This work-in-progress presents a strategy to implement software-defined wireless networks, particularly, to support IoT applications that require managing messages with different transmission priorities, e.g., voice, video and text data. These network implementations use IEEE 802.11e as the link protocol, and add a network controller that implements the Oblivious Forwarding Protocol and manage three transmission priorities for the messages. The performance and behavior of this network implementation was evaluated using simulations in NS-3. Preliminary results show that the network can provide communication support to IoT systems that involve up to 30 devices. The results also indicate that there is ample space to move forward this limit, e.g., by tuning the network parameters.

Every year, natural disasters cause important losses in terms of human lives and property. For example, unexpected floods and wild fires affecting urban areas are more frequent every day due to climate change. When it happens, most of the physical and service infrastructure in the affected area collapse or is eventually shut down to protect civilians. This negatively impacts on the gathering of information required by first response organizations to count on awareness situation that helps them make decisions. Trying to contribute to reduce the information and communication limitations during natural disaster response processes, this paper proposes the use of digital twin systems that help first responders obtain situation awareness and make better and on-time decisions. The proposed structure of these systems is based on both the blackboard pattern to collect, manage and share information, and a crowdsourcing approach to gather information from civilians.

The teaching of programming in primary and secondary education has once again revealed the heterogeneity of the ways in which students learn and instructors teach such a capability. Language barriers and technological skills of the involved people are some of the factors that affect the usability and usefulness of educational programming environments. This article presents a gamified programming environment, called Damo's Quest, that supports middle school instructors while they teach programming to students who have little access to computer technology and proficiency in English language. The platform offers a gamified-educational experience, in which students must deal with challenges in fantasy stories (in virtual worlds) by programming various solutions. The usability and perceived usefulness of the first version of this tool have been evaluated by two researchers, who are experts in computational thinking. Although preliminary, the results are highly encouraging.

In project-based software engineering courses, the collaboration among participants is usually the cornerstone that makes these experiences successful and allows reaching the courses’ instructional goals. Prescribing a collaboration process for these courses is not appropriate, since their workflows are ad hoc framed; i.e., most of their activities are defined on-the-fly by the participants, according to their current context and needs. Therefore, only coordination and awareness mechanisms can be defined at the course design time, in order to support and promote collaboration among participants during these courses. This article presents a qualitative study that identifies and relates these coordination and awareness mechanisms, and embeds them in a set of software ceremonies. Course instructors and instructional designers can take advantage of these results, not only to identify design decision points, but also coordination and awareness mechanisms to promote collaboration in this type of courses.

The phase of pre-contract of software projects is highly relevant for providers and acquirers.This time consuming phase should be done in a cost-effective way, since the possibility of finishing in a software contract is uncertain.The literature reports some macro-activities to guide this process.However, they are coarse grained, and therefore, difficult to follow in practice by practitioners.Moreover, it is not clear how the industry deals with the pre-contract process; particularly, when addressing the preselling of small software projects.This article presents an exploratory study that involves 14 Chilean software companies, in which we performed qualitative research to understand how they conduct the pre-contract process of small projects.The results were arranged in a model, named the Pre-Contract Process (PCP) model, which identifies the most prevalent actors, activities, outcomes, and a workflow according to the best practices used by these companies.These results extend those reported in the literature; particularly, the PCP model contributes with more in depth information about how to conduct the macro-activities in practices.Although this process is still preliminary, it can be used to inform the design of pre-contract activities in software companies and educational institutions.Future software engineers and practitioners can take advantage of it to address their own project pre-contract processes.

At project pre-selling time, customers and software providers collaborate to define the product required by the former; and based on it, the latter can generate a project proposal and a bid. This collaborative activity, that we have named product scoping, is not properly supported by the current tools and techniques, mainly due to the constraints imposed by the preselling phase; e.g., the activity has to be done quickly, accurately, and involving few resources. This article presents an instrument that supports the product scoping in bespoke projects, dealing with the main constraints involved in the pre-selling phase. The instrument is a canvas, and its design was particularly conceived to support the product scoping of data processing projects; however, the canvas can be adapted to address other project types. The instrument has been evaluated with real customers and providers, and the obtained results show that it helps conduct the product scoping process in a cost-effective way.

The development of software systems that support socio-technical activities, also known as collaborative or groupware systems, has historically been carried out in an ad hoc manner given its particular nature. However, the scientific literature and practical experience have been demanding for more systematization of these developments, due to the increasing need to count on these systems in several application domains, like education, healthcare, tourism, disaster relief and productive activities. In order to shed light on this matter, this paper presents a survey on literature of software strategies to support the development of collaborative systems. The study analyzes, classifies and compares these strategies considering several criteria. The results indicate that there is no development method or strategy that covers the whole lifecycle of these applications, but various of them are complementary, opening thus an opportunity to advance the state-of-the-art in this study domain.

