ABSTRACT Researchers, organizations, and professionals have a great interest in defining sustainability indicators within the framework of Green Business Process Management (Green BPM), together with business process models that allow the impact of those indicators to be assessed in organizations. However, there is a lack of procedures that help organizations to incorporate indicators in Green BPM. For this reason, the so‐called Gaia method has been developed based on the Green BPM lifecycle. This method allows the implementation, monitoring, and continuous improvement of sustainability in business processes based on sustainability indicators. This paper presents an empirical validation of Gaia through a case study carried out in a higher education institution, emphasizing the definition and evaluation of sustainability indicators in business processes. The evaluation of sustainability indicators into the BPM lifecycle allowed sustainability indices to be obtained for each process, leading to the calculation of an organization's sustainability coefficient. The proposal has been applied to a higher education organization, which obtained a sustainability coefficient , corresponding to the medium sustainability level (). The case study has been the basis for the re‐elaboration of objectives, lines of action, and the redesign of business processes that contribute to evaluating and improving the levels of sustainability desired by the organization under study. The main limitation of our study is that the Gaia method has been applied on one organization only. A tool that automates the method to assess the sustainability of business processes is being developed.

Sustainability has become a significant concern in software systems like websites, driven by their increasing adoption and environmental impact. As website usage grows, so does their energy consumption and carbon footprint, affecting their environmental sustainability. Understanding the relationship be-tween usability and environmental sustainability is essential for designing web sites that meet user needs while minimizing environmental impact. This paper examines this relationship, focusing on popular sports websites due to their substantial internet traffic. We evaluated ten English-language sports web sites for their environmental sustainability and usability using Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics. Our assessment considered factors such as Ecological Accommodation, Content, Operation, Multimedia, and HTTP Requests. The findings reveal a strong negative correlation between usability and sustainability, suggesting that improvements in usability may increase environmental impact and vice versa. This study's insights can inform website de-velopers in creating digital platforms that are both usable and environmentally sustainable.

Heuristic evaluation provides usability auditors with a structured flow of activities that enables them to obtain reliable, comparable and cost-effective usability evaluation results. Tools supporting heuristic evaluation are scarce in literature. Usevalia is an Internet-based tool that manages usability audits on the basis of heuristic evaluation. This article presents the main features of Usevalia, together with a validation of the software by following the Technology Acceptance Model, which verified the users’ perceptions of Usevalia as regards usefulness, ease of use, attitude and intention to use. A total of 22 students enrolled on a human–computer interaction course were involved in the validation. According to the results of the survey conducted with them, the proposed tool is easy to use (MD = 4.00 out of 5) and useful for conducting usability audits based on heuristic evaluation (MD = 4.00 out of 5). An expert-based validation was also carried out in order to thoroughly compare Usevalia’s features with those of a spreadsheet-based tool that performs usability audits in the traditional manner. This comparative analysis made it possible to conclude that the Usevalia tool has a higher perceived usefulness (M = 4.43) and perceived ease of use (M = 4.13) than a traditional audit tool, such as the Usability Datalogger spreadsheet (M = 2.43 and M = 3.03, respectively).

Abstract Attention is currently being focused on DevOps, which aims to reduce software development time by means of close collaboration between the development and operations areas. However, little effort has been made to determine the role of requirements management in DevOps. The objective of this study is to help both researchers and practitioners by providing an overview of the best practices regarding requirements engineering in DevOps and identifying which areas still need to be investigated. A multivocal mapping study has, therefore, been carried out in order to study which methodologies, techniques and tools are used to support requirements management in DevOps environments. After applying the review protocol, 37 papers from formal literature and 14 references from grey literature were selected for analysis. The general conclusions obtained after analysing these papers were that, within DevOps, more attention should be paid to: (1) the reuse of requirements in order to identify systems and software artefacts that can serve as a basis for the specification of new projects; (2) the communication of requirements between the different areas of an organisation and the stakeholders of a project; (3) the traceability of requirements in order to identify the relationship with other requirements, artefacts, tasks and processes; (4) non-functional requirements in order to identify the requirements of the operations area in the early phases of a project; and finally (5) specific requirements tools that should be seamlessly integrated into the DevOps toolchain. All these issues must be considered without ignoring the agile and continuous practices of development, operations and business teams. More effort must also be made to validate new methodologies in industry so as to assess and determine their strengths and weaknesses.

This paper presents the results of an educational experiment conducted to determine whether an automated, card-based gamification strategy has an impact on the learning of Jakob Nielsen's 10 heuristic usability rules. The participants in the experiment were 55 students enrolled on a human-computer interaction course. According to the results of the experiment and the hypothesis tests performed to compare both traditional and gamified approaches, there were no significant differences (t (53) = 0.66, p = 0.52), although the scores attained by the students who used the gamification strategy were slightly better when evaluated one week later ( M = 6.29 and M = 6.57 out of 10, respectively). Moreover, the students’ perceptions reflect that the proposed tool is easy to use (MD = 4.00 out of 5) and useful as regards learning (MD = 4.00 out of 5). Further research is needed to determine whether incorporating other gamification elements, such as rankings, difficulty levels, and game modes, would have a positive impact on student motivation, engagement and performance.

