Abstract Around the world, the importance of Very Small Entities (VSEs), organisations having up to 25 people, has been constantly increasing. Worldwide, VSEs represent over 92% of the software industry. Therefore, two main needs can be highlighted: a) providing VSEs with resources to produce high‐quality software, and b) training software engineering undergraduates in proven practices to produce high‐quality software within the given schedule and budget. A logical way to meet these needs is transfering proven practices provided by software engineering standards. However, transferring the knowledge of software engineering standards is not always an easy task. The ISO/IEC 29110 is a series of international standards and guides that provide codified knowledge related to the software development process. The series was specifically developed to be used by VSEs. This study presents an exploratory analysis, conducted in 12 Mexican VSEs, which implemented the software Basic profile of the ISO/IEC 29110, to identify the pace at which they can adopt this standard to their environment. Besides, the benefits and difficulties encountered are provided. The results can be relevant for other VSEs interested in implementing this standard. Even if the exploratory analysis was performed in the VSEs of Mexico, this analysis can be of interest in other countries. The results obtained can help other VSEs that are interested in the adoption of this international standard to reduce the barriers to a successful implementation.

The evolution of Smart Cities conveys continuous changes involving a great number of variables, which might hamper the development of evaluation tools and methodologies. Most of the metric models for Smart City are based on the selection of key performance indicators (KPI) according to the specific model objectives. As different organisations propose their own indicators generating different models, it is difficult to get a straightforward comparison among models. With the aim of dealing with this and other disadvantages, in this study, a framework based on the application of Data Science to the KPIs is proposed. This framework represents an infrastructure that goes through the treatment of Open Data, facilitating the evaluation of different models comparison intended for decision‐making, and to the final stage of dispatching service reports. There are four components that integrate this framework (i) a tree structure to manage the KPIs; (ii) a designed JavaScript Object Notation document for service dispatch; (iii) Web applications for evaluations based on Smart People with four scenarios and; (iv) the infrastructure for reception and attention of reports.

Abstract We are living in an age of growing demand for software products. This growing demand creates opportunities for very small entities (VSEs) to not only survive but also flourish. In this context, VSEs need to produce high‐quality products to meet market needs. However, in their quest to produce high‐quality software, VSEs need to overcome the challenge of implementing international standards, which they find difficult to do because of lack of knowledge and practical experience. This paper provides an analysis performed to 13 teams of VSEs, using different life cycles, which achieved the implementation of the ISO/IEC 29110, to analyze the effort each team invests to implement the best practices provided by the standard. Besides, the paper provides an analysis of the difficulties, and the benefits of using the six‐step method are included. This analysis is of interest because software engineering knowledge developed by researchers should be transferred to the industry to reduce the gap between them. The results highlight, on the one hand, the practices representing more effort for teams by life cycle. On the other hand, the results highlight the six‐step method that allowed the 13 teams to achieve a high level of coverage of the ISO/IEC 29110 international standard.

Nowadays computer games are applied beyond entertainment. Gamification, the application of game elements in non‐game environments supports behavioural studies in different disciplines including software engineering, the area in which collaborative work has become a fundamental key. The most used gamification elements in software development environments were analysed from two perspectives: (i) team building or reinforcement activities; and (ii) regarding a set of people's interactive styles. Then, interactive styles with software engineering roles were related in order to be able to identify scenarios that conform a model to build highly effective teams. The three analyses together allow identifying proper gamification elements for modelling scenarios to support the creation of highly effective teams in the software development domain.

Emotion awareness is becoming a key aspect in collaborative work at academia, enterprises and organizations that use collaborative group work in their activity. Due to pervasiveness of ICT's, most of collaboration can be performed through communication media channels such as discussion forums, social networks, etc. The emotive state of the users while they carry out their activity such as collaborative learning at Universities or project work at enterprises and organizations influences very much their performance and can actually determine the final learning or project outcome. Therefore, monitoring the users' emotive states and using that information for providing feedback and scaffolding is crucial. To this end, automated analysis over data collected from communication channels is a useful source. In this paper, we propose an approach to process such collected data in order to classify and assess emotional states of involved users and provide them feedback accordingly to their emotive states. In order to achieve this, a fuzzy approach is used to build the emotive classification system, which is fed with data from ANEW dictionary, whose words are bound to emotional weights and these, in turn, are used to map Fuzzy sets in our proposal. The proposed fuzzy-based system has been evaluated using real data from collaborative learning courses in an academic context.

Eye gaze is an important and widely studied non-verbal resource in co-located social interaction. When we attempt to support tele-presence between people, there are two main technologies that can be used today: video-conferencing (VC) and collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). In VC, one can observe eye-gaze behaviour but practically the targets of eye-gaze are only correct if the participants remain relatively still. We attempt to support eye-gaze behaviour in an unconstrained manner by integrating eye-trackers into an Immersive CVE (ICVE) system. This paper aims to show that while both ICVE and VC allow people to discern being looked at and what else is looked at, when someone gazes into their space from another location, ICVE alone can continue to do this as people move. The conditions of aligned VC, ICVE, eye-gaze enabled ICVE and co-location are compared. The impact of factors of alignment, lighting, resolution, and perspective distortion are minimised through a set of pilot experiments, before a formal experiment records results for optimal settings. Results show that both VC and ICVE support eye-gaze in constrained situations, but only ICVE supports movement of the observer. We quantify the mis-judgements that are made and discuss how our findings might inform research into supporting eye-gaze through interpolated free viewpoint video based methods.