Most adult children take care of their parents as they become older. However, the way in which families articulate themselves to care for their older members depends on cultural and social factors, which are different across societies. Given these differences, the design of CSCW systems and related services to support informal elderly caregiving requires contextual understanding of the complex and diverse living experiences and needs of older adults. This paper presents a cross-generational study to better understand the cooperative nature of informal elderly caregiving in Chile and Argentina. The study results show that family members assume implicit roles to fulfill their duties, with practically no coordination and no visibility of the assumed commitments within the family network. This implies that the articulation of the elderly caregiving is inefficient, conflict prone, and unbalanced, where family members assume a separation of concerns based on gender and kinship relationship with the older adult.

Internet access has become a requirement to participate in society; however, the majority of the world's population is not yet online. Citizens can self-organize cooperatively to crowdsource community network infrastructures and achieve Internet access. In order to help address that challenge, this paper provides an analysis of a crowdsourced Internet access mechanism: the distributed Web proxy service in one of the largest community networks in the world. Several perspectives were considered in this analysis, e.g., data traffic, networking issues, and proxies responsiveness. The evaluation results show how the current manual proxy choice, based on social clues, becomes a popular service plagued with hot spots and inefficiencies, which opens several opportunities for improving these infrastructures. By taking advantage of it, our research shows that the trade-offs between informed proxy selection and admission control in proxies, could alleviate imbalances and uncertainty, and also improve the service with little additional burden. This represents an explicit and direct mechanism for improving the service provided by these community networks, and a clear benefit for its members.

The lack of interactivity in the classroom has been identified as an important barrier to make the learning processes more effective. Although several instructional strategies and dynamics have been proposed, including the use of supporting technology, the problem remains open. This paper explores the feasibility of using touchless hand gestures (THG) during lectures in order to promote and ease the students' participation, and thus increasing their interactivity. Particularly, this work focuses on supporting the students' participation from their own spot in the classroom, as a strategy to help them feel comfortable and increase their participation during lectures. After conducting a literature review, no proposals or guidelines helping developers create THG-based applications to support such a participation strategy for the classroom scenario were found. Therefore, the authors used the literature review and their own experience to define a set of design aspects that should be considered when developing this type of applications. The suitability of this design guideline was evaluated with a user study with two applications. The quantitative and qualitative results show the students' participation from their spot could be feasible of being used in practice and it could increase the interaction during lectures. Moreover, the proposed design guidelines are shown to be suitable to support the development of these applications.

Most related research about intra-family communication follows the reality of developed countries, where older adults can live independently from their families and are likely to embrace technology. Contrarily, in Chile and other Latin American countries, most older adults live close to their families, are usually dependent of the latter, and rarely use digital means to communicate. Through cross-generational interviews, we identified attitudes, agreements, and expectations that describe how middle class Chilean families, living in urban settlements, interact with their elders. The study findings indicate that the approach used by the adult children to take care of their parents produces a vicious circle that stresses out the former and limits the technology adoption of the latter. Therefore, new ways of interacting with the elderly are required and digital technology has the potential to produce this change.

Collaborative learning activities have shown to be useful to address educational processes in several contexts. Monitoring these activities is mandatory to determine the quality of the collaboration and learning processes. Recent research works propose using Social Network Analysis techniques to understand students' collaboration learning process during these experiences. Aligned with that, this paper proposes the use of the indirect blockmodeling network analytic technique for monitoring the behaviour of different social roles played by students in collaborative learning scenarios. The usefulness of this technique was evaluated through a study that analysed the students' interaction network in a collaborative learning activity. Particularly, we tried to understand the structure of the interaction network during that process. Preliminary results suggest that indirect blockmodeling is highly useful for inferring and analysing the students' social roles, when the behaviour of roles are clearly different among them. This technique can be used as a monitoring service that can be embedded in collaborative learning applications.

Although most computer science graduates develop their professional careers as software engineers, there are no academic program with a specific focus on software engineering in Chile. Considering ACM/IEEE Software Engineering 2014 Curriculum Guidelines as a starting point, we analyzed the curricula of the CS Engineering and CS Technology programs offered by the most traditional Chilean universities, in order to establish to what extent they address the knowledge areas included in that recommendation. We also gathered information about theoretical and/or practical approaches of their courses, their types of evaluations and temporality. The results of this status report indicate that most knowledge areas of the ACM/IEEE curricula are covered but not all with the same emphasis. Programs count on three or four mandatory software engineering courses, most of them have a practical approach, are evaluated through exams and projects and start between the seventh and eight semesters. These results let us learn that some knowledge areas are not emphasized as they deserve. For example, Software Quality or Software Process are skills that industry often requires but academia does not seem to take into account. Similarly, it might be necessary to have students learn about software engineering earlier during their career. Knowing the actual status, actions can be taken.

