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Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / Jeffery R. Williams / For the past couple years, farm income has declined due to lower prices for corn, soybeans, and wheat. This decline has caused agricultural producers to keep equipment longer, which has affected equipment sales at John Deere. When times are good, producers buy new and trade used equipment, but when a producer’s profit is lower than previous years, they tend to save their money for input costs for the next growing season. The decline in farm income has had a negative effect on agriculture sales, but dealers can maintain their market share goals and still be profitable if they adjust their focus to other areas of their business, including sales of parts and equipment service. The goal of this study is to create an analysis tool that field managers can use to help dealers see the potential sales, profit, and pay for performance that they are missing because they are not up to suggested guidelines for sales of parts and equipment service. The tool includes several metrics from an existing report called the Categorization Report. These metrics are Dealer Performance Market Share, Aftermarket Performance Factor, Service Market Performance Factor, and Net Operating Return on Sales. The tool calculates the differences between the dealer metrics and John Deere metrics. Further, this tool is used to compare an individual dealer to other dealer averages and determine what a high performance, fully optimized dealer looks like and how much more a dealership could be selling in sales, parts and service to be a sustainable business in today’s economy. The tool is used to examine three scenarios to demonstrate its flexibility. These scenarios include a top-ten dealer, a large-scale above-average dealer, and a merger of three dealerships. The spreadsheet tool will display a two-page summary that shows how a dealership compares with other dealers that are similar in size and how they compare to the top-ten elite dealers in their category. The summary will also include market share maps to show which dealer-specific geographical areas need improvement to earn more sales in the future.

This work consists in proposing a methodology to improve automated evaluation of the ergonomic quality of web sites (with special focus on usability and accessibility) by static analysis of HTML code of their pages using the evaluation technique called guideline review. This methodology will be articulated around: - A framework that defines a systematic and consistent way for structuring guidelines in order to enable their automatic evaluation; - A guideline definition language (GDL) able to express guideline information in a sufficiently rich manner to enable an evaluation engine to perform automated evaluation of any GDL-compliant guideline; - Tools to support the proposed methodology. The tools are (1) a structuring tool (editor) to enable the specification and manipulation of guidelines structures (structured following the framework and expressed in a GDL-compliant form) and (2) an evaluation tool which uses the guidelines to conduct the evaluation of Web sites.

Darbo tyrimo sritis yra informacinių technologijų vertinimo metodologijos ir jų praktinis taikymas, detaliau nagrinėjamos COBIT (angl. Control Objectives for Information and related Technology) ir CMM (angl. Capability Maturity Model). Tyrimo objektas - vertinimo proceso kompiuterizavimas, problema - informacinių technologijų atitikimo įmonių veiklos poreikiams nustatymas. Tikslas yra suteikti galimybes įvertinti įmonių informacinių technologijų atitikimą jų veiklos poreikiams, sukuriant kompiuterizuotą vertinimo sistemą. / The problem of identifying the adequacy beside information systems and business needs exists in enterprises. This research work analyzes a few evaluation methodologies and proposes supporting software tool developed for this purpose on the base of integration of two methodologies - Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT) and Capability Maturity Model (CMM). The developed software tool allows to approach to the main purpose of this research work – to provide the opportunity to evaluate the adequacy beside information systems and business needs.

Due to the increasing size and complexity of software systems, software architectures have become a crucial part in development projects. A lot of effort has been put into defining formal ways for describing architecture specifications using Architecture Description Languages (ADLs). Since no common ADL today offers tools for evaluating the performance, an attempt to develop such a tool based on an event-based simulation engine has been made. Common ADLs were investigated and the work was based on the fundamentals within the field of software architectures. The tool was evaluated both in terms of correctness in predictions as well as usability to show that it actually is possible to evaluate the performance using high-level architectures as models.

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this dissertation. Copyright / Dissertation (MCom)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Marketing Management / MCom / Unrestricted

This thesis discusses the area of a control system for application testing in Linux. There is a need for testing software and its quality using automated software tools. Huge number of testing tools is available, Red Hat Test System (RHTS) being one of them. Dierent approaches to classi cation and evaluation of a testing tools are presented. Selected software testing tools were evaluated and compared with RHTS. The thesis then presents a design of a system for non-interactive application testing in Linux with support for RHTS tests and with focus on future enhancements. Implemented system is nally tested using proposed set of tests and several usage examples are described.

The guidelines for accessibility are many and it can be difficult to keep track of all of them. Therefore, test tools for evaluation are available to help developers identify accessibility problems. This study has aimed to investigate how useful one of these test tools is for developersand what strengths and weaknesses comes with such a tool. Five professional developers and five web development students performed a usability teston a selected accessibility test tool (Lighthouse). The result indicates that the test tool has high usability with strengths such userfriendliness, provides clear feedback of test results and can teach the user more about accessibility. The results also showed weaknesses in that the test tool did not find all the accessibility problems and it is unclear which criterias are being tested. The results of the study indicate that there are test tools that are useful for developers and students. The test tool can also make the user expand their knowledge regarding accessibility. Introducing the test tool to developers and students can contribute to more people thinking about accessibility in development. This can hopefully in turn lead to more web acessibility. / Riktlinjerna för tillgänglighet är många och det kan vara svårt för utvecklare att hålla koll på samtliga riktlinjer. Det finns därför testverktyg som utvärderar tillgänglighet och därmed hjälper utvecklare att identifiera tillgänglighetsbrister. Den här studien har syftat till att ta reda på hur användbart ett testverktyg är för utvecklare samt vilka styrkor och svagheter det finns i verktyget. Fem yrkesverksamma utvecklare och fem studenter inom webbutveckling har fått utföra användningstest på ett utvalt testverktyg för tillgänglighet (Lighthouse). Resultatet av studien indikerar att testverktyget har en hög användbarhet med styrkor så som att det är enkelt att använda, ger tydlig återkoppling av testresultat och kan lära användaren mer om tillgänglighet. Resultatet visade även på svagheter i form av att testverktyget inte hittade alla brister och att det var otydligt vilka kriterier som testas. Resultatet av studien indikerar på att det finns testverktyg som är användbara för utvecklare och studenter. Testverktyget kan även bidra till kompetensutveckling. Att introducera testverktyget till utvecklare och studenter kan bidra till att allt fler tänker på tillgänglighet vid utveckling. Detta kan förhoppningsvis i sin tur leda till mer tillgänglighet på webben.

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