Dear colleagues I am please to announce that I have just released another tutorial to AG-Central called "Improving your AG in Preparation for a Quality Assurance Test" (http://agcentral.org/help/tutorial/qualityhelper/).
As some of you might be unaware, I have been working on setting up a process to "Quality Assure" Access Grids, based loosely on the UK's "Access Grid Support Centre" quality assurance process. To help with this QA process, I have written a tutorial that is designed to help users and operators of the Access Grid to improve their local node quality. By improving the quality of each AG node, the overall quality of the Access Grid experience will improve for everyone, both local and remote participants. Covered within this tutorial are ways of ensuring that your audio, video, networking and shared applications are of high standard. This tutorial is generic in nature. It purposefully doesn't depend on your choice of operating system or video/audio hardware. Instead, we focus on basic concepts required to pass a quality assurance test. Quality assurance certification allows other sites to connect to your Access Grid node with confidence. In addition to this tutorial, I have also written a "Quality Assurance Access Grid Testing" document (http://agcentral.org/Members/jbell/qatesting/agtest) that will be used to quality assure Access Grids. (Please note that this document is still in BETA format and requires some additional changes to be made. I recently under went a QA test by Manchester University to ensure that my Access Grid here at CQU was at an acceptable level. From this, it is hopped that I will be able to Quality Assure other Access Grids within Australia shortly. As soon as we have the ability to record results and QA acknowledgments can be listed at AG central. As well as QA'ing AG's within Australia, I hope to be able to "train" other testers so that a global QA process might also be achieved. The reason for this QA process is to try and improve the quality of Access Grids, which in turn will improve the overall user experience of Access Grids. We have all participate in a session at one time or another where we connected with a "Poor" Access Grid in which caused a very poor video conferencing experience. This process will hopefully ensure that a QA'ed AG is of a high standard thereby increasing dramatically the probability of having a good AG session. If you have any questions about this process, ways to be involved or have any recommendations on improving the documentations, please feel free to drop me an email. Thanks very much for your time, Jason. -------------------------------------------- Jason Bell, B.I.T. B. Info. Tech. (Honours) Student Network Engineer Information Technology Division Central Queensland University High Performance Computing Support Officer Central Queensland University Research Assistant to the Nonlinear Intelligent Systems Research Group Faculty of Informatics & Communication Central Queensland University E-mail : j.b...@cqu.edu.au Phone : 07 4930 9229 -------------------------------------------- Patience is a virtue. But if I wanted Patience, I would have become a Doctor. --------------------------------------------
