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The build-up of large-scale COVID-19 testing required an unprecedented effort of coordination within decentralized healthcare systems around the world. The aim of the study was to elucidate the challenges of vertical policy coordination between non-political actors at the national and regional levels regarding this policy issue, using Sweden as our case.

Interviews with key actors at the national and regional levels were analyzed using an adapted version of a conceptualization by Adam et al. (2019), depicting barriers to vertical policy coordination.

Our results show that the main issues in the Swedish context were related to parallel sovereignty and a vagueness regarding responsibilities and mandates as well as complex governmental structures and that this was exacerbated by the unfamiliarity and uncertainty of the policy issue. We conclude that understanding the interaction between the comprehensiveness and complexity of the policy issue and the institutional context is crucial to achieving effective vertical policy coordination.

Many studies have focused on countries’ overall pandemic responses, but in order to improve the outcome of future pandemics, it is also important to learn from more specific response measures.

Upholding assessment ethics are common concerns during annual public examination performance appraisal. Previous studies have focused more on examination stakeholder: testees outside proctors however, assessment ethics cannot be studied excluding proctors variables therefore, the study investigated consistency of a structural equation modelling of security, environment, professionalism, testing and assessment ethics.

Ex-post facto design was adopted. Simple random sampling technique was employed to choose 90 proctors drawn from 45 colleges. Proctors Examination Ethics Questionnaire (reliability = 0.86) was used to collect data for the study. Data collected were analysed using path analysis at 0.05 significant levels.

Out of the six hypothesised paths significantly explaining the consistency of the causal model. Test security, environment and professionalism accounted for both direct and indirect effects on assessment ethics. All model fit indices were established to explain testing and assessment model.

Few proctor variables were studied, therefore assessment ethics may not be explained other than through proctor variables considered in this study.

Assessment ethics may not be violated if test security, testing environment and professionalism are not cared for during test administration as shown in the study.

It added to knowledge base in ethical areas of assessment, a 21st-century proctors in upholding testing and assessment ethics, security, environment and professionalism are to be considered.

There was a positive causal effect of security, environment and professionalism on testing and assessment ethics among proctors in public examinations.

Testing business processes is crucial to assess the compliance of business process models with requirements. Automating this task optimizes testing efforts and reduces human error while also providing improvement insights for the business process modeling activity. The primary purposes of this paper are to conduct a literature review of Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) testing and formal verification and to propose the Business Process Evaluation and Research Framework for Enhancement and Continuous Testing (bPERFECT) framework, which aims to guide business process testing (BPT) research and implementation. Secondary objectives include (1) eliciting the existing types of testing, (2) evaluating their impact on efficiency and (3) assessing the formal verification techniques that complement testing.

The methodology used is based on Kitchenham's (2004) original procedures for conducting systematic literature reviews.

Results of this study indicate that three distinct business process model testing types can be found in the literature: black/gray-box, regression and integration. Testing and verification approaches differ in aspects such as awareness of test data, coverage criteria and auxiliary representations used. However, most solutions pose notable hindrances, such as BPMN element limitations, that lead to limited practicality.

The databases selected in the review protocol may have excluded relevant studies on this topic. More databases and gray literature could also be considered for inclusion in this review.

Three main originality aspects are identified in this study as follows: (1) the classification of process model testing types, (2) the future trends foreseen for BPMN model testing and verification and (3) the bPERFECT framework for testing business processes.

Awareness raising campaigns have been used to promote HIV prevention messages, including the expansion of HIV testing, but initiating such campaigns de novo can be costly. Both the Bronx, New York and Washington, DC have significant local HIV epidemics and a history of efforts to scale-up HIV testing. To build on prior HIV testing campaigns and create new messages based on consultation with diverse stakeholders, a partnership with a community-based clinical trial to enhance HIV testing and treatment was established. The purpose of this paper is to describe the history of HIV testing campaigns in the two jurisdictions, the awareness raising conducted in collaboration with the HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN) study (HPTN 065) and provide evidence of its effect in these two communities.

The foundation of prior campaigns allowed for expansion of social mobilization efforts to specific priority populations (gay men and other men who have sex with men), the most severely affected groups in both communities, and to expand the efforts to include clinical settings. New compelling and acceptable messages were shaped through engagement with community members and based on input from focus groups with target populations in each city.

