Essays for TDT42352008

Tor Stålhane

IDI / NTNU

Intro

The essay counts for 30 of the 100 points used to grade the students of this course

The essay must be written as a group effort

All the students in a group will get the same number of points

The essay should preferably be written in English although essays written in Norwegian will also be accepted.

Formal requirements

• 10 – 12 pages plus title page, 12 points Times New Roman, double line spacing

• The essay must have– A front page with title and the names of all the

group’s participants– Introduction, main section, discussion and

conclusions– At least five non-web references

Topics

The following slides shows a set of possible essay topics. The first line of each topic shall be used as the essay’s title – also if the essay is written in Norwegian

Each group must select one of the topics listed

More than one group may select the same topic

Essay topics - 1

• ISO 9001 vs IEEE Std 730.Discuss strong and weak sides. When would you choose which standard and why?

• TQM vs. CMM. Discuss strong and weak sides. When would you choose which improvement paradigm and why?

• Risk assessment – 1.Most people are much better at estimating frequencies than probabilities. Discuss possible reasons. How can your suggested reasons be tested?

Essay topics - 2

• Risk assessment – 2.Most people will rank risks only according to their consequence and will not consider the probability or frequency. What might be the reason for this and what can we do about it?

• Process change.Companies that do well see no need to change while companies that are in trouble cannot afford it. How can we help companies to change while they still have the resources needed?

Essay topics - 3• TQM and experience.

TQM focus on learning from experience and from customer feedback. New methods and tools may cause experiences to become outdated. Which problems does this pose for companies that want to learn from experience and how may these problems be dealt with?

• Process freeze and unfreeze.The freeze and unfreeze periods during process change tend to get shorter and shorter. Discuss the problems this cause for process change and how the problems can be solved or reduced.

Essay topics - 4

• ALARP and GALESelecting one or the other of the two abovementioned ways of dealing with risk, combined with a cost / benefit analysis may influence the way we prioritize SPI activities. Discuss how. Which one would you prefer?

• Better process or better peopleSome companies argues that it is better to use extra money to attract the best people instead of using it for process improvement. Discuss this position.

Essay topics - 5

• Group decisionsResearch has shown that groups reach better decision than individuals and that groups that need to reach an unanimous decision reach their decision faster than if the group uses a decision by majority. Discuss possible reasons for these observations.