• Sustainability is defined as a trustworthiness attribute in SW architecture design. • Design of 4 SW architectures for an indoor environmental IoT system in the Edge. • Response time and energy consumption experimental evaluation report of 30 experiments. • 11 findings for the green and performance trustworthy design of IoT SW architectures. • The 30 experiments’ dataset with response and computing times and energy consumption. Identifying and implementing sustainable solutions to address the high energy consumption of ICT solutions has become a necessity in Industry 4.0. Therefore, the construction of Green software products is a priority for its customers, who need to trust that their software products are sustainable to fulfil the sustainability policies of their companies. We present sustainability as a key attribute in addressing the trustworthiness of software architectures. This work is focused on IoT monitoring software architectures in the Edge, since IoT energy consumption is a critical issue for sustainability due to the huge amount of power connections required by IoT devices and the high energy consumption needed for processing and transmitting their data. We present an exploratory research study conducted to determine how to design trustworthy IoT monitoring software architectures in the Edge considering two critical attributes, performance and sustainability. Specifically, this study evaluates how the configuration of the components that comprise Edge IoT monitoring architectures may influence their energy consumption and response time. This work presents the experimental results of the exploratory study and its findings, in which the energy consumption and response time of four different software architecture configurations of an indoor environmental monitoring IoT system are measured. From the execution of thirty experiments, this study reveals the importance of balancing the monitoring activities between the Edge nodes and servers, and it indicates that it is possible to construct trustworthy IoT monitoring software architectures in the Edge with software components that reduce both energy consumption and response time.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and Internet of Things (IoT) systems are mainly in charge of sensing, acting, computing, communicating, managing, and evolving the software integrated in devices. The wide variety of technologies and devices that support IoT systems and the decentralization of services through infrastructures such as fog or edge computing, has led companies to complex business models. These complex business models require decentralized and business-aware architectures driven by the Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) that define the tasks involved in IoT workflows. Well-defined and established IoT BPM are required for companies to remain competitive. However, there are still challenges that must be addressed to smoothly integrate IoT BPM and their architectures into a digitally native company’s daily workflow. In this paper, we present an IoT architecture to support a smart IoT BPM that focuses on addressing the challenges of scheduling, resource allocation, and state management of Smart IoT systems. In particular, the IDOVEN company’s adoption of this Smart IoT BMP in an IoT system for remote digital early cardiac arrhythmia detection and diagnosis is illustrated which has been validated with 2188 patients across the 7 continents.

Today, there is a great variety of learning techniques and methodologies: traditional lectures, role-plays, group dynamics, project-based learning, simulations, educational games, and so on. Regarding technology-enhanced learning, the educational usage of virtual reality is innovative and the initiatives carried out suggest that this technology is an appealing medium for young people that facilitates an active and effective teaching. On the other hand, agile methodologies are widely spread across the IT industry and it is necessary to look for the best techniques to learn them in the most appropriate way. This contribution presents a virtual reality serious video game, named ScrumVR, which aims to teach the key aspects of the most widespread agile methodology for software development: Scrum. To do so, this video game tries to gets players closer to their first weeks of work within a Scrum team. The empirical results, gathered through a case study conducted with 78 software engineering students and supported by instruments, such as prepost tests and questionnaires, indicate that ScrumVR facilitates the learning of the roles, meetings, artifacts, and practices employed in Scrum, and contributes to enhance student's motivation and the whole learning experience.

Abstract For information and communication technology to reach its goal of zero emissions in 2050, power consumption must be reduced, including the energy consumed by software. To develop sustainability-aware software, green metrics have been implemented to estimate the energy consumed by the execution of an application. However, they have a rebound energy consumption effect because they require an application to be executed to estimate the energy consumed after each change. To address this problem, it is necessary to construct energy estimation models that do not require the execution of applications. This work addresses this problem by constructing a green model based on size, complexity and duplicated lines to estimate the energy consumed by model-view-controller applications without their execution. This article defines a model constructed based on 52 applications. The results were accurate in twelve applications, which showed that the joule estimation was very close to reality, avoiding the energy consumed by the execution of applications.

Nowadays, software systems remain useful and competitive; entail the inevitable need to change over time and to be adapted to new technologies, platforms, and architectures. These quick changes imply following systematic, automated, or standardised processes that provide recommendations and guidelines to architects during software architecture reconstruction. Considerable research work on architecture reconstruction has been conducted. However, it needs to be studied thoroughly to determine what are the common activities and elements to reconstruct software architectures, and to define a reference process for systematically guiding the evolution of software architectures. This work addresses the need for defining a process for software architecture reconstruction called software improvement in the reconstruction of architectures (SIRA). This process has been rigorously designed from the results of a systematic literature review and a small survey of related work. As a result, SIRA integrates and extends previous research and can be conceived as a reference process to reconstruct software architectures in a semi-automated way. In addition, this work also determines the common elements of the architecture reconstruction process: (i) techniques and activities; (ii) architectural elements, patterns, and attributes; (iii) mechanisms and strategies; and (iv) the automation and recommendation tasks of the process.

