the goal and design of the experiment. The Bayes' Odds is calculated for each prey-bait pair in the `Specific' category to estimate the posterior probability that two proteins interact and compared to an approach used by Gilchrist et al. [23].