As automotive software systems evolve toward high and full driving automation, evaluating their quality becomes increasingly challenging, especially concerning emerging behaviors. Context awareness is the capability to sense the environment and adapt behavior. Automotive software systems are context-aware software systems (CASS). Previous secondary studies in technical literature indicate a need for testing techniques for CASS. However, these studies should have investigated the information provided by the industry. Therefore, this article undertakes a gray literature study to uncover evidence of CASS testing using 20 reports from 16 automotive companies as primary sources. Our findings show that industry practices exhibit quality assurance best practices, but CASS abstraction adoption still needs to be completed. Industry reports emphasize testing challenges but lack technical resolutions, relying on amassing diverse datasets for testing. This article has the potential to impact the quality assurance of automotive software systems significantly and lead industry professionals to enhance their testing process.

Agile software development methods have been around since at least 2001.They accommodate changing requirements with the flexibility to deal with cost and scope and have increasingly been used.However, explicit risk management is often ignored as agile methods deal with risk intrinsically and focus on rapid value delivery.In certain contexts, explicit risk management practices are needed to complement agile methods.Thus, this paper presents a systematic literature mapping aiming to discover how do software organizations integrate explicit risk management practices into agile methods.As a result we found 23 primary studies that, in majority, applied case studies in the industry, using agile methods such as Scrum, and adapting agile practices such as Daily Meeting and Iteration Planning Meeting to manage risks related to schedule and communication, for example.The selected primary studies raise evidence that the introduction of explicit risk management practices bring benefits to agile methods.

As computing education makes its way into schools, there is still little research on how to assess the learning of algorithms and programming concepts as a central topic. Furthermore, in order to ensure valid instructional feedback, an important concern is the reliability and construct validity of an assessment model. Therefore, this work presents a large-scale evaluation of the CodeMaster rubric for the performance-based assessment of algorithms and programming concepts by analyzing software artifacts created by students as part of complex, open-ended learning activities. The assessment is automated through a web-based tool that performs a static analysis of the source code of App Inventor projects. Based on 88,812 projects from the App Inventor Gallery, we statistically analyzed the reliability and construct validity of the rubric. Results indicate that the rubric can be regarded as reliable (Cronbach's alpha α=0.84). With respect to construct validity, there also exists an indication of convergent validity based on the results of a correlation and factor analysis. This indicates that the rubric can be used for a valid assessment of algorithm and programming concepts of App Inventor programs as part of a comprehensive assessment completed by other assessment methods. The results can guide the improvement of assessment models, as well as support the decision on the application of the rubric in order to support computing education in K-12.

One way to teach computing in K-12 is through the development of mobile applications with App Inventor. Although already broadly used worldwide, there is still a need for support for the assessment of the applications created by the students. Existing rubrics focusing mostly on programming concepts do not cover more comprehensively the performance-based assessment of user interface design concepts, important for the usability and aesthetics of the applications. Thus, in order to support the assessment of the visual design of apps based on its compliance with design theory and guidelines, we developed the CodeMaster UI Design - App Inventor rubric in the context of computing education. In order to facilitate its application in practice, we automated the assessment of applications created with App Inventor through a static code analysis by an online tool. We evaluated the reliability and validity of the rubric based on the automated assessment of 1,775 projects from the App Inventor Gallery. The results indicate that the rubric can be considered reliable (Cronbach's alpha = 0.84). In terms of construct validity, there is also evidence of convergent validity. The results presented in this article can be used to support the assessment of computing education in practice as well as to point out further research opportunities.

A common challenge in life is to evaluate and deal with risks. Even though Risk management is fundamental to any activity, it is too often evaluated and managed from a qualitative rather than a quantitative perspective. In order to improve, too often organizations are seeking compliance against a single model/approach, forgetting that most often 'one model doesn't fit all' and that the target process model is the organizational one, strengthened by external best practices. An approach to process improvement that takes this into consideration is LEGO (Living EnGineering prOcess). LEGO extracts the most useful Elements of Interest (EoI) from several types of maturity models into an organizational Business Process Model (BPM) in order to facilitate to the achievement of higher organizational maturity and capability levels, that's the definitive intended target to be improved. This paper applies the LEGO approach to Risk Management, analyzing several Risk Management Maturity Models and unifying their practices in order to come up with a more comprehensive process model on risk management integrating multiple views.

The technical debt metaphor has received wide attention by both practitioners and researchers alike. The metaphor has been proven useful to explain in economy's terms aspects which occur during the software development process. This work studies the applicability of the metaphor in reflection activities of agile projects. To achieve this, a qualitative research methodology has been carried out to study the records of a live agile development projects. Our results confirm the applicably of the proposal by the identification of terms related to the metaphor in this records. Moreover, our study has further validated the applicability of cost factors used in technical debt measurement reported in the literature.