Many mobile collaborative applications use resource positioning to provide services to end-users. Depending on the features of the collaboration activity to be supported, some positioning methods are more suitable than others. Despite ample research in this area, it is not clear which positioning method is more appropriate to support a particular collaboration activity. This paper presents a survey of positioning methods that can be used to support mobile collaboration. It also characterizes and compares these methods in order to determine which ones are more suitable, depending on the type of activity to be supported. This information helps software designers make this decision when they are conceiving a new mobile collaborative system.

Smartphones are powerful sensing devices that can help us capture not only information from the environment, but also the users' activities. Based on that information, mobile systems can identify the user's behavioural patterns and adjust their services to better fit his needs. This paper presents a software infrastructure, named Collaborative Sensing Platform (CoSP), which facilitates the automatic collection and collaborative distribution of the data gathered from smartphone sensors. CoSP also helps to save energy during the sensing and data sharing processes. This platform was evaluated empirically in a laboratory experiment. The preliminary results indicate that this infrastructure is useful not only for data gathering and sharing, but also for reducing the battery consumption involved in the sensing tasks.

Patients with chronic diseases or people with special health care needs are typically monitored by various health experts that address the problem from several perspectives. These experts usually do not interact directly between them; therefore, the instructions given to the patient by one of them are provided disregarding advices and instructions provided by the others. The collaboration between different health experts in a real context is mandatory to ensure the proper monitoring of the patient. This kind of collaboration, supported by technology, benefits the users' health condition and helps the patient achieve their goals in terms of wellbeing. This paper presents an approach for collaborative management of events related to activity supervisions and monitoring of these patients types. It also introduces a model and a mobile application to support this collaborative work.

Technical communities are social structures that emerge around the interest of individuals to build and deploy their own technology or communication infrastructure, such as wireless community networks. In these communities, the access to shared resources is regulated by incentive mechanisms, which are usually based on the members' contributions. Typically, technical contributions are computed by these mechanisms, ignoring the non-technical activities that members voluntarily perform to keep the community alive, e.g., administration and coordination of the tasks performed by the sub-communities. This article presents a regulation mechanism that rewards not only the contribution of shared resources to the community, but also the participation of the community members in non-technical activities. This proposal was evaluated using simulations, and the obtained results allow researchers and managers of technical communities to build appropriate incentive mechanisms that rewards both, technical and non-technical contributions of their members.

Knowing the position of a device at a given time is fundamental to provide services tailored to the current user location. However, not all devices are able to perform positioning by their own, even when positioning systems are available in the environment where the user is located. This article presents a context-aware positioning model that allows devices participating in mobile ad-hoc networks, to sense their context and exchange positioning information with their peers. Thus, nodes knowing their own position could share it with their neighbors, allowing the latter to perform positioning. We discuss the performance of the model in a simulated mobile outdoor environment, populated with different types of devices. Our experiment shows that nodes without positioning capabilities are able estimate their position, although with reduced accuracy compared to those using a direct positioning strategy, such as GPS.

Summary Personal security is an open problem in large cities. After several attempts to reduce violence and crime, there seems to be an agreement that preventive actions are the best way to address this problem. Trying to help deal with that challenge, this paper proposes a mobile collaborative application, named Personal Guardian, which is used by civilians while walking in urban areas. The application is focused on crime prevention and it implements participatory sensing to help people be aware of the risks that appear to exist in a certain place at a certain time. Based on that information, citizens can take appropriate and on‐time preventive actions. The system is supported by a human‐centric wireless sensor network, and it is complementary to the security solutions already used by public and private organizations. The system architecture and its main components are described, and the main requirements and design decisions are also discussed. A preliminary evaluation of the solution was conducted to determine its strengths and weaknesses in terms of quality of service. The obtained results indicate that the information feeding process is more relevant for end‐users than the unattended delivery of awareness information about their personal security. In addition, this former capability does not require to be adjusted to the end‐users' context. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The recent growth of social networking and sensing applications has enabled people to perform crowd computing. In turn, this activity has opened several opportunities to address people's needs in various application areas, such as tourism, security, entertainment and emergency response. However, the design of these applications has also brought several challenges to software designers. Since users of these systems interact among them in heterogeneous physical scenarios, their interactions should be formally considered in the design of these applications in order to determine whether or not the services embedded in the system are suitable to support those interactions. The lack of guidelines to address this modeling issue not only jeopardizes the suitability of these applications, but also implies the services provided by the system can be evaluated only after implementation, which is clearly risky and expensive. This article proposes an initial modeling language that allows software designers to address this challenge through the representation of the interaction among users of a system. The interaction model represented using the proposed language allows designers to evaluate, at the design time, the information flow and the availability of interaction supporting services in the system. The usability and usefulness of the proposal are shown using a running example.

