Abstract Design Thinking techniques have been widely used in software requirements elicitation to understand the necessities of stakeholders and end‐users. However, there is a lack of evidence of their effectiveness when applied to guide the development process of a system targeting vulnerable populations. What are the implications of using Design Thinking techniques to elicit requirements in a community of former inmates—and what would be the benefits of and challenges in this deployment? In this paper, we report our experience of using Design Thinking for requirements elicitation of a mobile application customized for the former inmates of the Brazilian prison system and their families. We applied techniques such as Brainstorming, Stakeholder Mapping, Personas Creation, Rapid Ethnography, and Interviews to obtain relevant data and create several prototypes. These techniques contribute to the development of an uncommon application that aims to help the reintegration process of former inmates into society. Our results validate the initial hypothesis that such techniques, when applied to a sensitive context, assist product development that meets the end‐users' needs by creating a higher quality product. The main limitation of the research was the lack of access to low‐literacy end‐users and/or former inmates without previous experience using mobile devices.

The Brazilian General Data Protection Law (LGPD) implementation has impacted activities carried out by the software development teams. Due to it, developers had to become aware of the existing techniques and tools to carry out privacy requirements elicitation. Extending our previous work, we have investigated the actions taken by organizations regarding the LGPD, specifically in software development, considering the perception of agile development teams after two years of the LGPD implementation. In addition, we also investigated the perception of an agile team regarding the practices, techniques, and tools previously cited by practitioners as potential solutions for use in this context, along with techniques already in use in the current context. We have conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) and selected 36 primary studies. Furthermore, we have conducted a survey with 53 IT practitioners and semi-structured interviews with ten practitioners. The LGPD principles are known by most agile teams and are being implemented by the organizations, although the existing tools to support privacy requirements elicitation are still underused by agile teams. Moreover, agile teams consider that software requirements and software construction are the most impacted areas of knowledge by the LGPD, and most of them use user stories in privacy requirements elicitation. Our findings reveal that agile teams and Brazilian organizations are more concerned with user data privacy issues after the LGPD became effective. However, agile teams still face challenges in privacy requirements elicitation.

Context: The Database Systems (DS) subject is a significant subject in Computer Science and Engineering-related undergraduate programs, as it supplies knowledge and abilities required for professional practice within the software industry. Teaching DS principles, concepts, and practices and relating them to real-world scenarios is challenging, particularly in social isolation circumstances due to Covid-19. Moreover, teaching resources can pose additional setbacks for teachers and students who are unfamiliar with remote learning. Purpose: This study investigates the DS students' perception regarding the methodology and teaching practices adopted by the teacher during the social isolation period. Method: We conducted a survey with the DS subject students to investigate their perception regarding the teaching methodology adopted, the challenges, and their motivation during this period of social isolation. Results: Our findings revealed that most students have adequate study conditions, i.e., a suitable environment for studying at home and the necessary equipment to attend online classes and perform the subject's practical tasks. Moreover, 79% of the students felt motivated to study the subject remotely, and more than 74% of the students endorsed the teaching methodology adopted by the teacher.

The Brazilian education methodology follows a very traditional pattern in the middle and high school years. Although it is very difficult to measure the degree of study between particular and public schools, the first-year university students face many difficulties between the clash of very different teaching learning methods. This paper presents an analysis of Competitive Programming, a non-traditional approach based on the Algorithm Problem Solving method, applied to teaching first-year programming classes for the Computer Science course at the University of Brasília (UnB). The main goal is to analyze if there is any correlation between the different teaching methods applied to this specific subject and an increased proficiency toward abilities that are useful not merely to programming, but also to group related projects in their future, such as proactivity and familiarity towards programming logic. The leading method of data acquiring was utilizing a questionnaire and the analysis by data provided by teachers, which brought an in-depth exploration about a disparity between the student's difficulty towards more advanced subjects when introduced with the two different teaching methods, and an improvement in both student's proactivity and familiarity regarding programming.