Abstract This research commentary explores how requirements engineering (RE) can contribute to achieving digital humanism in AI-enabled healthcare, ensuring that technological innovation is balanced with human values. Drawing on insights from a panel discussion at the REWBAH’25 (RE for Well-Being, Aging, and Health) workshop, we identify four key themes: the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration, the nuances of cultural and individual differences, human-AI collaborative decision-making, and the challenge of balancing technological advancement with sustainability and emotional considerations. We argue that RE is well suited for addressing these issues because it brings together diverse stakeholder perspectives to define what systems should achieve and how they should be used. In this paper, we build on digital humanism principles, on RE-relevant frameworks for AI, and on the above themes to frame the role of RE in supporting human-centred healthcare. We highlight open challenges, and outline five promising research directions and related research questions to guide future research and practice in RE, aiming to ensure that AI-enabled healthcare systems better reflect the values of digital humanism.

This study explores the integration of futuristic thinking and soft skills development within educational settings, emphasizing their potential role in equipping students to navigate the complexities of the modern workforce. In this paper, we report our insights captured from both higher education teachers and K-12 students. The findings from two experimental sessions-one involving teachers and the other with K-12 students-demonstrate not only high levels of engagement and satisfaction but also the adaptability and relevance of these methodologies across different age groups and educational stages. These results underscore the effectiveness of integrating futuristic thinking with soft skills training, highlighting their potential to be widely adopted in educational curricula.

Adopting Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools in software engineering represents a shift in how tasks like coding and idea generation are approached. This paper investigates uni-versity students' perceptions and expectations regarding the use of Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Copilot in software engineering. To achieve this, we conducted a questionnaire study with volunteer participants studying at Uppsala University in Sweden, resulting in a total of 127 responses. These responses were about the usage preferences, motivations for adoption, per-ceived benefits, encountered challenges, and suggested improve-ment of these tools. The findings reveal that 16 % of participants have never used a Generative AI tool, while of those who have used such tools predominantly use ChatGPT3.5. Among users of Generative AI, respondents reported benefits such as code optimization and idea generation, alongside challenges such as inaccuracies in generated content and understanding user intent. Despite these challenges, participants perceive the integration of Generative AI tools as transformative for traditional software engineering practices. The results of this paper offer insights into the practical use of AI tools and suggestions for improving their functionality, thereby influencing the future direction of software engineering education.

Software sustainability is becoming critical due to the increased use of software systems. Despite gaining attention from researchers over the last decade, there remains no consensus within the software engineering community on how to approach sustainability. We believe that this confusion arises from an ambiguity regarding the integration of sustainability into the software development process, with many suggesting its consideration as a component of software quality. In this paper, we advocate for a shift in perspective, emphasizing the importance of considering the development process of software systems. We propose that sustainability should be the starting point and cornerstone of software development.

The relevance of sustainable software is growing, drawing attention from both academic researchers and practitioners. Understanding its impact on end-users' perceived quality, often termed quality-in-use, is crucial. This paper aims to explore the relationship between software sustainability and quality-in-use as reported in literature. We conducted a systematic mapping study using Scopus, one of the largest peer-reviewed databases, to explore this relationship. Twenty-seven papers were selected and analyzed based on publication year, source, application domain, research type, empirical type, sustainability dimensions, quality-in-use attributes, and the relationship between sustainability and quality-in-use. Results indicate this area of study is in its early stages, with few papers published annually. Conferences were the primary publication channels, with healthcare being the most examined application domain. Papers were categorized into solution proposals and evaluation research, with over half undergoing empirical evaluation. The environmental dimension, particularly power consumption, was the most studied sustainability dimension. Quality-in-use was explored through various attributes, with 63% of the selected papers identifying a relationship between sustainability and quality-in-use. This mapping study highlights the lack of a common definition within the software engineering community regarding software sustainability, and calls for further research to clarify the impact of sustainable software products on quality-in-use.

Sustainability has become a significant concern in software systems like websites, driven by their increasing adoption and environmental impact. As website usage grows, so does their energy consumption and carbon footprint, affecting their environmental sustainability. Understanding the relationship be-tween usability and environmental sustainability is essential for designing web sites that meet user needs while minimizing environmental impact. This paper examines this relationship, focusing on popular sports websites due to their substantial internet traffic. We evaluated ten English-language sports web sites for their environmental sustainability and usability using Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics. Our assessment considered factors such as Ecological Accommodation, Content, Operation, Multimedia, and HTTP Requests. The findings reveal a strong negative correlation between usability and sustainability, suggesting that improvements in usability may increase environmental impact and vice versa. This study's insights can inform website de-velopers in creating digital platforms that are both usable and environmentally sustainable.

