The phase of pre-contract of software projects is highly relevant for providers and acquirers.This time consuming phase should be done in a cost-effective way, since the possibility of finishing in a software contract is uncertain.The literature reports some macro-activities to guide this process.However, they are coarse grained, and therefore, difficult to follow in practice by practitioners.Moreover, it is not clear how the industry deals with the pre-contract process; particularly, when addressing the preselling of small software projects.This article presents an exploratory study that involves 14 Chilean software companies, in which we performed qualitative research to understand how they conduct the pre-contract process of small projects.The results were arranged in a model, named the Pre-Contract Process (PCP) model, which identifies the most prevalent actors, activities, outcomes, and a workflow according to the best practices used by these companies.These results extend those reported in the literature; particularly, the PCP model contributes with more in depth information about how to conduct the macro-activities in practices.Although this process is still preliminary, it can be used to inform the design of pre-contract activities in software companies and educational institutions.Future software engineers and practitioners can take advantage of it to address their own project pre-contract processes.

Microservices is an architectural style that conceives systems as a modular, costumer, independent and scalable suite of services; it offers several advantages but its growing popularity has given rise to security challenges. Building secure systems is greatly helped by deploying existing security mechanisms, but current literature does not guide developers about which mechanisms are actually used by developers of microservices-based systems. This article describes the design and results of a systematic mapping study to identify the security mechanisms used in microservices-based systems described in the literature. The study yielded 321 articles, of which 26 are primary studies. Key findings are that (i) the studies mention 18 security mechanisms; (ii) the most mentioned security mechanisms are authentication, authorization and credentials; and (iii) almost 2/3 of security mechanisms focus on stopping or mitigating attacks, but none on recovering from them. Additionally, it emerges that experiments and case studies are the most used empirical strategies in microservices security research. The clear identification of most-used security solutions will facilitate the reuse of existing architectural knowledge to address security problems in microservices-based systems.