Masters in Public Administration - MPA / This study is about the application of a negotiated model of training needs analysis in the Registry/Messengers" Division of the Cape Town City Council. The negotiated model of training needs analysis is predicated on the formation of the performance evaluation committees. These committees comprise the assessees, the line managers, the peers and the trainers. Their primary responsibility is to address issues of performance ratings, causes of performance discrepancies, training solutions and/or non-training solutions in the key performance areas of individual employees who belong to the various job families. The study argues that the current application of the traditional model of training needs analysis in the RegistryfMessengers' Division which is both "menu-driven" and "line management-driven", is not scientific and participatory in form and nature. The study has four objectives. The first was to give some background to the RegistryfMessengers' Division. This painted a picture of the organisation, management and functions of the RegistryfMessengers' Division. The second objective was to provide a conceptual framework of the study by examining the existing literature on the contending models of training needs analyses, namely, the traditional model of training needs analysis and the negotiated model of training needs analysis, in public organisations. The third objective was to adopt and apply the negotiated model of training needs analysis in the RegistryfMessengers' Division. The fourth objective was to recommend the institutionalisation of the negotiated model of training needs analysis in the RegistryfMessengers' Division in “particular and the Cape Town City Council in general- given the fact that its strengths far outweigh its weaknesses. The study concludes inter alia, that th~ current application of the traditional model of training needs analysis in the Registry/ Messengers' Division should be replaced by the negotiated model of training needs analysis considering the fact that the latter allowed the collective and scientific determination of the training needs of the employees. The study then recommends the adoption of the negotiated model of training needs analysis in the Registry/ Messengers' Division in particular and the Cape Town City Council in general. However, the following factors and issues need to be taken into account to ensure the effective implementation of the negotiated model of training needs analysis in the organization, for example, educating the employees about the new approach to training needs analysis; identification of key performance areas; conducting an organization wide training needs analysis; development of performance standards for the key performance areas; formation of performance evaluation committees in the various job families; and agreement upon the performance rating scale

Many companies and organisations today suffer from Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, which can have direct and indirect economical consequences. This thesis tackles this problem with a novel approach by utilising domain specific behaviour and knowledge. The goal is to distinguish malicious attacks from legitimate usage and to alter overall system behaviour at the event of a DoS attack. Distributed DoS attacks (DDoS) are examined as well as a category suggested in this thesis, namely Domain DoS attacks. A simple e-commerce system is developed based on the principles of Domain-Driven Design in order to test the given approach. Five examples of DoS attacks are presented and tested towards the system. The results indicate that utilising domain behaviour is a suitable approach in order to mitigate DoS attacks, but it requires deep integration with the application itself. / Många företag och organisationer lider idag av Denial-of-Service-attacker (DoS-attacker), som kan få direkta och indirekta ekonomiska konsekvenser. Denna avhandling ser nytänkande på detta problem genom att dra nytta av domänspecifikt beteende och kunskap. Målet är att skilja skadliga attacker från legitimt användande och att ändra systemets beteende i händelse av en DoS-attack. Distribuerade DoS-attacker (DDoS) undersöks så väl som en kategori föreslagen i denna avhandling, kallad Domän DoS-attacker. Ett enkelt e-handelssystem utvecklas baserat på principer från domändriven design i syfte att testa den givna tesen. Fem exempel av DoS-attacker är presenterade och testade gentemot systemet. Resultaten indikerar att utnyttjandet av domänbeteende är ett lämpligt tillvägagångssätt för att avvärja DoS-attacker, men att det kräver djup integration med applikationen.