Abstract Cyber‐physical systems (CPS) refer to the next generation of Information and Communication Technology systems that mainly integrate sensing, computing, and communication to monitor, control, and interact with a physical process to provide citizens and businesses with smart applications and services: health care, smart homes, smart cities, and so on. In recent years, health care has become one of the most important services due to the continuous increases in its costs. This has motivated extensive research onhealth care CPS, and some of that research has focused on describing the software architecture behind these systems. However, there is no secondary study to consolidate the research. This paper aims to identify and compare existing research on software architectures for health care CPS in order to determine successful solutions that could guide other architects and practitioners in their health care projects. We conducted a systematic literature review and compared the selected studies based on a characterization schema. The research synthesis results in a knowledge base ofsoftware architectures for health care CPS, describing their stakeholders, functional and non‐functional features, quality attributes architectural views and styles, components, and implementation technologies. This systematic literature review also identifies research gaps, such as the lack of open common platforms, as well as directions for future research.

Abstract Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) demands upfront long‐term investment in (i) designing a common set of core‐assets and (ii) managing variability across the products from the same family. When anticipated changes in these core‐assets have been predicted with certain accuracy, SPLE has proved significant improvements. However, when large/complex software product line projects have to deal with changing market conditions, alternatives to supplement SPLE are required. Agile Software Development (ASD) may be an alternative, as agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. However, when the aim is to scale Agile projects up to effectively manage reusability and variability across the products from the same family, alternatives to supplement agility are also required. As a result, a new approach called Agile Product Line Engineering (APLE) advocates integrating SPLE and ASD with the aim of addressing these gaps. APLE is an emerging approach, which implies that organizations have to face several barriers to achieve its adoption. This paper presents a systematic literature review of experiences and practices on APLE, in which the key findings uncover important challenges about how to integrate the SPLE model with an agile iterative approach to fully put APLE into practice. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The increasing complexity of software systems requires a continuous revisions process in order to correct errors or to add new functionalities. However, the nature of some systems makes unfeasible their stopping to integrate changes. Dynamic evolution of types is a feature that provides support for changing completely at runtime the types that a system is composed of. Thus, a system is able to integrate new types, or to modify/remove existing ones, while it is running. In software architecture, these types are component specifications, and its instantiations, component instances. This paper presents a reflective approach for providing dynamic evolution of component types and instances in a decentralized way. Each type can be evolved separately from others, and each one of its instances evolves asynchronously, only after finishing their running transactions. The approach is reflective since it dynamically provides editable specifications of the type to evolve, and reflects changes on both types and instances while they are running.

The complexity and the big size of current software systems are challenges to be faced in software development. In the last few years, these challenges have increased the effort required to develop such large software systems. As a result, students must be able to develop these systems using approaches that reduce their development costs. Two of these approaches are Software Architectures and the Aspect-Oriented Software Development. However, in order to acquire skills in these approaches, students must put them into practice in realistic software projects. For this reason, we propose a reverse engineering method to learn these approaches by using open-source projects.

Functional requirements must be tested to check if the system executes as the end user expects. Validation environments must be able to test multiple kinds of applications that belong to different domains and technologies. Since this wide validation spectrum is very difficult to cope with, validation environments are usually specialized in domains, programming languages, technologies, etc. However, it is possible to identify that the validation processes for different systems share a set of commonalities and variability points. This is a perfect framework to apply the software product line approach to develop domain specific validation environments for testing specific products. In this paper we present our experience of applying software product lines to support the variability of validation environments. We illustrate our product-line experience of developing two domain-specific validation environments for two different case studies: digital TV and slots machines.

Currently most software systems have a distributed nature. The development of distributed and mobile software is a complex task. As a result, it is important to take into account distribution and mobility from the early stages of the development process instead of delaying their considerations to the implementation stage. In this work, we present how to consider distribution and mobility features at the architectural level.

Currently, software architecture is presented as a solution for the design and development of complex and large software systems. One of the main advantages of the use of software architectures is reuse [1]. Software architectures allow us to reuse software at different levels of abstraction (simple components, architectural styles, etc.) for different purposes (general and domainspecific). Reuse improves the time and cost invested in the development and maintenance processes of software.

Recently, increased attention has been paid to how to establish and strengthen the relationships between requirements and architectural design. In particular, how the process must encompass changes to requirements over time and their effects upon a system's architecture. We sketch our work-in-progress in this field, which we concern about a methodology to guide the architecture development from the inception.