The software industry and the academia have recognized the importance of teamwork as a driver to succeed in software projects. Therefore, the industry expects that new engineers are able to work in teams. Unfortunately, teamwork is a skill that cannot be transferred in a simple way, and there is not a clear recipe for doing that. This paper proposes the use of particular ThinkLets (a process pattern to address collaboration recurrent problems) to help overcome particular problems that jeopardize teamwork. This proposal has been evaluated through software developments in the academia involving computer science undergraduate students.

Background: Software engineering is a core subject in computing education. Today, there seems to be a consensus that teaching software engineering requires students to perform practical experiences that simulate the work in the software industry. This represents a challenge for universities and instructors, because these experiences are complex to setup and involve considerable time and effort. Although there are several experiences and proposals reported in the literature, there is no clear solution to address this challenge. Aim: Being knowledgeable about the several approaches reported in the literature for dealing with this challenge is the first step to proposing a new solution. Counting on this knowledge allows instructors to reuse lessons learned from other universities. In order to address this challenge, we conducted a systematic mapping study that intends to answer the following questions: What are the main approaches used to address the practical experiences in software engineering education? Is there an emerging tendency to address this challenge? Which software process models are used to support the practical experiences in software engineering courses? Have the universities changed the way of conducting these experiences over the years? What are the main forums to seek information on practical approaches for teaching software engineering? Method: We used a systematic mapping study to identify and classify available research papers that report the use of practical experiences in software engineering education. Results: There were 173 papers selected, analyzed and classified. The results indicate that universities have realized the value of including practical experiences as part of the software engineering teaching process. However, few proposals indicate how to address that challenge. The practical approaches identified in this study were game learning, case studies, simulation, inverted classrooms, maintenance projects, service learning, and open source development. Only one recent report on the use of traditional approaches (i.e., teaching using expositive lectures) was found. The use of a development process to support these practical experiences seems not to be a concern for software engineering instructors. Only 40% of these studies report the use of a development process to guide the process experience. The reported processes are mainly agile methods. Conferences are the most used forum to publish studies in this area (72%). One third of these studies have been published over the last five years. Conclusion: There is a clear concern for teaching software engineering involving practical experiences, and there are several initiatives exploring how to do it. The map gives us an overview of the different proposals to address this challenge, and also allows us to make some preliminary conclusions about the preferred approaches.

Tailoring is the mechanism of adapting a software process to the needs of a project. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) provides a formal basis and tools infrastructure for automatic software process tailoring. However, the use of a MDE approach can become awkward for most process engineers, because it requires knowledge of MDE concepts and formalisms to implement the required models and tailoring transformations. Proposals trying to address this problem should balance the formality required by MDE and the usability needed by the users. This paper presents a model-based tool and its associated procedure that allow process engineers to automatically generate tailoring transformation rules using a graphical user-interface, obtaining the desired balance. The proposal is illustrated with a running example.

This article presents a study on the nodes positioning confidence in mobile collaborative scenarios. The confidence of nodes positioning is an indicator that allows providing appropriate services and information to mobile users. In mobile ad-hoc networks, nodes with positioning capabilities could share their position with their neighbors in order to allow these latter to determine their own location collaboratively and increasing their positioning confidence. We study the fluctuation of this confidence in mobile scenarios populated by nodes with and without positioning capabilities. We analyze the effect of changing the maximum communication range of the nodes, the amount of nodes with positioning capabilities present in the environment. We also studied the impact that produces the degree of nodes mobility. The findings of this study are presented and discussed.