Since the emergence of big data, traditional business intelligence systems have been unable to meet most of the information demands in many data-driven organisations. Nowadays, big data analytics is perceived to be the solution to the challenges related to information processing of big data and decision-making of most data-driven organisations. Irrespective of the promised benefits of big data, organisations find it difficult to prove and realise the value of the investment required to develop and maintain big data analytics. The reality of big data is more complex than many organisations’ perceptions of big data. Most organisations have failed to implement big data analytics successfully, and some organisations that have implemented these systems are struggling to attain the average promised value of big data. Organisations have realised that it is impractical to migrate the entire traditional business intelligence (BI) system into big data analytics and there is a need to integrate these two types of systems. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate a framework for creating a hybrid data-driven decision support system that combines components from traditional business intelligence and big data analytics systems. The study employed an interpretive qualitative research methodology to investigate research participants' understanding of the concepts related to big data, a data-driven organisation, business intelligence, and other data analytics perceptions. Semi-structured interviews were held to collect research data and thematic data analysis was used to understand the research participants’ feedback information based on their background knowledge and experiences. The application of the organisational information processing theory (OIPT) and the fit viability model (FVM) guided the interpretation of the study outcomes and the development of the proposed framework. The findings of the study suggested that data-driven organisations collect data from different data sources and process these data to transform them into information with the goal of using the information as a base of all their business decisions. Executive and senior management roles in the adoption of a data-driven decision-making culture are key to the success of the organisation. BI and big data analytics are tools and software systems that are used to assist a data-driven organisation in transforming data into information and knowledge. The suggested challenges that organisations experience when they are trying to integrate BI and big data analytics were used to guide the development of the framework that can be used to create a hybrid data-driven decision support system. The framework is divided into these elements: business motivation, information requirements, supporting mechanisms, data attributes, supporting processes and hybrid data-driven decision support system architecture. The proposed framework is created to assist data-driven organisations in assessing the components of both business intelligence and big data analytics systems and make a case-by-case decision on which components can be used to satisfy the specific data requirements of an organisation. Therefore, the study contributes to enhancing the existing literature position of the attempt to integrate business intelligence and big data analytics systems. / Dissertation (MIT (Information Systems))--University of Pretoria, 2021. / Informatics / MIT (Information Systems) / Unrestricted

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is an emerging agile development approach where all stakeholders (including developers and customers) work together to write user stories in structured natural language to capture a software application's functionality in terms of re- quired "behaviors". Developers then manually write "glue" code so that these scenarios can be executed as software tests. This glue code represents individual steps within unit and acceptance test cases, and tools exist that automate the mapping from scenario descriptions to manually written code steps (typically using regular expressions). Instead of requiring programmers to write manual glue code, this thesis investigates a practical approach to con- vert natural language scenario descriptions into executable software tests fully automatically. To show feasibility, we developed a tool called Kirby that uses natural language processing techniques, code information extraction and probabilistic matching to automatically gener- ate executable software tests from structured English scenario descriptions. Kirby relieves the developer from the laborious work of writing code for the individual steps described in scenarios, so that both developers and customers can both focus on the scenarios as pure behavior descriptions (understandable to all, not just programmers). Results from assessing the performance and accuracy of this technique are presented. / Master of Science

Debris-slides are one of the most frequently occurring geological hazards in metasedimentary rocks of the Anakeesta ridge in Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GRSM), which often depends on the influence of multiple causing factors or geo-factors such as geological structures, slope, topographic elevation, land use, soil type etc. or a combination of these factors. The main objective of the study was to understand the control of geo-factors in initiating debris-slides using different knowledge and data-driven methods in GIS platform. The study was performed in three steps: (1) Evaluation of geometrical relationship between geological discontinuity and topographic orientation in initiation of debris-slides, (2) Preparation of knowledge-driven debris-slide susceptibility model, and (3) Preparation of data-driven debris-slide susceptibility models and compare their efficacy. Performance of the models were evaluated mostly using area under Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, which revealed that the models were statistically significant.