GlobalSoftware Engineering implies a paradigm shift towards globally-distributed development that can be advantageous, but at the cost of having to address the specific challenges that arise when the stakeholders are not colocated. Reusing assets during the initial processes of the software development life cycle could be beneficial, but automated support is essential if the expected benefits of requirements reuse are to be actually obtained. The main contribution of this paper is the specification of a collection of software features for a tool support for distributed, catalogue-based natural-language requirements reuse. Two additional contributions are also made: (1) an implementation of the requirements specifications previously mentioned using Drupal, a Content Management System; and (2) an empirical assessment of this tool support using distributed university students as subjects (n=57). According to our findings, the tool helps in making requirements reuse better than requirements specification from scratch and in managing traceability, is easy to use, useful, and easy to learn. In contrast, the tool is not particularly suitable for managing users and user roles.

Global Software Development (GSD) poses inherent risks to projects success. Project managers are now faced with new challenges related to the geographical, temporal and socio-cultural distances between stakeholders. The objective of this research is to identify challenges associated with Software Project Management (SPM) activities in a GSD context and present an integrative framework encompassing them. Using a Systematic Literature Review (SLR), 39 risk factors were identified and later compiled into a framework inspired from the model of organizational change.

Requirements Engineering (RE) includes processes intended to elicit, analyse, specify and validate systems and software requirements throughout the software life cycle. Mastering the principles of RE is key to achieving the goals of better, cheaper and quicker systems and software development projects. It is also important to be prepared to work with remote teammates, as distributed and global projects are becoming more common. This paper presents an experiment with a total of 31 students from two universities in Spain and Morocco who were assigned to either a co-located or a distributed team. Both traditional and reuse-based requirements specification techniques were applied by the participants to produce requirements documents. Their outcomes were then analysed, and the approaches were compared from the point of view of their effect on a set of performance-based and perception-based variables in co-located and distributed settings. We found significant differences in only productivity (Z = −2.320, p = 0.020) and difficulty (Z = −2.124, p = 0.034) as regards the scores attained for non-reuse and reuse conditions, both in the co-located modality. Our findings show that, in general, the participants attained similar results for requirements specification when using the two strategies in both distributed and non-distributed environments. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Software cost estimation plays a central role in the success of software project management in the context of global software development (GSD). The importance of mastering software cost estimation may appear to be obvious. However, as regards the issue of customer satisfaction, end-users are often unsatisfied with software project management results. In this paper, a systematic mapping study (SMS) is carried out with the aim of summarising software cost estimation in the context of GSD research by answering nine mapping questions. A total, of 16 articles were selected and classified according to nine criteria: publication source, publication year, research type, research approach, contribution type, software cost estimation techniques, software cost estimation activity, cost drivers and cost estimation performances for GSD projects. The results show that the interest in estimating software cost for GSD projects has increased in recent years and reveal that conferences are the most frequently targeted publications. Most software cost estimation for GSD research has focused on theory. The dominant contribution type of software cost estimation for GSD research is that of models, while the predominant activity was identified as being software development cost. Identifying empirical solutions to address software cost estimation for GSD is a promising direction for researchers.

In an increasingly globalized world, the diversity of languages and cultures of the students requires the adaptability of the learning environment to satisfy their needs and preferences. In order to achieve this aim, current and future e-learning tools should take into account the internationalization aspects. With this purpose, and to help in the process of review and analysis of these features, we present an internationalization requirements catalog, obtained from the main related standards, together with the identification of the central elements needed to perform an effective e-learning software audit regarding these characteristics.

The rise of new development paradigms such as global software development (GSD) forces requirements engineering (RE) to face up to new challenges and risks not common in traditional development models. When an organization first embarks upon a GSD project it exposes itself to plenty of risks. Many of these risks appear as a result of the lack of experience of the development team on GSD projects. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) has led to the compilation of a repository which gathers the risks that concern RE when developed in a distributed software development environment, as well as a set of safeguards, which help overcoming such risks. This repository, open to progressive enrichment, provides a novel basis to assist in RE activities for GSD projects. It could be especially useful when the developers have little experience in distributed projects and cannot prevent communication, distance, cultural, or organizational risks. Although the repository collects the main contributions from published work in the field, it has not been validated on real GSD projects yet.

This article presents a real case study in which both the control and topographic activities of a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) are formally specified. A method to obtain the executable formal specification is described, which implies the following tasks: 1) obtention of a functional model of the selected STM experiences; 2) discussion of the specification formalism and formal language to be used; 3) establishment of certain rules to convert the functional model to the chosen formal language; and 4) construction of the formal specification. The final specification has been used to validate the functional requirements against the behavior of the system. Previously, the internal consistency of the model had also been formally verified. Much has been learned through this project about the potential of formal techniques to be accepted as a viable way of improving requirements analysis in electronic instrument systems and in related software development. This experience shows how starting from both a formal basis and a set of formally verified functional requirements is critical in producing a high-quality system design.