Achieving a balance between interoperability and security in blockchain systems has led to the development of various integration mechanisms. These include the use of specialized smart contracts to facilitate cross-chain interactions, enabling reliable connections and secure transfers of information and assets. While technical interoperability is effectively addressed at lower layers, achieving semantic interoperability at the application layer remains a significant challenge. This paper proposes a mechanism to address this challenge by leveraging a model-driven approach. Metamodels, models, and transformations are created, and smart contracts are defined abstractly and then semi-automatically generated for specific blockchain platforms. The proposed approach was validated by generating contracts between Ethereum and Hyperledger, enabling semantically compatible transactions. The mechanism was further evaluated using the Technology Acceptance Model with expert participants. This evaluation demonstrated its effectiveness in specifying and transforming contracts and fostering semantic interoperability across blockchains.

The activities of software design, documenting, and evaluating the structure of software systems, referred to as Software Architecture, have been increasingly getting significant attention in industries. This situation is because of the explicit and prominent role assigned to quality attributes while developing software systems. By considering the high relevance of Software Architecture to industry, many academic institutes have introduced a course on Software Architecture as a part of undergraduate programs in Software Engineering. However, teachers offering this course face numerous challenges. Some of these challenges stem from how software architecture is practised in industries and others from teaching them in an academic setting. This paper describes an experience of designing a software architecture course that aligns the competencies expected from professional software architects with teaching practices imparting those competencies. Such an alignment is necessary to improve the employability of graduate students, make their progression from academic institutes to industries an effortless one, and for better learning outcomes. In the absence of such alignment, fresh graduates need to re-train, leading to training costs and delayed recruitment of fresh graduates by their prospective employers. The experience reports recurring challenges observed by earlier researchers, strategies to address them and our experience in implementing those strategies. The teaching strategies suggested are potentially helpful and practical, especially to less-experienced instructors teaching a course on Software Architecture.

Hybrid software processes are defined as a combination of practices from traditional and agile methodologies. Most software development companies currently apply this kind of process; however, the appropriate combination of practices is not often clear. To address this issue, we have proposed DynaTail in a previous study, i.e., a method for tailoring a software process and its practices to a particular context to improve a certain characteristic. In this work, we use an MDE approach to formalize all the artifacts involved in DynaTail: processes, context, practices influencing goals, and tailoring transformations. This model-based formalization lays the base for building supporting tools. We illustrate all models with a running example from a Chilean medium-size software development company.

ABSTRACT Defining and formalizing the software development process is a common means for improving it. Software process modeling is often a challenging and expensive endeavor, because a well specified process may still include inefficiencies that are hardly detected before enacting it. Thus, assessing process quality is a relevant concern to improve several aspects such as conceptual integrity, correctness, usability, maintainability, and performance, among others. This paper describesAvispa, a graphical tool that allows analyzing the quality of SPEM 2.0 software processes models.Avispaidentifies a series of error patterns and highlights them in different blueprints. A detailed description of the internals ofAvispais provided to show both its structure and its extensibility mechanisms. We also present an interactive mechanism to define new analysis scripts and to implement new patterns and blueprints. This paper illustrates the application ofAvispain an industrial case study where process engineers are assisted to analyze the quality of their process. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

SUMMARY Defining organizational software processes is essential for enhancing maturity because they cannot be improved if they are not specified. However, software process definition is hard and still not good for assuring productivity because the best process depends on the project's particularities. The process engineer can define a specific process for each kind of project, but this is expensive, unrepeatable, and error prone. Moreover, it is difficult to foresee all project scenarios and therefore the appropriate processes. The most usual situation is to apply always the same software process, although it is known to be suboptimal. To deal with this challenge, we propose a model‐based approach to software process tailoring that automatically generates project‐specific processes on the basis of the organizational process and project contexts. We still require competent process engineers to define the company's process, but once done, our approach is systematic, repeatable, and easy to use. The proposal is applied for tailoring the requirements engineering process of a medium‐size Chilean company. Processes obtained matched those used in the company for planned project contexts, and they were also reasonable for nonexpected situations. The company's process and project engineers agreed that the approach was highly valuable. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Software product quality and project productivity require defining suitable software process models. The best process depends on the circumstances where it is applied. Typically, a process engineer tailors a specific process for each project or each project type from an organizational software process model. Frequently, tailoring is performed in an informal and reactive fashion, which is expensive, unrepeatable and error prone. Trying to deal with this challenge, we have built CASPER, a meta-process for defining adaptable software process models. This paper presents CASPER illustrating it using the ISPW-6 process. CASPER meta-process allows producing project specific processes in a planned way using four software process principles and a set of process practices that enable a feasible production strategy. According to its application to a canonical case, this paper concludes that CASPER enables a practical technique for tailoring a software process model.

Software process models are sophisticated and large specifications aimed at organizing and managing software development. Their formal specification demands an enormous effort, but once specified there are few approaches and even fewer tools that aid the process engineer to analyze the quality of the process. For the last five years we have aided software companies in specifying their software processes and we have found a series of error patterns that indicate the potential presence of misconceptions or misspecifications. This paper presents these patterns, characterizes the kinds of errors they potentially reveal, and details how errors could be localized within a software process model. To assist process engineers to analyze the quality of their processes, we provide Avispa, a tool that graphically renders different aspects of a process model and highlights potential errors as intuitive and comprehensible indicators. The approach and the supporting tool are illustrated by applying them for analyzing the software process models of three Chilean software companies.

Defining organizational processes is essential for enhancing maturity. However the best process depends on the particularities of each project. Typically a process engineer defines a specific process for each project in an ad-hoc fashion, which is expensive, unrepeatable and error prone. Trying to deal with this challenge we propose a model-based approach to software process tailoring that generates project specific processes based on the organizational process and the project context. The approach is systematic, repeatable and it does not depend on the people using it. The proposal has been applied for tailoring the Requirements Engineering process of a medium size company. The obtained results were validated by process engineers of the company. Processes obtained using the proposed approach matched the ones used in the company for planned contexts and also they were reasonable for non-expected situations.