SUMMARY Defining organizational software processes is essential for enhancing maturity because they cannot be improved if they are not specified. However, software process definition is hard and still not good for assuring productivity because the best process depends on the project's particularities. The process engineer can define a specific process for each kind of project, but this is expensive, unrepeatable, and error prone. Moreover, it is difficult to foresee all project scenarios and therefore the appropriate processes. The most usual situation is to apply always the same software process, although it is known to be suboptimal. To deal with this challenge, we propose a model‐based approach to software process tailoring that automatically generates project‐specific processes on the basis of the organizational process and project contexts. We still require competent process engineers to define the company's process, but once done, our approach is systematic, repeatable, and easy to use. The proposal is applied for tailoring the requirements engineering process of a medium‐size Chilean company. Processes obtained matched those used in the company for planned project contexts, and they were also reasonable for nonexpected situations. The company's process and project engineers agreed that the approach was highly valuable. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Difficulties creating process descriptions can occur because the processes extend beyond coordination, including for instance conversations, meetings, and discussions. These tasks are difficult to describe using conventional business process modeling languages, which tend to emphasize coordination. There is a need then to provide facilities for the description of highly collaborative activities. This paper proposes an extension to the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) modeling language. It includes notation to handle some of the commonly occurring tasks in highly collaborative processes. A case study concerning emergency response is presented showing how the proposed notation can be used, and how the extension provides additional expressiveness to BPMN.

The widespread availability of smartphones with wireless communication and geo-positioning capabilities has open new opportunities to services for casual passersby, e.g. the delivery of advertising when they visit a certain area. Typically such messages are delivered to cellular phones, consuming thus part of the energy of these devices. Since these devices are constrained in battery-energy, disseminating messages using little energy represents a challenge for designers of this type of solutions. This paper presents a study based on simulations that intends to identify good strategies to irradiate messages collaboratively, minimizing the energy consumption in the devices involved in the information exchange. The simulation results show that the best irradiation strategy will depend on the number of devices in the area to be irradiated. Moreover, such a strategy will have more influence if the devices are dispersed. These findings should help designers of mobile collaborative applications based on messages irradiation, to identify the best dissemination strategy depending on the current network context.

A firefighter Incident Commander (IC) is responsible for organizing, coordinating and making decisions in most urban emergencies, such as fires and car crashes. The lack of supporting information and the limitations of the radio systems push the IC to make decisions with little or no information; therefore his actions tend to be improvisations. This article presents a decision support system that allows the IC to address medium-sized urban emergencies, providing him on-demand information and also recommendations to address the event. The system was evaluated by comparing the information that it provides, with those required by the IC during past emergencies. The system was also evaluated by firefighter's commanders during a focus group session. The obtained results indicate that the proposed system is able to support the decision making process performed by IC during medium-sized emergencies.

Collaborative and volunteer applications need to implement incentive mechanisms to regulate resource sharing and encourage network nodes to contribute for reaching a certain goal. Typically, these incentive mechanisms assign resources to network node requests, based on the total amount of resources contributed by the requesting participant. This approach assumes that participants contributing more should also get back more resources from the collaborative environment. This assumption turns the system unfair to those participants with scarce resources, because they have just few resources to share. This paper proposes the use of an incentive strategy based on the contribution percentage of each node; i.e. an effort-based approach. This proposal is evaluated and compared to contribution-based strategies. The obtained results show that the proposed effort-based approach not only benefits participants that have scarce resources, but also it is able to satisfy the requests of the powerful nodes.

Healthy older adults experience physical and sensory performance decrease, reducing their interest in exercising and leading to a sedentary lifestyle. This increases natural decay, diseases, isolation and risk of falls and eventually death. Active-play video gaming, also referred as exergaming, might motivate positive changes in health behavior. However, such games need to take into account the physical characteristics of players and can also be used to foster their social ties. In this paper, we present a long-term intervention, using Action Research, aimed at developing insights for the design of full-body motion-control exergames for older adults experiencing age-related changes addressing problems raised by their motion capacity. The results of our study establish which physical characteristics need to be monitored to adapt gameplay, and other elements of social gameplay and spectator-centered design. Based on our study we present guidelines for the design of full-body interaction in exergames for older adults.

In recent years it has been identified the need to use mobile technology in urban emergency response process, due to the importance of having information to make decisions in these scenarios. The data visualization in small mobile devices, such as PDAs or smartphones, is a critical aspect to make appropriate and on time decisions. This criticality is given particularly by the small-size of its screen and the type of information to show, which is usually geographically. This article presents a strategy to select and display the most relevant “Points of Interest” on a digital map, according to the emergency influence area. This strategy was implemented on the MobileMap tool, and then it was evaluated through simulated emergency situations, in which participated Firefighters Commanders of different Chilean Companies.

