Software start-ups are fundamentally different from traditional software development firms and boutique software services enterprises of all sizes. They develop software products with strict time and resource constraints and are focused on beating competitors to the market. They fail fast and often pivot their business models several times in their lifetimes. Their approach to designing, developing, testing, and shipping software products differs vastly from the established software engineering principles that emerged during the field’s earlier decades. One such principle is Software Quality Assurance. Start-ups tend to do away with procedures that ensure that their products are of the utmost quality. Instead, they focus on shipping their products to market as fast as possible, testing these products vis-a-vis real-life customers and use-cases, and eventually improving these products, repeating the process several times over. We hypothesize that this reluctance to adhere to software quality assurance principles can have adverse effects on the health of start-ups or their products. This paper investigates this hypothesis through over 20 questions presented to CEOs, CTOs, Technical Leads, and Product Managers of several start-ups. These questions focus on start-ups’ motivations, their levels of understanding and appreciation of software quality assurance principles, and the limitations they face due to time and resource constraints. Our research’s results indicate the surveyed start-ups’ problems are partially due to the absence of robust software quality assurance practices within their processes.

Control system plays a critical function as one of the essential bedrocks of contemporary social development. Differential equations are time-based equations. The analysis of these equations according to time-domain, is what the theory of modern control is based on. It uses a state-space method which allows direct design in the time-domain. With the state-space method, many controllers can be designed optimally. LQG is one of these controllers. This controller is covered much in the literature. Despite this, not many works cover the ball-on-sphere system. Therefore, the research designed an optimal LQG controller for the system of ball-on-sphere. System dynamics were first investigated and the mathematical model was derived. After that, the system was linearized and then the state-space representation was obtained. Using this representation, the controller was designed and applied to the system for control. The control was done based on the specified desired system performance. Finally, the controller's performance was analyzed. Results obtained showed that the controller met the desired system performance. The controller satisfied the at least 80% performance requirement with θ_x is 82.35% and θ_y is 82.95% less than their respective unregulated settling times. It was also observed that minimizing the total control energy leads to maximizing the total transient energy. Another finding was that all states played role in regulating the controller to the desired system performance. Unfortunately, a settling time (of the ball's angles) of less than 1.00 sec could not be realized. The realized performance is 2.35% and 2.95% more than the desired performance in x and y directions, respectively, for the ball’s angles settling time. This research is significant because it is the first to design an LQG controller for the ball-on-sphere system. Therefore, bridging the existing gap in the literature is the value of this research.

High-performance concrete is a specialized series of concrete designed to provide superior mechanical and physical properties that cannot be achieved through the conventional design. Using high-performance concrete in the construction field can reduce the dead weight, provide a longer span, and increase the service life. In this paper, a full experimental program is conducted to study the effect of glass and carbon fibers on the flexural behavior of reinforced concrete (RC) beams. A total of 15 RC beam specimens are prepared and divided into four main groups according to their added fiber materials, which are (S- Steel fiber), and E (E- Glass fiber), carbon fiber, and S-Glass with carbon fiber. All the reinforced fibers are used at 1.5% of the cement weight. The beams are reinforced using the fiber materials at the hinging zone then tested under concentrated static load placed at the mid-span. The results show that using high-performance fibers can improve the ultimate load capacity, ductility, and absorption energy of the RC beams.

In recent years, the retail market industry has taken a broad form to sell the products online and also to give the opportunity to customers to provide their valuable feedbacks, suggestions and recommendations. The opinion summarization and classification systems extract and identify a range of opinions about different online available products in a large text-based review set. This paper addresses and reviews the concepts of automatic identification of the sentiments expressed in the English text for Amazon and Flipkart products using Random Forest and K-Nearest Neighbor techniques. It presents a detailed comparative study of such existing sentiment analysis algorithms and methodologies on the basis of five key parameters. It results in evaluating their performance in terms of parameter usage and contributions. The paper also discusses their experimental results and challenges found. Therefore, this study shows the maximum usage of feature extraction, positive-negative sentiment, Amazon web source, mobile phone for a large set of reviews in the existing algorithms.