Abstract It is important to count on tools to help software professionals to evaluate the software process and how it may be affected by factors related to its deployment. Simulation models are a valuable means to illustrate the behaviour of such a process since scenario generation supports the prediction of potential outcomes and the prevention of undesired scenarios which are harmful to the process and the company in charge of the project to be developed. This work explores the effectiveness of introducing system dynamics (SD) models in the software engineers’ process of understanding, from a management perspective, the software process dynamics. The used SD simulation model of the software process emphasises the representation of an iterative process. The COCOMO II model drivers and their main attributes were used, providing a set of reference factors that affect the software process, the estimation of project cost and the effort required. A set of 59 junior software professionals with no previous knowledge about SD participated in a validation study. For simple predictive scenarios, there was no important improvement effect, while for more complex predictive scenarios SD helped them to guess better and provide a rationale for the expected behaviour of the software process performance.

Abstract Software engineers and IT professionals face the challenge of envisioning the needs and wishes of their client companies, whose long‐term survivability depends on their adaptability to the digital business ecosystem, which is impregnating more or less every single sector of the economy. Looking at the data reported on the business digitalization project success rate, we realize that there is a lot of room for improvement. In this paper, we focus on the results of developing 10 business digitalization projects for 10 small and medium enterprises, where the software engineers in charge of the projects assessed the knowledge governance maturity of client companies before proposing any specific projects to support their digital businesses. We surveyed the software engineers participating in the above projects to gather their impressions of using knowledge governance assessment as a tool to predictively visualize the digital solution that best fits each digitalization project.

One of Industry 4.0 main challenge is focused on building Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) platforms to handle data management across industrial systems and components, enabling interoperability and seamless integration. In this paper, we present INDIGO, an IIOT Data Management platform which fosters semantics for fully-fledged data integration.

Gamification is a research field that is intended to increase motivation, so it is especially indicated in human capital intensive environments such as the software industry. Within Software Engineering, one of the main issues regarding software process improvement (SPI) is personnel motivation in specific SPI initiatives. These issues are stronger in small and medium software development companies where employees have to deal with the pressure of deadlines and occasional work overload. To address the adoption of SPI initiatives, the researchers implemented a defined gamification framework for deployment in SPI efforts in order to increase motivation among software workers and to enhance SPI results. The framework was rolled out in a small Spanish software development organisation, which is conducting internal SPI initiatives. To validate the effectiveness of the implemented framework, a controlled experiment was carried out in which an experimental group adopted SPI improvements using a gamification approach. The implementation results show that the application of the framework does not increase personnel motivation in SPI tasks although it contributes to enhancing the SPI tasks performance. This study discusses the limitations and recommendations to implement appropriately the SPI‐gamification framework in the scope of small and medium software development companies.

The adoption of innovative Software Engineering (SE) processes by an organization implies that engineers have to learn new processes which they might not be familiar with. Social software can support and enhance this adoption process, so research needs to focus on how the exchange of knowledge among software engineers using these tools can help to perform training more effectively. We propose a framework based on social software to support the collaborative learning, adoption and improvement of SE processes through the exchange of experiences among individuals. This article examines factors influencing the adoption of new SE processes and the quality of the experiences shared using the proposed framework in comparison with similar ones. Two case studies were carried out involving junior engineers in a training course on agile software development. Anonymous surveys collected data on the perceived quality of the experiences shared during the research, their usefulness, and the simplicity of the mechanisms provided to contribute experiences. Results show that the adoption of new SE processes is influenced by several factors such as the commitment of software engineers to collaborate in the adoption of the new process, the perceived level of usefulness of the tacit knowledge elicited during the adoption process, the diversity of the topics covered by the shared knowledge, the simplicity of the mechanisms to contribute new tacit knowledge, and the amount of learning achieved by software engineers.

ABSTRACT Mobile app markets have experienced a significant growth during the last year. The increasing number of apps available on markets and the profits that developers and companies obtain are relevant enough to seriously consider the way apps are developed. The always‐changing environment in which apps are produced makes agile a convenient methodology to follow. Although agile allows the development team to quickly adjust the requisites to the new customer's needs, there is a lack of research on how agile methodologies can be explicitly adapted to develop mass‐market applications. Many references explain how to design and code a mobile app, but there is not much knowledge about other stages in the development process. Adapting an agile methodology to the development of mass‐market applications would provide project teams with a clear guide to successfully produce an app without missing any step in the process. This paper describes a case study in which an agile mass‐market application development process is followed. The proposed process also considers marketing issues as they are necessary to publicize a mass‐market application. This process has been followed and refined for several years in the development of the institutional apps at Carlos III University of Madrid. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

