Software architecture evaluation (SAE) is a key area in software architecture design. Some of its key challenges are describing and assessing the architecture itself, the architectural decisions, the business or mission goals, and the quality attributes; and further, the adoption itself of SAE practices. The lack of a standard representation for SAE endeavors hampers its adoption by development teams, its (semi-)automated support by tool providers, and its normative assessment by process specialists. In this paper we introduce SAEMET (Software Architecture Evaluation MEthod and Theory), an extension of the Essence standard proposed by SEMAT and adopted by OMG; The Essence kernel defines “things” (called Alphas) any software engineering endeavor should include, and provides an extensible representation to be used for assessing an endeavor progression. SAEMET includes five sub-alphas (Quality Attributes, Business Goals, Architecture Description, Architecture Decision, and Evaluation Adoption), and provides a complete description for each one, their progression levels, and the relationships among them. Our approach is useful for representing an already published architecture review, conducted using DCAR (Decision-Centric Architecture Review method), and assessing its suitability for actionable support of adoption, automated support, and normative assessment. Ongoing empirical evaluation of SAEMET is underway, and early results indicate it is usable and useful for guiding and auditing SAE endeavor, as well as planning courses to train teams for adopting SAE.

The Open Innovation paradigm has spread widely since 2003, and led to the emergence of Open Innovation Platforms as software systems aiming at supporting and facilitating open innovation initiatives and projects. This software domain has matured up to a point where many functional concepts became notably common and used in these platforms. When implementing open innovation platforms, related people often struggle when defining expected functional characteristics due to the general application of the paradigm, making necessary the existence of a model that provide a set of potential functional features expected in the creation and development of this type of platform. Reference models provides a domain-specific set of clearly defined entities aiming at encouraging better communication in the domain. We propose in this paper a reference model for capturing and defining the functional features that could be implemented in outside-in oriented open innovation platforms. For building this reference model, we reviewed some of the already published reports of open innovation platforms implementations in order determine and define the potential functional features expected in this kind of platforms. We believe this knowledge base could ease software development and deployment decisions, especially at early stages where open innovation platforms adopters face development in a domain that as of this writing is still new to many people.

Open innovation platforms emerged as software solutions to facilitate collaboration among diverse participants in an open innovation initiative. Implementing an open innovation platform is a challenging endeavor mainly due to the disruptive nature of the paradigm itself and to technological aspects that, if left overlooked, may have a big impact later. During our experience in implementing an open innovation platform in a Chilean university, we soon discovered the need for guidance in the implementation, and we argue that this guidance is compatible with the gap-covering structure of capability maturity models, a well-known approach to ICT process improvement. Based on this insight, we propose an initial version of a focus-area maturity model to assess an organization's readiness to implement and deploy open innovation software platforms. As befits emerging work, we also discuss and share some future lines of work.

The explosive growth of the Web makes increasingly harder to identify relevant resources among large result sets yield by search engines. Researcher looking for specialized documents have little guidance beyond the documents' own metadata. This article describes the use of trust-based computing to improve ranking and relevance of results by combining topic-specific trust among community members and individual's resources evaluation. The approach has been prototyped with Antu, built over the IT-specific faceted keyword-based search tool Yarquen. An experimental study was conducted with informatics graduate students, and found improved relevance of the suggested documents. This result suggests that trust-based approaches have huge potential to improve recommendations in specialized communities.

Differences in prices registered in market research studies are common. Visualization of the price differences is difficult to develop and understand as several attributes are considered by the analysts. An alternative to visualization of the price differences is sonification, a kind of auditory display, in which these attributes and relations are translated into sound. In this paper we present a parameter mapping sonification for differences of prices in market research studies. As a proof of concept, we show results from an implementation of the sonification which creates four samples, one for each category of differences defined in this work. Also we describe its use and its benefits in a real market research environment.

MDA is a concept promoted by the OMG that proposes software development based on models specified using UML, to make from these models a transformation to other models and also source code that can be executed as an application implemented by a programmer. In software engineering the models are very important in development, due to the fact that they enhance the reuse of the different parts or components and with them a better production and maintenance is generated. This paper presents automatic transformations of a software process, for which the tools: MediniQVT and Eclipse Process Framework, and the QVT and ATL languages were used. A configuration metamodel along with the automatic transformation from source code to java were also successfully created.