ABSTRACT Cybersecurity is a critical global concern, particularly for small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) with limited resources and expertise. The authors are developing CyberESP, a tailored cybersecurity framework supported by a semi‐automated tool to ensure Spanish SMEs' cybersecurity management. Following the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology and grounded in international standards, the authors identified six requirements to be satisfied by a cybersecurity framework for SMEs, which should support the identification of assets, vulnerabilities, threats, and risks. This paper presents the first part of the CyberESP framework dealing with asset management, particularly their identification and analysis of dimensions and cost. A prototype supporting these activities was developed and validated through a case study in a retail SME, showing the solution's potential and identifying particular improvements. The paper also addresses threats to validity and limitations, noting the framework's focus on hardware, software, and networks. Future work includes vulnerability management and will explore the use of cloud and IoT deployment, positioning CyberESP as a practical solution to enhance SMEs' cybersecurity resilience.

This paper presents an investigation of an Experi-ential Learning approach aiming to: (i) provide an experience which bring students closer to practice by means of a real project; and (ii) foster soft skills. Our experience took place in a Software Engineering graduate course, delivered remotely. This work and its results are primarily to be viewed as a feasibility study, although the findings provide interesting results. Active strategies, especially the Experiential Learning, can be a useful approach to provide an experience closer to real-world software industry practices, besides to foster soft skills in the students (particularly Communication, Teamwork, Leadership and Adaptability and Flexibility).

Abstract The software industry is a dynamic and ever‐changing environment where knowledge dissemination and ongoing learning is an open challenge, especially in agile organizations where continuous learning is essential. Organizational training covers the set of activities that drive this learning process and is one of the process areas of process improvement models like CMMI. In this paper, we discuss how the organizational training activity has been carried out at agile organizations under the lens of CMMI V2.0. In other words, we use the CMMI‐DEV V2.0 Organizational Training practices to provide an overview of how agile organizations plan, perform, and assess their training activities as part of their continuous learning process. Existing literature primarily discusses the techniques used to train and retrain employees. However, there is little evidence on how to plan training, how to assure alignment with the organization's strategic and tactical goals, and how to evaluate the effectiveness of training, which are very important challenges in the organizational training process. The paper concludes by presenting eight valuable insights identified by this research and matching them up with the CMMI‐DEV V2.0 Organizational Training practices.

ABSTRACT Software process improvement (SPI) initiatives have contributed for a long time to the progress of software development. However, the outcome of such initiatives has not always been as effective as expected. The literature of SPI points out that motivation of practitioners involved in SPI initiatives is a critical factor for its success. On the other hand, gamification has been perceived as motivational and has the potential to improve people's engagement. Thus, researchers have been recently investigating the impact of gamification in increasing the motivation and commitment of the organization members involved in SPI. Despite the novelty of the field, we see the integration of gamification and SPI as an opportunity of study and research. The aim of this paper is to investigate and report the state of the practice in this field, identifying key challenges faced by organizations wishing to incorporate gamification into their SPI initiatives. One of the main challenges identified is related to the complexity of gamifying SPI because it involves different organizational roles and aspects that may require designing different gamification strategies. Another relevant issue is the need of more empirical data to provide sound evidence about the real impact of gamification on improving SPI initiatives.

The growing demand for data scientists and their importance in industrial trends has resulted in a number of recent initiatives to promote skills in data science. One of these initiatives is a badge based scheme for the recognition of skills in data science developed as part of the BDVe project with the collaboration of the BDVA. This initiative is based upon a committee of experts, from both academia and industry, which will define and maintain a list of skills required to play key roles in the data science ecosystem.

The lack of user engagement, the absence of user feedback, incomplete and continuously changing user requirements are among the critical concerns that cause projects to fail. User-centered design (UCD) and agile software development are two iterative approaches that have been proposed to overcome such concerns. UCD is a design process focusing on user research, user interface design and usability evaluation. Introduced by software engineering practitioners, agile refers to a number of iterative and incremental software development practices that emphasize people’s needs, communication between developers and stakeholders and the ability to adapt to change. In both the agile and UCD communities, however, a full understanding of user requirements is often seen as incompatible with early and quick development iterations. We performed a literature review aiming to identify how agile teams have integrated UCD tools into their agile software development process to a better understanding of the user requirements without losing sight of the agile values and principles. UCD tools adaptations and minimal-up-front design applied in agile development are among the approaches discovered in this study. The findings could lead to a comprehensive user-centric software engineering that will overcome inherent problems faced by agile teams to understand user needs, priorities and goals.

In 2003, the original paper with this title was published as part of CSEET 2003. It focused on resolving communication issues between software project managers and developers and introduced a corporate strategy based means of evaluating software engineers. Now, more than a decade later, we could benefit from what we have learned in other fields about managing people involved in knowledge work and how to improve our success in software development. But are we? This paper is intended to present what Software Engineering students can be taught today that will help them to be successful as software project managers now and in the future. It is based on the premise that effective software project managers are not born but made through education.

