Abstract This paper proposes an interdisciplinary approach aimed to bring into practice some novel Software Engineering theoretical paradigms. The premise of these news paradigms is based on the idea of “ecologies” as realities that take place in the environment of a Software product. These “ecologies” are understood as tight but flexible interactions between the human, social, and technical components involved, where Software is just another component. However, the theoretical paradigms discussed do not offer a viable way to make sense of these ecologies into the practice of Software design and development. Thus, as a more operationalized approach, this paper proposes a framework based on Networks of Activities, a concept derived from Activity Theory, as a resource to help in the design, development, and evolution of these new emergent complex socio‐technical ecologies. This framework has been conceived as a tool for the design, capture, and, especially, to analyze the evolution of these ecologies. The concepts and notations used by the proposed approach are illustrated through a proof of concept that shows the essential ideas and their use in real scenarios. In this way, the concepts discussed contribute to the improvement of related fields like Requirements Engineering, Human‐Computer Interaction, or Software Architecture, among others.

Critical infrastructure (CI) modeling and analysis is a very challenging research topic. One of the most pressing issues is to find an effective representation for addressing the system vulnerabilities caused by interdependencies, which, if exploited, could result in nontrivial accident scenarios. Until now, this question has been tackled for different sector-specific infrastructures (electricity grid, telecommunications networks, supply chains, etc.), and very few generalizable analysis tools have been developed. However, all CI share some features that can be leveraged in order to build a common modeling framework. This paper identifies these common features, which it exploits to develop a modeling language: the infrastructure resilience-oriented modeling language (I®ML). I®ML is designed to facilitate the analysis of operational interdependencies among the infrastructure components and overall resilience, i.e., the ability of the infrastructure to withstand and recover under off-nominal (anomalous) conditions. A number of examples are used to illustrate the modeling concepts and highlight the analytical capability of I®ML.

Even though information and communications technology arises as a powerful tool for the improvement of education, at present, e-learning does not improve learning methods but merely repeats the problems of traditional education. This work proposes a new educational model that tries to tackle these problems. Through the use of a global ontology as basis of a knowledge management system, this system allows us to establish the largest number of relationships within the available information, and its classification. From this knowledge support, learning is planned through action, which results in the execution of tasks that are based on computer games strategies. The system interacts with the student to motivate him, showing him the information adapted to his preferences.

To solve any nontrivial problem, it first needs to be conceptualized, taking into account the individual who has the problem. However, a problem is generally associated with more than one individual, as is usually the case in software development. Therefore, this process has to take into account different viewpoints about the problem and any discrepancies that could arise as a result. Traditionally, conceptualization in software engineering has omitted the different viewpoints that the individuals may have of the problem and has inherently enforced consistency in the event of any discrepancies, which are considered as something to be systematically rejected. The paper presents a methodological framework that explicitly drives the conceptualization of different viewpoints and manages the different types of discrepancies that arise between them, which become really important in the process. The definition of this framework is generic, and it is therefore independent of any particular software development paradigm. Its application to software engineering means that viewpoints and their possible discrepancies can be considered in the software process conceptual modeling phase. This application is illustrated by means of what is considered to be a standard problem: the IFIP case.

Viewpoint-based Requirements Engineering (VBRE) is based on the fact that there is a multiplicity of stakeholders that take part in any requirements process. This will inevitably lead to conflicts and inconsistencies that, if adequately managed, can be used to improve the process, as they are sources of requirements. There comes a time in every VBRE process when different viewpoints need to be compared to fin discrepancies (conflicts, inconsistencies). But in Requirements Engineering (RE) we also deal with other categories of statements, apart from "requirements", like domain descriptions and interface specifications. We could use this categorization to (i) internally classify the contents of each viewpoint by categories; (ii) compare the contents of one viewpoint against another, taking into account that this comparison should only be made between elements of the same category; (iii) classify the discrepancies by the affected categories and (iv) generate resolutions for the discrepancies according to this classification. In this paper, we present a VBRE method based on this approach, which is not constrained to a particular representation formalism. The proposed framework includes discrepancy detection and classification and solution generation.