About the research
During the summer of 2015 four students from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg (Sweden) will participate in an academic exchange program with Stanford University and UC Berkeley. The students will spend 10 weeks in Silicon Valley, California. In addition to their University studies, the students will conduct a market analysis for one of the tools that Sigma Technology has developed.
Alexander Fastberg, Rebecca Härkönen, Minh Bang Nguyen and Agnes Söderholm have recently received their Bachelor’s degrees in Industrial Engineering and Management at the “Industrial Economy” faculty of Chalmers University of Technology. While pursuing their Master’s degrees, the students will take the course “Success Factors in High Technology Management” as well as “Modeling and Design of Organizations” at Stanford University and UC Berkeley.
The market analysis that the students will do for Sigma Technology focuses on the Quality Monitor (methodology and tool). The Quality Monitor methodology and its metrics have been developed by Sigma Technology in collaboration with Linnaeus University and a market-leading Telecom company. The Quality Monitor tool is developed by Softwerk. At the program end, the students will report the results and run a final presentation.
About the concept
With both a comprehensive and thorough information quality model and an intelligent analysis tool, Sigma can now measure and analyze product information and provide a figure that represents the quality of the product. The model can be tuned on each measurement point, allowing it to adapt to different industries and customer segments. The analysis tool can be used to analyze the results on different measurement points, while comparing different parts of the product information library, documents, and versions of the library. With this information, we can analyze quality trends, effects of improvements, and the quality of information coming from different sources.
The model and the tool can be used on a continuous basis, even for daily measurements, to enable testing and measuring of large sets of information. You’ll discover within minutes how well your information works together. This kind of analysis is difficult – or almost impossible – to perform manually within a decent time frame.
We believe in the great benefit the Quality Monitor offers in evaluating the quality of product information. Another advantage of the analysis tool is that the second version of it, developed by Softwerk – a partner of Sigma Technology, can be used to measure the quality of a software codebase.
Benefits
The Quality Monitor can be used in the daily operations by:
- Project Managers/management, to spot trends in the documentation quality
- Each technical writer to prioritize document improvements
- The documentation team, to check the overall quality of a documentation collection/library before publishing
The Quality Monitor can also be used in documentation migration projects. For example, in a DITA migration project it can be used to:
- Check readiness and prepare the library for DITA migration
- Get an overview of how to split documents into topics
- Suggest reusable topics
- Get an overview of coupling between chapters / topics as input to DITA maps
- Check the overall quality of the documentation under and after the migration to DITA
Contact us
Alexander Fastberg
+1 628 444 9869
Rebecca Härkönen
+1 415 510 9893
Minh Bang Nguyen
+1 628 444 9868
Agnes Söderholm
+1 415 510 9756