Abstract Software companies encourage and further the use of collaborative tools and skills at the work place in pursuit of the benefits of their use: they improve communication, productivity and efficiency, and competitiveness. Besides, undergraduate and graduate software engineering computing curricula recommend subjects related to effective cooperative working and group learning. In order to align industry needs and curricula recommendations, universities should provide graduates with the collaborative knowledge and skills that will be required when they finish their degrees and join the labor market. In this scenario, we asked three questions: Are collaborative tools beneficial to software projects? Is it easier for graduates with knowledge and skills of collaborative tools to find a job? Do enterprises use collaborative tools as a marketing strategy for the recruitment process or are they really empowering their employees to use collaborative tools? We devised a survey which was administered to 86 recent computer science graduates. We applied statistical techniques to analyze the responses. We conclude that graduates skilled in the use of collaborative tools do find it easier to get jobs, and companies are not only looking for people with collaborative skills but also regularly use collaborative tools in their work processes. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Over the past two decades, the HCI community has proposed specific features that software applications should include to overcome some of the most common usability problems. However, incorporating such usability features into software applications may not be a straightforward process for software developers who have not been trained in usability (i.e., determining when, how, and why usability features should been considered). We have defined a set of usability guidelines for software development to help software engineers incorporate particular usability features into their applications. In this paper, we focus on the software design artifacts provided by the guidelines. We detail the structure of the proposed design artifacts and how they should be used according to the software development process and software architecture used in each application. We have tested our guidelines in an academic setting. Preliminary validation shows that the use of the guidelines reduces development time, improves the quality of the resulting designs, and significantly decreases the perceived complexity of the usability features from the developers' perspective.

Like any other quality attribute, usability imposes specific constraints on software components. Features that raise the software system's usability have to be considered from the earliest development stages. But, discovering and documenting usability features is likely to be beyond the usability knowledge of most requirements engineers, developers, and users. We propose an approach based on developing specific guidelines that capitalize upon key elements recurrently intervening in the usability features elicitation and specification process. The use of these guidelines provides requirements analysts with a knowledge repository. They can use this repository to ask the right questions and capture precise usability requirements information.

This paper reports a systematic review of empirical studies concerning the effectiveness of elicitation techniques, and the subsequent aggregation of empirical evidence gathered from those studies. The most significant results of the aggregation process are as follows: (I) interviews, preferentially structured, appear to be one of the most effective elicitation techniques; (2) many techniques often cited in the literature, like card sorting, ranking or thinking aloud, tend to be less effective than interviews; (3) analyst experience does not appear to be a relevant factor; and (4) the studies conducted have not found the use of intermediate representations during elicitation to have significant positive effects. It should be noted that, as a general rule, the studies from which these results were aggregated have not been replicated, and therefore the above claims cannot be said to be absolutely certain. However, they can be used by researchers as pieces of knowledge to be further investigated and by practitioners in development projects, always taking into account that they are preliminary findings

Summary form only given. As the number of undergraduate software engineering programs increases, what does this imply about the future role of graduate programs in software engineering? This panel will explore changes that may be required to existing graduate software engineering programs to adapt to the increasing number of undergraduates with bachelor's degrees in software engineering entering graduate software engineering programs. In particular, the questions the panel will consider include: How should graduate software engineering programs adapt to accommodate the arrival of students with BSSE degrees? Should graduate software engineering curricula change because of the growth in BSSE programs, and, if so, how? Should a BSSE degree substitute for the industry experience requirement commonly used in MSSE programs? Will graduate software engineering education still have value in industry for a BSSE graduate? What is the role of post-baccalaureate certificate programs in relation to graduate software engineering degree programs? How does the arrival of accreditation for software engineering impact graduate software engineering education? The panel participants have experience with both undergraduate and graduate software engineering education delivered in both degree and certificate programs. The panel has also been organized to include perspectives from the U.S. and Europe as well as a perspective from industry.

Production of software is growing at a phenomenal rate worldwide. In addition, the increasingly global business climate has accelerated the need for business software. There are too few software engineers to produce and maintain software to meet this demand. One possible solution to correcting this shortfall is reeducating existing non-software employees to become software engineers. For the past two years, the Industry/University (UU) subgroup of the Working Group on Software Engineering Education and Training (WGSEET) has been investigating active collaborations between companies and universities in which employees without formal software education are reeducated to become software engineers. This paper reports on our findings by discussing our approach to the investigation, outlining the factors involved in successful collaboration construction and execution, and describing alumni views of the knowledge and skills transferred by the collaboration.

This paper presents the motivations, experiences and results of teaching integrated Software Engineering (SE) and Knowledge Engineering (KE), specifically as part of the master course organized by the Polytechnic University of Madrid (School of Computer Science). The paper outlines a possible approach to this instruction, whose aim is for software practitioners thus educated to have a flexible and moldable view of the software systems development process. This broad and malleable approach allows future practitioners to better address the increasingly more complex, divergent and innovative problems and needs raised by users. This approach is the result of a gradual and continuous process. This paper discusses the current stage of integration, giving a detailed description and justification of the scope of the integrated instruction. For the purpose of quantitatively analyzing this experience, the paper also shows the results of the evaluation conducted throughout this process at three levels (industry, students and projects).

Software engineering (SE) and knowledge engineering (KE) develop software systems using different construction process models. Because of the growing complexity of the problems to be solved by computers, the conventional systems (CS) and knowledge-based systems (KBS) software process is at present passing through a period of integration. In this paper, we propose a software process model applicable to both CS and KBS. The model designed is declarative, that is, it indicates what is done to build a software system. Its goal is to provide software and knowledge engineers with a techno-conceptual tool to develop systems comprising both traditional and knowledge-based software.

In this paper, we present a linguistic approach in order to achieve the object oriented analysis (OOA) process in a systematic way. The approach is based on the definition of a formal correspondence between a subset of structures from linguistic world, called linguistic patterns, and a subset of structures from conceptual world, called conceptual patterns. This correspondence provides a solid basis in order to develop the conceptual models that represent the problem and its solution. One conceptual model will be used to represent the static part of the system, and another will represent system behavior.