Daily News

posted on April 17: New lab aims to become leading source of expertise on software quality assurance

The goal for McMaster's new Software Quality Research Lab (SQRL) is to become a leading source of expertise on software quality assurance. A team of researchers, software professionals and graduate students will work together to: 7 conduct academic research related to software quality 7 provide courses for developers on how to inspect and test software 7 cultivate personnel who are highly trained by supporting graduate theses on software quality assurance 7 provide software quality assessment with and for industry on a contract basis 7 perform joint research with developers. SQRL will include testing experts who will make their expertise available to the quality assurance projects and conduct research on new testing methods and tools, says David Parnas, director of the software engineering program. Security will be a high priority for research, Parnas said. "One only has to follow the TV news to recognize that high quality software must be secure against attempt to misuse a system, deny service to legitimate users, or steal information from a system," he said. "Research in this area has been extensive but, except for work in cryptography, little of it has helped industry."

posted on April 16: Senate approves two new graduate programs, e-commerce diploma courses

Senate approved two new fields of study for the Department of Civil Engineering's master's and PhD programs and two new graduate diplomas in electronic commerce at its meeting on Wednesday, April 11 . The Senate approved: the Department of Civil Engineering's decision to offer master's and PhD program degrees in computational mechanics and water resources/environmental engineering. These two fields of study, in addition to structural engineering, represent the Faculty's main research areas. The Department of Civil Engineering has four faculty members with expertise in computational mechanics and most of the faculty use computer applications in their research, the majority using computational mechanics. The decision to offer graduate degrees in water resources/environmental engineering was made after the department received permission to hire an additional 1.5 faculty members in the water resources area. According to Graduate Council's report to Senate, this field of study has a long history at McMaster and was previously offered as a graduate program in 1993. two new graduate diplomas in e-commerce. The diplomas will give students the opportunity to study the technology and management of e-commerce. They will be open to students who have completed at least their first year of an MBA program and have some computer programming experience. The two graduate diplomas will build on each other. changes to the way the Faculty of Engineering designates its master's degrees. Starting November 2001, master's degrees requiring a thesis will be changed from Master of Engineering (M.Eng.) to Master of Applied Science (M.A.Sc.). Non-thesis master's degrees in the Faculty of Engineering will retain the M.Eng. designation. (END OF STORY)

posted on April 11: Payroll to issue special advance for returning MUSA employees

Payroll services will be providing, as soon as possible, a special advance to MUSA members who returned to work on April 9. "We understand that many of our employees who came back to work on Monday may be experiencing financial hardship and we are working hard to ensure that they can be compensated in advance of our normal payroll dates," says Bob West, director, financial services. The special advance will be based on an estimate of what each employee would net in five days' pay (representing the work period April 9-15). Staff will be notified next week of the exact date that this pay will be deposited into their bank accounts. In addition to the special advance, the regular mid-month advance will be deposited on Monday, April 30 into the bank accounts of all MUSA employees who normally receive this advance. MUSA staff who returned to work on Monday were not included in the April 12 payroll deposit. "There are two reasons we just couldn't do this," says West. "First, we had to transfer the deposit early due to the Good Friday holiday so we could meet the bank's deadline. Second, significant and highly specialized programming changes were required to include these staff. Our system is not built in a way that allows us to make significant modifications on such short notice." West says programming changes must also be made to implement the special advance and as soon as this is done staff will be advised of when they will receive the advance. Payroll considered issuing manual cheques but determined it was unable to do so under the current configuration of the system.