SUMMARY Software process improvement in software development organizations is a complex task that can be solved using knowledge management strategies. The definition and use of process patterns is a proven approach to apply knowledge management strategies in software engineering organizations. One of the main problems for the effective application of process patterns is the difficulty of formalizing the knowledge about the development process using these approaches. In this paper, a framework to manage software project patterns is presented. This framework is composed of a model called reusable project pattern (RPP) and a tool called sdpReuser. It is able to formalize the knowledge on software development projects from software development methodologies, reference frameworks, best practices and also tacit knowledge, useful to software engineers. The authors carried out a case study at the University Carlos III of Madrid, where junior software engineers used RPP. This study shows that the quality of pattern formalization correlates with experience in specific software engineering methods, the quality of the references in software engineering practices and the collaboration among software engineers to develop an RPP. It also analyzed the usefulness of RPP information elements to help software engineers to identify the most appropriate RPP and how to adapt it to project restrictions. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

ABSTRACT Nowadays, it is common to develop software development projects collaboratively among team members or organizations in different geographical locations. These teams, known as global software development (GSD) teams, allow organizations to save costs as well as have available highly qualified personnel. This kind of team is different from traditional teams, so it is necessary for team members to develop other essential competences to work efficiently in a global context. Unfortunately, there is no well‐defined competence model that allows organizations to assess personnel competences and establish the relevant training program that allows them to work efficiently in such teams. This work defines and implements, in four GSD teams, a competence model specifically designed to address challenges that people face when they work in a GSD team. This competence model has been defined considering tasks a GSD team have to carry out, bodies of knowledge, and existing competence models for the software engineering profiles and the authors' experience working in such teams. As a result of the implementation process, it was confirmed that the competence model is a key factor for human capital improvement. When personnel have these competences, team and individual efficiency and product quality increase, and delays in delivering products decrease. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Society is becoming a great source of knowledge and innovation, the synergy of all the ideas that are coming from all the countries across the world is fostering the rise of a new kind of society where knowledge plays an important role, nevertheless today's society needs a global strategy to improve knowledge management in order to ensure its accessibility. This paper introduces a global strategy supported on the one hand, by a methodological framework that proposes a transactive memory system to allow encoding, storing, and retrieving knowledge collectively in a smart manner, on the other hand, it is supported by a technological framework based on Web 2.0 technologies aimed to implement the methods and strategies defined in the transactive memory system. Moreover, this global strategy must ensure the maturity of the generated knowledge in order to foster innovation, also knowledge use must be tracked and measured in order to allow knowledge to become intellectual capital, which is one of the most valuable assets of current society.

Abstract The development of future interactive systems (FIS) is in its infancy, so detailed guides describing the process to design them hardly exist. This may be due to the fact that their development is quite recent and what their components are and how they must be combined to develop a FIS are not yet clear or widely accepted. Our approach towards a thorough understanding of FIS was to analyse the different types of FIS and to extract general characteristics, which can be considered generic, in order to describe what a FIS consists of and how it works. In this paper, we present a classification of the components of a generic FIS and propose interactive behaviour patterns, which can be used to design the FIS components more easily. These patterns are part of the SENDA framework, which was defined to facilitate the rigorous development of a specific kind of FIS, which is Virtual Environments (VEs). The results obtained from the application of the proposed patterns to VEs development are also presented.

Abstract Domain analysis was first used 15 years ago as one of the most important techniques for software reuse. Even today, new techniques appear every year, and different authors propose different domain representation structures to represent and store all the different software components and the relationships among them. These relationships among components are the kernel of the domain semantics. In this report, a set of techniques and tools is presented regarding mathematical, statistical, and neural fields that, when linked together, enable semi‐automatically building domain representations and storing them in a thesaurus structure of software components. Thesaurus structures, widely used in information science, are presented as the domain‐modeling key concept, due to their higher automation possibilities compared with previous structures. New metrics to evaluate the quality, consistency, and completeness of the domain model obtained through this technique are also presented.

Abstract Virtual environments (VEs) are special kinds of interactive systems currently used in many fields such as education, training and medicine. However, as VE development is relatively recent, there is little experience in the area. Software engineering, the discipline which assures quality software, has not been successfully applied to date. In developing VEs, the object‐oriented software engineering paradigm is the most suitable even though principles and techniques are insufficient. In this paper, we will demonstrate this inadequacy through the development of two different VEs, identify the processes to be improved, offer a set of guidelines to improve them (coined SENDA), and present the results obtained with SENDA. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.