Today, millions of users around the world log into Web platforms to participate in online communities. Some of these communities group people that interact frequently in a face-to-face manner, such as the community of a course or a neighborhood. These communities are partially virtual because their members interact through both, a physical and a virtual space. These partially virtual communities have particular features and needs, and to the best of our knowledge, there are no guidelines concerning their modeling and evolution. This paper addresses the challenge of supporting the design of partially virtual communities. In particular, the article proposes a conceptual model to help design these communities, based on a literature review, a previous field study and the authors' experience. This model is expected to help designers and community managers establish the basis for developing and maintaining sustainable communities in order to ensure a certain level of activity through time.

The flexibility and changing nature of loosely coupled work makes presence awareness crucial to promote interactions among collaborators. Undergraduate students, in their efforts to accomplish coursework-related tasks, must deal with having several available channels to interact with others, accessing and sharing educational material, and the need to optimize their time. Most of them work in a loosely coupled way as the main strategy to reduce the effort spent in the educational process. Presence awareness may help them achieve interactions among potential collaborators in this scenario. This paper aims to identify the most suitable presence awareness information to promote on-demand interactions among college students. A study was conducted for this purpose, involving undergraduate engineering students from two universities in Chile. This article also presents a classification of presence awareness mechanisms for loosely-coupled mobile group work.

A firefighter Incident Commander (IC) is responsible for organizing, coordinating and decision-making in most urban emergencies such as fires or car crashes. To accomplish this task, the IC uses a couple of radio channels for communicating with the Alarms Center (AC, also known as Emergency Operation Center) and the resources assigned to such emergency. Although radio-based communication has brought several benefits, it also has drawbacks for sending, sharing, updating, and saving geospatial information. This paper presents the extension to a mobile collaborative tool called “MobileMap”, which complements the radio system. The tool helps to increase the availability of the most frequently requested information for the IC and firefighters in the field. The system design was based on a study of relevant information that the IC requires on-site for an efficient and effective decision-making. The results highlight that using MobileMap makes it possible to reduce the radio channels usage time by approximately 20%. Furthermore, the information shared through the application improves the IC decision-making process during an emergency.

Growing population and service interconnection make urban areas increasingly vulnerable to emergency situations. Although the firefighting response process plays a key role in most urban emergencies, it has remained essentially unchanged in the past decades; therefore it has several limitations to coordinate effective and efficient response activities. This paper studies the firefighting initial response process in order to measure, understand and improve it. The study involved a literature review, interviews with firefighting personnel and the analysis of 66 urban emergencies in the city of Santiago (Chile). Based on the obtained results this article proposes an emergency coordination system to improve the initial response process in urban emergencies. In order to realize the impact of the proposed system on the initial response process, a simulation based on past emergencies is presented and discussed.

Energy consumption is a main research issue in wireless sensor networks; and particularly in those where nodes collaborate to reach a goal. This article explores the energy consumption in mobile devices participating in a human-based wireless sensor network. Specifically, the paper proposes the use of a message predictor to help detect and reduce the number of unnecessary control packets delivered by the nodes as a way to keep updated the network topology. In order to evaluate this proposal, the Optimized Link State Routing protocol was modified to add a message predictor between the routing and the network layers. Eleven simulations were performed using a particular setting. The preliminary results indicate the use of the message predictor can help reduce considerably the nodes energy consumption without affecting the routing capability of the protocol. Although these results are still preliminary, they are highly encouraging.

Many educators and educational institutions include an online discussion forum in the content management system supporting their courses, because they think such tool facilitates the instructional process. It could be true if we explicitly design the instructional process to take advantage of this tool, but to do so we have to better understand how users actually use online discussion boards. Trying to answer such a question this paper presents a study of discussions occurring in several undergraduate courses in computer science offered by the University of Chile. More specifically, the study was based on the semantic analysis of a representative set of messages registered in eight different courses occurring in a period of two years. The obtained results indicate that the users do not perceive the forum as a learning tool, but as a communication platform that allows them to socialize and address coordination and operative issues related with the courses.

Firefighters are responsible for dealing with several types of urban emergencies, such as fires, car crashes and explosions. The participants in an emergency response process require shared information to make effective, on-time decisions, and to coordinate their activities. The information sharing process is currently performed using message exchange through a radio system. However, limitations in this communication medium jeopardize information availability during the emergency. This may produce undesirable situations, such as lack of coordination among firefighters or wrong decisions due to lack of supporting information. As a way to deal with the problem, this article proposes a computer-based system, which complements the radio system. The system helps increase the availability of the information that is most frequently requested by firefighters in the field, identified by a study of 65 past emergencies. The results of a preliminary evaluation indicate the solution is able to ensure the availability of at least the 30% of the most requested information during an emergency.

