Public funding for information and communication technology (ICT) innovation in Spain appears to be slow, bureaucratic, highly restrictive, and not agile. Therefore, the innovation process is negatively affected. These restrictions could be attributed to inadequate trust from public funders toward executors and ontological problems regarding the definitions of ICT innovation (i.e., the I+D+i formula), affecting all Quadruple Helix stakeholders. In this study, a Delphi study was proposed to reach a consensus among 81 experts (i.e., innovation managers, public funders, and consultants) to validate this hypothesis. The study included 41 statements and 59 questions organized into the following five objectives: (1) concept of innovation, (2) public funding and its restrictions, (3) theoretical model of innovation, (4) public funders’ trust and executors’ freedom, (5) assessment of capabilities and maturity for innovation. The experts discussed, evaluated, and reached a consensus, after two rounds, on 52 of the 59 questions. The results revealed wide dispersion of the proposed ICT innovation questions. They demonstrated that the innovation management ecosystem in Spain’s ICT context is immature and the I+D+i formula did not represent the innovation process. The study reached a consensus on requirements for an Agile Innovation Funding Framework (AIFF) oriented toward obtaining an improved competitive advantage for ICT products or services based on trust, transparency, inspection, and adaptation principles. The results revealed that a joint framework involving public funders and executors based on organizational capability and maturity positively affects the innovation process. The capabilities of the executors should be standardized and measured, and public funders must move from supervisors to mentors to acquire new capabilities. Furthermore, innovation regulation and the various types of calls for proposals should be analyzed globally to change their fiscal and controlling nature restricting innovation.

Software development companies use Agile methods to develop their products or services efficiently and in a goal-oriented way. But this alone is not enough to satisfy user demands today. It is much more important nowadays that a product or service should offer a great user experience — the user wants to have some positive user experience while interacting with the product or service. An essential requirement is the integration of user experience methods in Agile software development. Based on this, the development of positive user experience must be managed. We understand management in general as a combination of a goal, a strategy, and resources. When applied to UX, user experience management consists of a UX goal, a UX strategy, and UX resources. We have conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to analyse suitable approaches for managing user experience in the context of Agile software development. We have identified 49 relevant studies in this regard. After analysing the studies in detail, we have identified different primary approaches that can be deemed suitable for UX management. Additionally, we have identified several UX methods that are used in combination with the primary approaches. However, we could not identify any approaches that directly address UX management. There is also no general definition or common understanding of UX management. To successfully implement UX management, it is important to know what UX management actually is and how to measure or determine successful UX management.

System of Systems (SoS) is an emerging paradigm by which independent systems collaborate by sharing resources and processes to achieve objectives that they could not achieve on their own. In this context, a number of emergent behaviors may arise that can undermine the security of the constituent systems. We apply the Delphi method with the aims to improve our understanding of SoS security and related problems, and to investigate their possible causes and remedies. Experts on SoS expressed their opinions and reached consensus in a series of rounds by following a structured questionnaire. The results show that the experts found more consensus in disagreement than in agreement about some SoS characteristics, and on how SoS vulnerabilities could be identified and prevented. From this study we learn that more work is needed to reach a shared understanding of SoS vulnerabilities, and we leverage expert feedback to outline some future research directions.

In recent years, user experience questionnaires have established themselves to measure various aspects of User Experience (UX). In addition to these questionnaires, an evaluation tool is usually offered so that the results of a study can be evaluated in the light of the questionnaire. As a rule, the evaluation consists of preparing the data and comparing it with a benchmark. Often this interpretation of the data is not sufficient as it only evaluates the current User Experience. However, it is desirable to determine exactly where there is a need for action. The User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) is a common and valid questionnaire with an evaluation tool to measure and analyse the User Experience for a product or service. In our article we present an approach that evaluates the results from the User Experience Questionnaire using the importance-performance analysis (IPA). The aim is to create another possibility to interpret the results of the UEQ and to derive recommendations for action from them. In a study with 467 participants, we validated the approach presented with YouTube, WhatsApp, and Facebook. The results show that the IPA provides additional insights from which further recommendations for action can be derived.

The advance in the digital world has caused a growth of complexity in innovation. Traditional approaches to innovation, based on reductionism, face greater difficulties. That is why we have witnessed the growth of those known as System of Systems (SoS). There is a wide variety of methodologies and domains of application in the literature to form framed solutions in the context of SoS, but there is no unified consensus for its use and even less when it comes to agile environments of continuous integration and deployment in which traceability requirements are critical. In recent years, the need to have traceability software that continuously records and monitors the trace of the entities that interact with it has become an essential feature. In addition, over the years there has been evidence of errors caused by poor traceability control. Therefore, this document presents an agile framework that aims to guarantee the traceability of a SoS from the early stages. This framework unifies the discovery, development and operations, providing full coverage in the conformation of the solution. Finally, we present a case study as future work, which is based on the application of our framework on smart laboratories for assisted reproduction.