During the last decades the product lifecycle has been shortened and as a consequence the majority of manufacturing companies have focused on decrease the time to market. Several companies within the automotive industry have during the last years implemented Simulation Driven Product Development as a method to reduce lead time, increase quality and reduce development cost for their products. This study is divided into three areas; (1) Investigate the applicability of Simulation Driven Product Development in a Lean Product Development environment. (2) Examine the preconditions for implementing Simulation Driven Product Development. (3) Study the possible effects in a product development process of using simulations performed by design engineers. By studying available literature in the area of Lean and Simulation Driven Product Development the consistence of the two product development philosophies are rather high. Simulation Driven Product Development tends to support the principles of Lean as well as reduce different kinds of waste that normally is present at a R&D department. In order to implement a Simulation Driven Product Development a number of preconditions were identified; e.g. knowledge and experience within both physical and virtual testing, cross functional synchronizations, trust for simulation results and incentives from management. These factors, among a couple of others, are according to the theory and case studies preconditions for a successful implementation where the primary case is based on Scania, but Saab Automobile AB, Jaguar Land Rover and AB Volvo is also analyzed in the benchmarking study. Simulations performed by design engineers will increase the potential of Simulation Driven Product Development in several ways. A major finding from the study is that it enhances the understanding for properties of the items among design engineers. The increased understanding also increase the knowledge and decrease the learning cycle time for the design engineers. It also seems to be a resource efficient way since waiting times are reduced. The need of support from simulation groups might also reduce the communication barriers between different groups and increase the cross functional work. / Eftersom produktlivscykeln blir allt kortare har utvecklingstiden för produkter fått ett ökat fokus. Inom fordonsindustrin har simuleringsdriven produktutveckling använts som en metod för att reducera ledtid samtidigt som kvaliteten förstärks och den totala utvecklingskostnaden sänks. Detta examensarbete är uppdelat i tre olika områden: Det första utreder huruvida simuleringsdriven produktutveckling är förenligt med Lean produktutveckling. Det andra området fokuserar på förutsättningar för att kunna implementera en simuleringsdriven utvecklingsprocess. Det tredje och sista området fokuserar på konstruktörssimuleringars inverkan på produktutvecklingsprocessens effektivitet. Förenligheten mellan Simuleringsdriven produktutveckling och Lean produktutveckling är hög, enligt befintlig litteratur. Simuleringsdriven produktutveckling stödjer flertalet av principerna till Lean samtidigt som det bidrar till att reducera slöseri på forskning och utvecklingsavdelningen. De två andra forskningsfrågorna angrips med hjälp av litteratur såväl som fallstudier. Den huvudsakliga fallstudien genomförs på Scania, men även Saab Automobile AB, Jaguar Land Rover och AB Volvo studeras i syfte att öka examensarbetets generaliserbarhet. Studierna identifierar ett antal viktiga faktorer för att kunna implementera en simuleringsdriven produktutveckling: incitament för en förändring från ledningen, kunskap inom både fysisk och virtuell provning, tvärfunktionell synkronisering, en tydlig och framtung produktutvecklingsprocess och tillit till simuleringar. Konstruktörssimuleringar kan på flera sätt höja potentialen hos simuleringsdriven produktutveckling. Det ger konstruktören en ökad förståelse för sin komponents fysiska egenskaper. Tät feedback från simuleringarna kortar inlärningstiden hos konstruktörerna och resulterar även i mer genomarbetade produkter. För att lyckas med dessa simuleringar krävs ett nära samarbete mellan konstruktion och beräkning vilket bidrar till att öka det tvärfunktionella arbetet och minskar kommunikationsbarriärerna mellan konstruktions ‐ och beräkningsgrupper.

Asynchronous design is a possible alternative design methodology that has the ability to alleviate issues associated with clock skew, power dissipation, and process and environmental variability among transistors, issues encountered in typical synchronous design methodologies. This investigation studies the implementation of two asynchronous models of the Texas Instruments MSP430 processor family using a logic system known as Null Convention Logic (NCL). The study also investigates two design styles of NCL: the data-driven and control-driven design styles. This example and others show that although there are tradeoffs in chip area and performance, the control-driven design style is a viable methodology that can lead to designs that are low in energy usage. The openMSP430 processor project is the baseline for the investigation as it is a mature open-source project. Silicon-proven multiple times and fully synthesizable, it parallels the original Texas Instruments family nearly cycle for cycle. UNCLE (Unified NCL Environment) is a toolset used to create comparable implementations of the openMSP430 architecture that are data-driven and control-driven in nature. This investigation shows that the control-driven implementation has a slightly larger chip area due to the complexity of the control path and its effects on the data path. While the control path has a lower area than the data-driven model due to area optimization, the data path of the control-driven version is larger than that of the data-driven model. Because of these issues of complexity in both the control and data paths, the performance of the model suffers as well, degrading from the already poor performance of the traditional data-driven NCL model. Along with the increase in chip area and the decrease in performance, the control-driven model sees a 50.2% average decrease in energy usage as compared to the data-driven model. As with most design choices in engineering, there are tradeoffs when using either design style of NCL. This investigation serves to allow designers to make a well-informed decision when deciding between the two.

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