Knowledge-Centric Systems Engineering is an industrial approach to systems and software engineering that advocates the development and use of knowledge bases that represent system domains. This approach can also exploit artificial intelligence techniques. These means can be used for early V&V (verification and validation) activities, e.g., for system artefact quality analysis and traceability management. This paper presents advances made in these activities with the SES Engineering Studio industrial tool and its underlying methods to meet further early-V& V needs in practice. The methods and the tool have been improved to better address model quality analysis, traceability project management, trace specification, and compliance with standards. For validation, we have initially applied the new features on a medical device. This has also allowed us to study the benefits of the features. The results show that the advances made can lead to wider system artefact analyses, more precise traceability management, better system artefacts, lower V & V effort, and lower issue resolution costs. All in all, the paper presents specific examples of how early- V & V industrial practices and tools can be improved.

Technological advances and the digitization of information have allowed us to obtain a large amount of data from different processes such as medicine, commerce, mining, among others. All this data has been used by different researchers in machine learning techniques to accelerate the decision making process of professionals. Machine learning techniques are very sensitive to data, so it is necessary to perform a cleaning to remove irrelevant and redundant information. This information removal is known as the feature selection problem. This paper presents the Pendulum Search Algorithm applied to solve the feature selection problem. Since the Pendulum Search Algorithm is a metaheuristic designed for continuous optimization problems, a binarization process is performed using the two-step technique. Preliminary results indicate that our proposal obtains competitive results compared to other metaheuristics extracted from the literature that solve well-known benchmarks.

Society increasingly depends on electronic systems and components (ECS) whose reliability must be ensured throughout their lifecycle. ECS reliability must be addressed since early development stages and the means used to this end must fit other systems engineering practices. Within this context, we present an industrial approach for model-based reliability-oriented system design. It links model-based systems engineering with Arcadia/Capella and knowledge-centric systems engineering with the Systems Engineering Suite. The approach deals with system modelling, ontology development, structured textual requirements specification, traceability management, and model quality analysis, all of them targeted at ECS reliability. We also present the validation steps taken.

One of the more complex topics to teach to software engineering students is the conceptual modeling design, which has several concepts that students must learn in order to specify the structural, behavioral and interaction views of software systems.Learning the design of class diagrams is of paramount importance since these diagrams are used to guide concrete development tasks such as programming and software testing, and -consequently-to avoid defective software products.Applying novel teaching/learning techniques in this topic may help students to reduce the defects that are committed at the moment of designing a class diagram.One interesting technique is the use of serious games, due to the fact that they provide learning environments free of risks and pressure for students, allowing the students to know the topics that they must learn in a fun way.Serious games have been widely used in programming courses.Thus, we aim to investigate the feasibility to replicate this experience for conceptual modeling of class diagrams at software engineering courses.In this paper, we present a roleplaying game specially focused in the class diagram, which is called Classutopia.This serious game provides modeling challenges, comprehension and correction of diagrams with different complexity levels for learning conceptual modeling design.

One of the more complex topics to teach to Software Engineering students is the conceptual modeling design, which has several concepts that students must learn in order to specify the structural, behavioral and interaction views of software systems. Learning the design of class diagrams is of paramount importance since these diagrams are used to guide concrete development tasks such as programming and testing, and, consequently, to avoid defective software products. Applying novel teaching/learning techniques in this topic may help students to reduce the defects that are committed at the moment of designing a class diagram. One interesting technique is the use of serious games, since they provide learning environments free of risks and pressure for students, allowing the students to know the topics that they must learn in a funny way. Serious games have been widely used in programming courses. We aim to investigate the feasibility to replicate this experience for conceptual modeling of class diagrams at Software Engineering courses. In this paper, we present a role-playing game especially focused on the class diagram, which is called Classutopia. This serious game provides modeling challenges, comprehension and correction of diagrams with different complexity levels for learning conceptual modeling design.

Context. Many critical systems must meet safety compliance needs from safety standards. These standards are usually large textual documents whose compliance needs can be hard to understand. As a solution, the use of models has been proposed. Goal. We aim to provide evidence of the extent to which models improve the understanding of safety compliance needs. Method. We designed an experiment and ran a pilot to study the effectiveness, efficiency, and perceived benefits of understanding these needs, with the text of standards and with models in the form of UML object diagrams. Results. The overall results from 15 Bachelor students show that the effectiveness of understanding safety compliance needs increases very little with models (2%), and the efficiency even decreases (24%). Nonetheless, the results improve when the potential complexity in navigating the models is taken into account (15% effectiveness increase). The students find benefits in using the models but most consider that the models are hard to understand. Conclusions. The extent to which models improve the understanding of safety compliance needs seems to be lower than what the research community expects. New studies are necessary to confirm our initial insights.