User Experience Questionnaire is a common and valid method to measure the User Experience (UX) for a product or service. In recent years, these questionnaires have established themselves to measure various aspects of UX. In addition to the questionnaire, an evaluation tool is usually offered so that the results of a study can be evaluated in the light of the questionnaire. As a rule, the evaluation consists of preparing the data and comparing it with a benchmark. Often this interpretation of the data is not sufficient as it only evaluates the current User Experience. However, it is desirable to determine exactly where there is a need for action. In our article we present an approach that evaluates the results from the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) using the importance-performance analysis (IPA). The aim is to create another possibility to interpret the results of the UEQ and to derive recommendations for action from them. In a first study with 219 participants, we validated the approach presented with YouTube and WhatsApp. The results show that the IPA provides additional insights from which further recommendations for action can be derived.

ERP systems are composed of different functional modules on which each one addresses a different business area.Developments on these modules are managed independently on each one, which allow to handle and address the management of many related information requirements.In this context the startup G7Innovation works for its product iMEDEA.In this study we have combined two methodologies, Design Sprint and NDT 4.0; and systematized the development of ERP system modules.This combination allows you to use Design Sprint to generate and validate prototyping, and NDT 4.0 to do the study, analysis, and design of the software to be developed.In addition, according to the specifications defined in NDT, the code generation of the ERP module can be automated.This proposal has been validated in a case study in collaboration with the startup G7Innovation, where we have applied both methodologies on Odoo, an open source ERP system based in Python language.Thanks to the use of these two methodologies we have produced a module related to the needs of the clinic by reducing costs, times and human failures.

Abstract Agile approaches, one of the key methodologies used in today’s software projects, often rely on user interface mockups for capturing the goals that the system must satisfy. Mockups, as any other requirement artifact, may suffer from ambiguity and contradiction issues when several points of view are surveyed/elicited by different analysts. This article introduces a novel approach that enhances mockups with friendly end-user annotations that helps formalizing the requirements and reducing or identifying conflicts. We present an evaluation of the approach in order to measure how the use of annotations improves requirements quality.

Entity reconciliation (ER) aims to combine data from different sources for a unified vision. The management of large volumes of data has given rise to significant challenges to the ER problem due to facts such as data becoming more unstructured, unclean, and incomplete or the existence of many datasets that store information about the same topic. Testing the applications that implement the ER problem is crucial to ensure both the correctness of the reconciliation process and the quality of the reconciled data. This paper presents an approach based on model-driven engineering that allows the creation of test models for the early integration testing of ER applications, contributing in three main aspects: the description of the elements of the proposed framework, the definition of the testing model, and the validation of the proposal through two real-world case studies. This validation verifies that the early integration testing of the ER application is capable of detecting a series of deficiencies, which a priori are not known and that will help to improve the final result that the ER application offers.

Within the development of software systems, the development of web applications may be one of the most widespread at present due to the great number of advantages they provide such as: multiplatform, speed of access or the not requiring extremely powerful hardware among others. The fact that so many web applications are being developed, makes grotesque the volume of information that it is generated daily. In the management of all this information, it appears the entity reconciliation problem, which is to identify objects referring to the same real-world entity. This paper proposes to give a solution to this problem through a web perspective. To this end, the NDT methodology has been taken as a reference and has been extended adding new activities, artefacts and documents to cover this problem.

Model-Driven Web Engineering approaches have become an attractive research and technology solution for Web application development. However, for more than 20 years of development, the industry has not adopted them due to the mismatch between technical versus research requirements. In the context of this joint work between academia and industry, the authors conduct a survey among hundreds of engineers from different companies around the world and, by statistical analysis, they present the current problems of these approaches in scale. Then, a set of guidelines is provided to improve Model-Driven Web Engineering approaches in order to make them viable industry solutions.

Model Driven development approaches are being adopted by the software industry due to a core set of benefits such as raising the level of abstraction and reducing coding errors. However, their underlying modelling languages tend to be quite rigid, making their evolution hard, specifically when the corresponding metamodel do not support primitives and/or functionalities required in specific business domains. In this work, we present an approach for fast evolution of the modelling language that is “self reflective”, allowing modellers to abstract new language concepts from the primitives. The main advantage of our approach is that it provides zero application downtime and automatic tool evolution. As a consequence, applications created with our approach are able to adapt quicker to the business needs than those based on traditional Web modelling languages. We compare our approach with existing modelling languages in a case study providing a proof of its ability to adapt faster than to new business needs.

The effective application of test phases has been one of the most relevant, critical and cost phases in the life cycle of software projects in the last years. During the test phase, the test team has to assure the quality of the system and the concordance with the initial requirements of the system. The model driven paradigm is offering suitable results in some areas and the test phase could be one of them. This paper presents how the application of this paradigm can help to improve this aspect in the functional test generation and it analyses the experience in a real project developed under this approach.