Teaching astronomy to children has the potential to develop their imagination and critical thinking and might encourage them to pursue a career in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) related fields. Gamified mobile applications are tools that could be used to teach effectively astronomy concepts to children by simplifying them and making the learning experience fun and engaging. This study analyzed and assessed the specifications of 6 gamification-based applications for astronomy education, covering their content and technical features. The scoring system assigned a score with a rating from very high to very low for each of the applications. None of the applications scored a very high rating, in either the content or the technical features. The technical features have an overall lower score relative to the content. We discussed the implications of our findings in the paper and suggested recommendations for the developers of future astronomy-related applications.

The increasing adoption of technology in the classroom offers several advantages, but also challenges all stakeholders, including instructors, students and decision makers. E-learning has gained momentum, especially in the last two years with the onset of the pandemic, forcing lectures to migrate to the internet and requiring new methodologies to support knowledge transfer between instructors and students. Thus, to verify the situation of Angola in relation to practices and methodologies related to the teaching of informatics, we search to identify existing practices through the application of a questionnaire to teachers of informatics subjects in secondary schools, colleges, and universities of the country. This study aims to discover the effects of using technology as a support for teaching computer science classes, including software engineering, programming, and computer networks. Therefore, 82 participants were involved in this study answering an online survey. Results shown that, although digital technologies are revolutionizing the world and consequently education, institutions in Angola still face several challenges, such as, lack of laboratories for practical classes, lack of electricity, lack of internet, and lack of computers for students. In addition, the adoption of technologies in the classroom proved ineffective, perhaps because of the absence of determining factors for technological inclusion by the institutions, or even because of the training of teachers in the area, whether weak, inefficient, or incomplete. In this sense, although the use of software in the classroom facilitates the acquisition of knowledge, there are still several barriers to be overcome for this to happen broadly. This study concludes that it is necessary to consider technology as a basic need for the facilitating role it plays in society.

Sensitive patient data is generated from a variety of sources and then transferred to a cloud for processing. Therefore, it is exposed to security and privacy and may lead to an increase in communication costs. Edge computing will ease computing pressure through distributed computational capabilities while improving security and privacy. In this paper, we propose a Federated PSN (FPSN) model where the model is moved directly to the edge to minimize computation and communication costs. PSN has been applied as a successful approach in categorizing and diagnosing patients based on similarities against some clinical and non-clinical features. Our proposed model distributes processing at each edge node, then fuses the constructed PSN matrices at the cloud premises, which significantly reduce the model’s training and inference time and ensures quick model updates with the local client/nodes. In this paper, we propose: (i) an algorithm to evaluate patient’s data similarity at the edge; and (ii) an algorithm to implement the federated similarity network fusion at the Cloud. We conducted a set of experiments to evaluate our FPSN model against other machine learning algorithms using a COVID-19 dataset. The results obtained prove that the FPSN model accuracy is higher than the distributed PSNs at various edges and higher than the accuracies of other classification models.

Software engineering courses are characterized by heavy theoretical and complex concepts that might be challenging to teach while keeping students engaged in the classroom, which might impact them from pursuing software engineering careers later. Software engineering is well known to be a male dominated field even though the first software engineer was a woman. Research has shown that storytelling can be used to improve students and teachers engagement in primary and secondary education. However, there is a lack of research on storytelling application and efficiency in higher education to teach complex concepts. This study explored the impact of combining a story with lecture on undergraduate female students in a software engineering course. We investigated the following hypothesis: Combining storytelling with lectures can improve the female students interest in software engineering. A questionnaire study has been conducted with 24 female undergraduate students in the classroom. Students had no prior knowledge on software engineering before the study. The questionnaire was designed to be simple to motivate students to participate in the study. It contained three questions to capture the interest of female students in pursuing a career in software engineering: prior to the lecture, after the lecture, and after the story. The results showed that the story incorporated in the lecture had great impact on female students perception about software engineering. Combining storytelling with software engineering lectures seems a promising tool to engage female students in higher education and increase their interest in pursuing a career in software engineering.