By engaging the target population in the development of new messaging, HPTN 065 study successfully built on campaigns that were already underway in both jurisdictions and was able to use those messages and platforms to further normalize HIV testing.

Modifying and adapting existing messages saved time and resources, which can be important factors to consider in settings with limited resources or high media purchasing costs.

Efforts of this kind may ultimately help to decrease HIV transmission in large urban settings.

Worldwide efforts to identify individuals infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV) focus almost exclusively on community healthcare systems, thereby failing to reach high-risk populations and those with poor access to primary care. In the USA, community-based HCV testing policies and guidelines overlook correctional facilities, where HCV rates are believed to be as high as 40 percent. This is a missed opportunity: more than ten million Americans move through correctional facilities each year. Herein, the purpose of this paper is to examine HCV testing practices in the US correctional system, California and describe how universal opt-out HCV testing could expand early HCV detection, improve public health in correctional facilities and communities, and prove cost-effective over time.

A commentary on the value of standardizing screening programs across facilities by mandating all facilities (universal) to implement opt-out testing policies for all prisoners upon entry to the correctional facilities.

Current variability in facility-level testing programs results in inconsistent testing levels across correctional facilities, and therefore makes estimating the actual number of HCV-infected adults in the USA difficult. The authors argue that universal opt-out testing policies ensure earlier diagnosis of HCV among a population most affected by the disease and is more cost-effective than selective testing policies.

The commentary explores the current limitations of selective testing policies in correctional systems and provides recommendations and implications for public health and correctional organizations.

This paper aims to gauge developers’ perspectives regarding the participation of the public and anonymous crowd testers worldwide, with a range of varied experiences. It also aims to gather their needs that could reduce their concerns of dealing with the public crowd testers and increase the opportunity of using the crowdtesting platforms.

An online exploratory survey was conducted to gather information from the participants, which included 50 mobile application developers from various countries with diverse experiences across Android and iOS mobile platforms.

The findings revealed that a significant proportion (90%) of developers is potentially willing to perform testing via the public crowd testers worldwide. This on condition that several fundamental features were available, which enable them to achieve more realistic tests without artificial environments on large numbers of devices. The results also demonstrated that a group of developers does not consider testing as a serious job that they have to pay for, which can affect the gig-economy and global market.

This paper provides new insights for future research in the study of how acceptable it is to work with public and anonymous crowd workers, with varying levels of experience, to perform tasks in different domains and not only in software testing. In addition, it will assist individual or small development teams who have limited resources or who do not have thousands of testers in their private testing community, to perform large-scale testing of their products.

This paper aims to support small mobile application development teams or companies performing testing on a large variety of operating systems versions and mobile devices to ensure their seamless working.

This paper proposes a “hybrid crowdsourcing” method that leverages the power of public crowd testers. This leads to generating a novel crowdtesting workflow Developer/Tester- Crowdtesting (DT-CT) that focuses on developers and crowd testers as key elements in the testing process without the need for intermediate as managers or leaders. This workflow has been used in a novel crowdtesting platform (AskCrowd2Test). This platform enables testing the compatibility of mobile devices and applications at two different levels, high-level (device characteristics) or low-level (code). Additionally, a “crowd-powered knowledge base” has been developed that stores testing results, relevant issues and their solutions.

The comparison of the presented DT-CT workflow with the common and most recent crowdtesting workflows showed that DT-CT may positively impact the testing process by reducing time-consuming and budget spend because of the direct interaction of developers and crowd testers.

To authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to propose crowdtesting workflow based on developers and public crowd testers without crowd managers or leaders, which light the beacon for the future research in this field. Additionally, this work is the first that authorizes crowd testers with a limited level of experience to participate in the testing process, which helps in studying the behaviors and interaction of end-users with apps and obtains more concrete results.

This paper tests whether Bayesian A/B testing yields better decisions that traditional Neyman-Pearson hypothesis testing. It proposes a model and tests it using a large, multiyear Google Analytics (GA) dataset.

This paper is an empirical study. Competing A/B testing models were used to analyze a large, multiyear dataset of GA dataset for a firm that relies entirely on their website and online transactions for customer engagement and sales.