The market of mobile applications is constantly changing and growing, partly due to the popularity of software that supports daily tasks and the emergence of new communication medias. Applications of this kind are typically small but require high usability interfaces, which are often based on small's sets of patterns with proven efficacy. Using patterns is one of the main principles of model-driven development, a paradigm with the potential to reduce development time and coding errors. However, there exist many challenges for improving the usability of automatically generated mobile interfaces. To face some of these challenges, this paper proposes a method to model mobile interfaces, which is part of an ongoing research project aimed at model-driven development of fully-functional mobile applications. We present the modeling constructs, which are inspired by recent studies on best practices, and evaluate the feasibility of the application of the proposal to an archetypical case.

The main focus of Software Engineering discipline is to establishing methods and processes for the effective and efficient development of software projects. One of the most relevant paradigms for achieving this goal is Model-Driven Development (MDD). MDD uses models at different abstraction levels to automatically generate software products by means of model-transformations. However, one of the main issues related to the development of MDD technologies is the lack of standardization in terms of the features that need to be considered to support the current industry needs. This difficults the comparison of existing technologies since there are not a reference point for the creation of new MDD approaches with their corresponding supporting tools. This paper analyses these industry needs through an exploratory study. From the results obtained, it states the main features that must be supported by MDD tools. In addition, this paper presents an analysis about the presence or absence of these features in a set of industrial MDD tools.

Models are key artifacts in Model-Driven Development (MDD) methods. To produce high-quality software by using MDD methods, quality assurance of models is of paramount importance. To evaluate the quality of models, defect detection is considered a suitable approach and is usually applied using reading techniques. However, these reading techniques have limitations and constraints, and new techniques are required to improve the efficiency at finding as many defects as possible. This article presents a case study that has been carried out to evaluate the use of a Functional Size Measurement (FSM) procedure in the detection of defects in models of an MDD environment. To do this, we compare the defects and the defect types found by an inspection group with the defects and the defect types found by the FSM procedure. The results indicate that the FSM is useful since it finds all the defects related to a specific defect type, it finds different defect types than an inspection group, and it finds defects related to the correctness and the consistency of the models.

Nowadays, the emergence of several model-driven development (MDD) proposals that are related to multiple domains requires the definition of proper interoperability mechanisms that facilitate the reuse of knowledge in the MDD community by taking advantage of already defined modeling languages, tools, and standards. However, there are no recent studies that cover the existent interoperability alternatives in the model-driven domain nor is there a common interoperability framework. This paper confronts this situation through a systematic analysis of recent interoperability approaches that provide relevant features for MDD processes. From this analysis, a general interoperability framework is depicted, which is complemented with our contributions to solve specific interoperability issues. Therefore, we present those aspects that are already covered by existent proposals as well as those pending subjects that, from our point of view, are future challenges in order to achieve a suitable interoperability framework for MDD approaches.

The current Web applications are in continuous evolution to provide new and more complex functionalities, which can improve the user experience by means of adaptivity and dynamic changes. Since testing is the most frequently used technique to evaluate the quality of software applications in industry, novel testing approaches will be necessary to evaluate the quality of future (and more complex) web applications. In this paper, we investigate the testing challenges of future web applications and propose a testing methodology that addresses these challenges by the integration of search-based testing, model-based testing, oracle learning, concurrency testing, combinatorial testing, regression testing, and coverage analysis. This paper also presents a testing metamodel that states testing concepts and their relationships, which are used as the theoretical basis of the proposed testing methodology.

Models are key artifacts in Model-Driven Development (MDD) methods. To evaluate the quality of models, defect detection is considered to be a suitable approach, which is usually applied using reading techniques. However, new techniques are required in order to find as many defects as possible. This paper presents a case study to evaluate the usefulness of a Functional Size Measurement (FSM) procedure to detect defects in models of a MDD environment. The results indicate that the FSM is useful in finding all the defects that are related to a defect type as well as finding different defect types than an inspection team does.

A key requirement for MDD solutions is to have a modeling language that allows the correct representation of conceptual models. Nowadays, there are two options that are the most widely used for the definition of these modeling languages: 1) the specification of a domain-specific modeling language (DSML) or 2) the customization of UML. In practice, these two modeling alternatives are viewed as opposite solutions. However, since both alternatives provide benefits for the application of MDD solutions, in this paper, we present a proposal that uses UML profile extension mechanisms to interchange modeling information between DSML-based models and UML models. This proposal shows how these two modeling alternatives can be integrated in a unique MDD solution.