The software engineering community celebrated, in 2018, the 50th anniversary of what is considered to be the official start of the profession of software engineering. Software engineering is a young and promising discipline which is still under development and improvement. This is reflected when teaching software engineering in higher education. The aim of this study is to investigate the challenges and perspectives of software engineering education. To do so, a questionnaire study was conducted. 21 software engineering faculty and experts in teaching software engineering related courses participated in this study. The questionnaire contained demographic questions, questions related to students’ engagement and to different methodologies adopted by respondents in the classroom. Results showed that the majority of respondents found engaging students in software engineering courses to be the biggest challenge they faced in the classroom. Almost half of the participants found difficulties designing practical activities for students. Results also revealed that the problem-based learning approach is the most used in software engineering lectures, followed by gamification techniques and role-playing which are new trends used to engage students. Moreover, the majority of the participants considered that the adoption of new teaching methodologies in the classroom produced high impact in the students’ learning experience. Based on the outcomes of this questionnaire study, a conceptual model to engage students in software engineering courses is proposed. For future work, complementary studies should be implemented to evaluate the proposed model in a real-world scenarios including its effect on the achievement of learning outcomes.

In this paper, we present a new way of controlling drone by using a P300-based brain-computer interface that supports the military field as assistive technology. The main idea is that the drone can be controlled by the soldier's brain activity using electroencephalogram (EEG) to chase other drones and discover hidden enemy areas. We assumed that we have two able-bodied users, the first role played by a user as a soldier aims to control the drone by using brain activity and the other role played by another user as an enemy aims to control manually the drone using Python program. This scenario allowed us to test the ability of chasing the enemy's drone. The results for this application was evaluated by the ability of the user to calibrate very well with the software and the ability of the program to receive and send commands using EEG signal to the drone for execution.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health disorder that is triggered by exposure to traumatic events. PTSD is associated with severe emotional disturbances that impair the person's functional abilities like social interactions and the ability to work. If left untreated, PTSD can even lead to suicide. Even though PTSD is a manageable and treatable disorder, many people are not able to get the appropriate treatment, either because of cost problems, stigma, mobility problems, or other causes. Since mobile phones are devices that are owned by a large number of people, m-health is an aspect that can facilitate access to the needed treatment and care for PTSD in many ways, one being via mobile applications (apps). Using gamification features in apps can be helpful in the management and treatment of PTSD. This paper identifies a list of 24 gamification-based apps for PTSD, 14 Android apps and 10 iOS apps, and assesses their functionalities and characteristics. The results highlighted mainly the need for more consideration of security aspects, incorporation of medical devices and physical indicators, and the apps' availability in multiple languages.

Weak requirements engineering can lead to the failure of software projects, unstable software products and unclear designation of responsibilities in software projects. Requirements engineering education is essential for preparing students for the real world of software engineering, especially the proper handling of requirements. Students should be able to elicit, analyze, specify, and validate known and unknown requirements from stakeholders with different backgrounds. Role playing has been suggested by many researchers as a pedagogical technique for teaching requirements engineering efficiently. However, there is hardly any empirical evaluation demonstrating its efficiency. The objective of this study is to assess the use of role playing and role reversal in an intensive requirements engineering course. This paper reports our experience teaching requirements engineering courses using role playing for four sessions of two hours each. The results demonstrate the efficiency of role playing as a tool for teaching requirements engineering over short durations, and for creating student engagement during the course.

The ongoing transformation in healthcare requires the creation of agile systems to meet the growing needs of patients. An approach to develop such systems requires the elicitation of end-users’ perspectives to software development life circle. The current requirements development process does not emphasis on the importance of end-users’ participation in the requirements elicitation phase. The present study proposes an approach utilizing Service-Dominant (S-D) logic framework to contribute to the co-design of connected health services. Value co-creation practices when combined with requirements engineering best practices can contribute towards the development of usable software for connected healthcare systems.

Abstract Connected health applications are efficient tools to improve health care services. The aim of this paper is to define a reusable requirements repository (catalog) for sustainable connected health applications based on the main related software engineering standards, e‐health technology standards, and literature. The catalog contains requirements which cover the individual, social, environmental, and technical dimensions of sustainability. The requirements presented in this paper can be very useful to connected health application stakeholders and can be adapted to specific m‐health applications. Moreover, the requirements catalog can be used to generate a checklist of requirements to evaluate and audit connected health applications. An application example is presented to show that the evaluation of connected health applications using the generated checklist is realistic.