Bayesian A/B tests of the data not only yielded a clear delineation of the timing and impact of the intellectual property fraud, but calculated the loss of sales dollars, traffic and time on the firm’s website, with precise confidence limits. Frequentist A/B testing identified fraud in bounce rate at 5% significance, and bounces at 10% significance, but was unable to ascertain fraud at the standard significance cutoffs for scientific studies.

None within the scope of the research plan.

Bayesian A/B tests of the data not only yielded a clear delineation of the timing and impact of the IP fraud, but calculated the loss of sales dollars, traffic and time on the firm’s website, with precise confidence limits.

Bayesian A/B testing can derive economically meaningful statistics, whereas frequentist A/B testing only provide p-value’s whose meaning may be hard to grasp, and where misuse is widespread and has been a major topic in metascience. While misuse of p-values in scholarly articles may simply be grist for academic debate, the uncertainty surrounding the meaning of p-values in business analytics actually can cost firms money.

There is very little empirical research in e-commerce that uses Bayesian A/B testing. Almost all corporate testing is done via frequentist Neyman-Pearson methods.

Community-based HIV testing and counselling (HTC) has been recommended for improving access to prevention, care, and treatment services in at-risk populations. Earlier systematic reviews and meta-analyses have been undertaken, but due to some methodological limitations, their findings do not yet provide a practical significance. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the recent evidence of the efficacy of community-based HTC approaches on the uptake of HTC in at-risk populations.

The database of PubMed online, Science Direct, the Lancet Global Health, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, and Google Scholar were systematically searched using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines to obtain empirical papers published between March 2013 and December 2015.

Of 600 collected papers, there were 6 cluster randomized trials papers which met the inclusion criteria. Compared to the health facilities-based HTC, community-based HTC approaches have been shown to improve the uptake of HIV testing from 5.8 to 37 per cent, and improve HIV testing in men and their partners together from 6.8 to 34 per cent. The community approaches also detected lower HIV-positive cases (0.29 per cent as compared to 4 per cent), improved access to treatment services from 0.3 to 25 per cent, demonstrated higher cluster differentiation 4 count in newly diagnosed patients (median of 400-438 cells/µl), and increased the rate of first-time HIV testing from 9 to 11.8 per cent. With respect to social and behavioural outcomes, community-based HTC increased social norms for HIV testing by 6 per cent (95 per cent CI 3-9), decreased multiple sex partners by 55 per cent (95 per cent CI 42-73), lowered casual sex by 45 per cent (95 per cent CI 33-62), increased knowledge about HIV (83.2 vs 28.9 per cent), improved positive attitudes towards HIV patients (73.0 vs 34.3 per cent), and increased the use of condoms (28.0 vs 12.3 per cent).

Community-based HTC combined with behavioural interventions have been found to be more effective in increasing the uptake of HIV testing as well as other outcomes as compared to the conventional health facilities-based testing and counselling approaches.

The diagnostic process after referral to an acute psychiatric treatment facility consists of more than the clinical investigation and laboratory tests. Psychometric tests in a broad range of languages may be such an augmentation of our diagnostic armamentarium. Whether such tests are in use, and how they are distributed among different patient categories was the aim of the study. All referrals in one calendar year (N=1168), as they are depicted in the hospital computerized medical records, were investigated. Fifty-six (6.1%) out of 926 ethnic Norwegians and six (3.0%) out of 198 non-Western immigrants were tested, whereas none of the 44 Western immigrants. The difference between ethnic Norwegians and the immigrants was significant (Z=-3.05 and P=0.002). Psychometric tests were thus almost not in use, and even lesser so in immigrants. Mean number of resident days was higher among those tested, 11.7 (SD=11.2) versus those not tested, 7.4 (SD=10.4) days, t=2.97 and P=0.004. Length of stay for ethnic Norwegians did not differ from that for non-Western immigrants 11.4 versus 11.7, respectively. The patients tested were older than those not tested. Mean age was 43.0 (SD=14.4) versus 38.8 (SD=12.1), with a t=2.65 and P=0.03. The difference in resident days between all immigrants and ethnic Norwegians was significant with a Z=−2.232 and P=0.026. Level of testing was higher in ethnic Norwegians, and the tested patients stayed longer, maybe indicating more room for testing. Whether this low test-activity influences treatment quality is an unsettled question.