Advances in wireless communication systems and mobile devices allow nomad users to participate in mobile collaborative activities. However the availability of hardware resources in the mobile devices participating in the collaboration process enhances or jeopardizes such activity. This paper studies how the network topology and the hardware resources distributed into a mobile network influence the collaboration activities among the participants. Several simulations were done to try to understand this issue. The obtained results show that in mobile collaboration scenarios involving a high number of resources-constraint mobile devices (e.g. handhelds), the maximum cooperation among node is obtained in a small world network topology. The results also show that another factor that encourages cooperation among nodes is the network size.

Defining organizational processes is essential for enhancing maturity. However the best process depends on the particularities of each project. Typically a process engineer defines a specific process for each project in an ad-hoc fashion, which is expensive, unrepeatable and error prone. Trying to deal with this challenge we propose a model-based approach to software process tailoring that generates project specific processes based on the organizational process and the project context. The approach is systematic, repeatable and it does not depend on the people using it. The proposal has been applied for tailoring the Requirements Engineering process of a medium size company. The obtained results were validated by process engineers of the company. Processes obtained using the proposed approach matched the ones used in the company for planned contexts and also they were reasonable for non-expected situations.

VHF radio systems commonly used to support search and rescue activities after disasters limit the flow of information among response teams deployed in the field. It generates islands of information that jeopardizes the coordination and effectiveness of the response activities. This article proposes a communication model that uses opportunistic networks and real-time messages delivery to help address such limitation. Since the communication model is computable, it is possible to diagnose the flow of information expected for a particular work scenario. The diagnose results allow identifying elements that could help improve the information flow in such scenario. This proposal allows first responders to address the stated problem during the phases of preparedness, response and recovery from a disaster.

Software engineering education has been recognized as an important challenge in computer science undergraduate programs. Instruction in such area requires not only to deliver theoretical knowledge, but also to perform practical experiences that allow students to assimilate and apply such knowledge.

The software industry has recognized the importance of teamwork as a driver for good projects results. However teamwork is not an easy goal to reach, because there is a large list of variables affecting the process. Each project probably will require a particular recipe to promote and perform real teamwork. Therefore a one-size fits-all approach does not work to promote teamwork in the software development scenarios. This article presents an influence model that helps the development teams to find a strategy that allow them to carry out teamwork. This model is the result of an analysis conducted by the authors on 27 software projects performed in a controlled setting in an academic environment.

Very small software enterprises (up to 25 employees) represent the most important software task force around the world. Several researches report these organizations remain a low success rate in development projects, because they implement inefficient mechanisms to support requirements engineering practices. This paper presents a collaborative software application, named Software Requirements Manager (SRM), which automates several requirements engineering practices. This tool acts as a communication and coordination space for team members. SRM has been used in a software development academic scenario during the last three years. The obtained results show that SRM can significantly improve the projects' success rate by facilitating the collaboration among members of the development team.

Wireless communication infrastructure dependence is not always a suitable way to support mobile collaboration. Mobile workers can take advantage of the communication capability embedded in their mobile devices, in order to create communication channels between them. These Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) are robust and they can be deployed almost anywhere. However, these networks need to include a routing protocol that allows mobile workers to collaborate when they are not physically close. This paper presents an application level routing protocol designed to automatically perform MANET formation and message routing procedures. It is intended to assist high level groupware development with a structured high level communication system.

Mobile collaborative applications are usually deployed in work scenarios where the existence of fixed communication infrastructure is hard to predict. For that reason, these applications use Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) to support communication between mobile users. The complexity involved in such communication infrastructures make that developers avoid developing software for mobile work scenarios. However, it is possible to provide a reusable abstraction of such communication mechanisms, in order to avoid that developers have to deal with low-level programming. This article presents HLMP API, which is an application programming interface that provides access to a HLMP implementation. This API is organized as a fully distributed mobile communication infrastructure, able to run on MANETs. This infrastructure provides an important set of services, which are required to support mobile collaboration. The reuse of these services allows developers to reduce the complexity, times and cost of these development projects.

The complexity of modeling mobile groupware systems is well known. The mobility of the collaborators, the diverse technologies available to support them and the continuous change in the collaboration scenarios bring new challenges to the design of these applications. Currently there are few languages explicitly designed to model these groupware systems. This paper presents the Mobile Collaboration Modeling language, a graphical language to represent loosely coupled mobile collaborative work. This language may be used to communicate work practices, determine user requirements and design a groupware application that accurately supports collaborative mobile work. This article presents a case study illustrating the suitability of the proposal.

