In either case, enter the User ID you
submitted at the time of registration and the registration code supplied by
Syberad to complete registration.
If you have any questions or concerns
about the registration process or the licence conditions, do feel free to contact
us.
Was the HP Companion developed in
accordance with a quality assurance programme?
Quality assurance of software is a difficult business
because some aspects of the process are not within the developer's
control. It is essentially about the following:
1) Hardware performance and
reliability
2) Operating system performance and reliability
3) Calculation algorithm accuracy and robustness
4) Software interface performance
5) External data accuracy
6) Fault tolerance issues
Items 1,2 and 5 are entirely outside the control of the software developer.
Item 1 is wholly intractable: the current thinking on this is
that a hardware system has the propensity to fail in a way that can not be
predicted. This is hardly surprising given CMOS chip manufacturing
processes and the complexity of CPU designs nowadays. One only has to
remember the floating point problem on early Pentium chips to appreciate this.
In the UK, the regulator's advice is that if safety critical performance is
prerequisite, then system redundancy and replication is the only appropriate QA
'solution'. This philosophy is of course why UK nuclear plant have
replicated safety critical software systems that have been designed and coded
entirely separately. Even in medical applications, therapeutic and
diagnostic doses are typically calculated by two independent methods.
Item 2 creates the same risks as item 1, the only difference
being that failure can only be due to human error (in coding) rather than in
both this and/or some form of physical failure.
Item 5 can only be dealt with by seeking out the very best in
data sources and properly citing these in the software documentation. The
HP Companion gives you a full bibliography of all data sources it uses.
This is contained in both the online help system and in the user manual.
The user can therefore independently validate the data the software uses.
Item 3 is entirely within the gift of the developer to sort out and,
in this regard, the HP Companion's calculation algorithms were initially
developed independently of any coding and validated against manual calculation
methods. Once these had been coded this validation process was repeated.
Where practicable the algorithms were also coded in alternative software (MS
Excel and Mathcad) to further assure the accuracy and reliability of results.
Finally, some field tests of the product before release were undertaken in order to
provide further assurance of the product's reliability.
The x-ray dose rate data used by the HP Companion were obtained
from third-party empirical sources and so the only quality assurance that
could be completed was in having a transcription error detection method.
The gamma dose rate calculator was validated against published empirical data
relating to dose rate and shielding performance measurements completed in the
laboratory.
Item 4 was dealt with by preparing a user test scheme which
was systematically executed by real users and by code written to mimic user
input sequences. This had to include all of the visual component
operation sequences a typical user might carry out. The
object-orientated nature of the Windows interface renders this task very
difficult and time-consuming because the user can interact with the software in
a huge number of ways. Even Microsoft with all its resources has made
errors in this process. At any rate, if you run the Companion, I'm sure
you'll agree that the interface achieves an acceptable level of consistency
and operational reliability.
Item 6 is an issue that often gets over-looked in software
development. Given that all software will contain bugs, it is important to
have ways of trapping errors that could lead to incorrect results if the
software were allowed to continue to operate with an extant fault. The HP
Companion will self-terminate (producing an error message first of course) if
any problem arises in its calculation algorithms that can not be resolved by
further user input. This ensures that the software can't continue to
operate with an extant fault in its data derivations processes.
Overall, some 30% of the development time of the HP Companion
was devoted to testing and it is therefore Syberad's hope that it will work as intended.
The HP Companion installs but won't run. I get
an access violation and EConvert module error
The HP Companion had a problem running on computers in countries where the
decimal point default character was a comma rather than a full-stop;
English-speaking countries use the full-stop and the HP Companion worked fine on
computers set up in these countries.
This problem was fixed on the 8th January 2003 and a revised version was
uploaded to the download area of our web site.
Users of the original version can manually fix the problem by running the
Regional Settings applet in the Windows Control Panel and changing the decimal
symbol from a comma to a full-stop.
Please contact Syberad if you have any questions about this issue.
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© Syberad 2002
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