Clinical decision support system (CDSS) is a technology designed to assist physicians and medical stuff with clinical decision-making tasks. It aims to better the safety and quality of patient care, improve patient care treatments and outcomes, decrease the dependence on memory, lower error rates, and decrease response time. CDSS is not intended to replace clinician judgment, but it supports users with the detection and prevention of possible risks to patient safety and encouraging the appropriate usage of evidence-based practice and guidelines. The benefits of the CDSSs contribute in increasing the number of e-health applications in recent years. Cardiology healthcare institutions are adopting such systems in their departments in order to assist cardiologists when making their decisions. This study proposes a set of cardiac DSS requirements and measures the influence of these requirements on software product quality using the ISO/IEC 25010 software quality model. A checklist of cardiac DSS requirements is also presented. As a result, Functional suitability, Reliability, Performance efficiency and Operability external characteristics were identified as the most influenced by cardiac DSS requirements.

Requirements Engineering (RE) includes processes intended to elicit, analyse, specify and validate systems and software requirements throughout the software life cycle. Mastering the principles of RE is key to achieving the goals of better, cheaper and quicker systems and software development projects. It is also important to be prepared to work with remote teammates, as distributed and global projects are becoming more common. This paper presents an experiment with a total of 31 students from two universities in Spain and Morocco who were assigned to either a co-located or a distributed team. Both traditional and reuse-based requirements specification techniques were applied by the participants to produce requirements documents. Their outcomes were then analysed, and the approaches were compared from the point of view of their effect on a set of performance-based and perception-based variables in co-located and distributed settings. We found significant differences in only productivity (Z = −2.320, p = 0.020) and difficulty (Z = −2.124, p = 0.034) as regards the scores attained for non-reuse and reuse conditions, both in the co-located modality. Our findings show that, in general, the participants attained similar results for requirements specification when using the two strategies in both distributed and non-distributed environments. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Evaluating software product quality (SPQ) is an important task to ensure the quality of software products. In this paper a systematic mapping study was performed to summarize the existing SPQ evaluation (SPQE) approaches in literature and to classify the selected studies according to seven classification criteria: SPQE approaches, research types, empirical types, data sets used in the empirical evaluation of these studies, artifacts, SQ models, and SQ characteristics. Publication channels and trends were also identified. 57 papers were selected. The results show that the main publication sources of the papers identified were journals. Data mining techniques are the most frequently approaches reported in literature. Solution proposals were the main research type identified. The majority of the selected papers were history-based evaluations using existing data, which were mainly obtained from open source software projects and domain specific projects. Source code was the main artifacts used by SPQE approaches. Well-known SQ models were mentioned by half of the selected papers and reliability is the SQ characteristic through which SPQE was mainly achieved. SPQE-related subjects seem to attract more interest from researchers since the past years.

Software quality requirements (SQR) play a central role in software quality (SQ) success. The importance of mastering SQR can be seen as obvious, however, when it comes to customer satisfaction, end-users are often dissatisfied with SQ. In this paper, a systematic mapping study aims to summarize SQR research by answering nine mapping questions. In total, 51 articles were selected and classified according to multiple criteria: publication source, publication year, research type, research approach, contribution type of SQR literature, requirements engineering activity, well-known SQ model, software artifact and SQR type. The results show an increased interest in SQR research in recent years and reveal that conferences are the main SQR publication target. Most SQR research has used case studies. The dominant contribution type of SQR research is method while specification is the main requirements engineering activity identified. SQ models need to be more used for SQR identification. Design module and requirements documentation are the principal artifacts reported in SQR literature. External and internal SQR were the main SQR types addressed in literature. Identifying empirical solutions to address SQR is a promising research direction for researchers.

Requirements engineering (RE) is critical to the success of a software development project. In order to have professionals who are capable of accomplishing software projects successfully, Requirements engineering education (REE) is therefore an important endeavor. The objective of this paper is to identify and to present the current research on REE in order to discuss their contribution types, identify deficits and to extract the useful approaches. A search was conducted using bibliographic databases to find as much research as possible. The papers found in this study are classified with respect to research types and their empirical type. We believe that this study will be a reliable basis for further research in Requirements engineering education.