One of the problems affecting fire departments in Latin America is the lack of a strong infrastructure to overcome their communication problems. Because these organizations are mainly volunteer and receive minimal support from government agencies, most existing solutions are not applicable for them. This article presents a low-cost mobile groupware application, which may be used in emergency situations to overcome the firefighters' communication problems. The tool, named MobileMap, allows exchanging textual and graphical information using mobile devices. Therefore, this solution complements the frequently over-used radio communication systems. This tool was evaluated in a simulated and a real scenario; the obtained results are highly encouraging.

This paper presents a language for courseware design that tries to overcome usability limitations shown by the Course Modeling Technique (CMT). The proposed language is able to deal with the key aspects of courseware design: objectives, contents, and instructional path. Given that its potential users are non-technical, the representation of the language is close to natural language. For its design, an emperical experimentation was made comparing its expressivity power regard to CMT. The results showed that the proposed language is more expressive and avoids some ambiguities that appears when CMT is used. Finally, the designers who participate in the tests, think that the new language is better than CMT in terms of effort required to use it.

This article presents an abstract structure capturing the essence of a mobile shared workspace (MSW), and how a particular MSW can be obtained by instantiating such structure. It is intended to assist designers of mobile groupware tools to conceive new products reusing other designers' knowledge. This approach facilitates the design of a particular MSW in an easy and fast way. We illustrate how the abstract structure can be instantiated in the development of MSWs to support hospital work and construction inspection activities.

Traditionally, collaborative systems have been difficult to conceive, design and implement. Although several requirements involved in these products are recurrent, some become invisible to clients and developers because they are part of the product back- end. This situation is worse in the case of mobile groupware because the general requirements to support mobile collaboration are still unclear. This paper presents a framework of general requirements that are usually present in mobile shared workspaces. These requirements are not always visible; therefore the framework acts as a checklist helping developers to consider them. Thus, the framework could increase the success probability of mobile shared workspaces.

Wireless communication and mobile computing technologies have brought new opportunities and challenges to the CSCW area. Traditional CSCW solutions concerning communication and coordination support are not applicable to mobile collaboration scenarios. Therefore, new reusable solutions have to be proposed in order to ease the development of mobile collaborative applications. This paper presents a set of design patterns to support communication and coordination in mobile ad-hoc scenarios. These two aspects are the basis to support mobile collaboration.

The software engineering community has been trying to find a way to get fast and accurate software estimations for many years. Although many methods have been proposed, they are not designed for novice persons. This paper proposes a collaborative estimation method based on negotiation. The method is applicable to small/medium-size projects (3-6 months) and it can be used by novice developers. The article also describes a software application supporting the process. The estimation method and the tool where evaluated in an academic scenario. The obtained results show this kind of tool is suitable for novice developers; however, an in-depth study must be made to determine the real effectiveness of the application.

Workflow modeling is well suited for scenarios where many entities work collaboratively towards a common goal, and it is vastly used to model complex business processes. Besides, the workflow model can be applied to a wide variety of domains. This paper shows how to use workflows to model collaboration in ad-hoc mobile environments. Particularly, it introduces the concept of "active entity", which is a network-isolated subcomponent of a workflow process. It is shown how active entities overcome the challenges of an ad-hoc mobile environment. The support required for this workflow extension in terms of lightweight software architecture for mobile device is also described.

The use of past information is becoming critical for organizations. Coordination, decision making and negotiation are some of the collaborative activities that depend on it. However, the need to provide privacy and information retrieval capabilities to all users of an organizational memory system (OMS), requires a good strategy for acquiring and structuring the information. This paper presents a strategy intended to (a) facilitate the feeding of an OMS based on information stored in legacy information systems, (b) ease the information retrieval process, and (c) provide an automatic privacy mechanism for the information stored in the OMS.

People are usually concerned with the privacy of their personal information. However, the problem of privacy is also present when the information is directly linked to people, for example in personal opinions, discussions and decisions. Typically, if this information is indefinitely stored in an organizational memory system, then it may cause privacy problems inside the organization. Privacy is needed for users to feel free enough to express themselves honestly, and consequently, for the collaborative software to succeed. This paper presents a model to incorporate automatic privacy measures in an Organizational Memory System

Traditional courseware tools produce courseware with property formats. Unfortunately, these formats are incompatible among them. Therefore, the reuse of courseware material is limited to those developed with the same courseware tool. The functionality of a courseware becomes limited to that provided by a specific courseware tool. To solve these problems this paper proposes a framework of software components. The software components are JavaBeans that provide an interchangeable format among courseware tools supporting this specification. It means the components of the framework make possible to reuse courseware contents and functionality among these tools. The reuse is a very desirable practice because it could reduce the courseware development time and cost. The obtained results using the proposed framework are encouraging.