Abstract It is important to count on tools to help software professionals to evaluate the software process and how it may be affected by factors related to its deployment. Simulation models are a valuable means to illustrate the behaviour of such a process since scenario generation supports the prediction of potential outcomes and the prevention of undesired scenarios which are harmful to the process and the company in charge of the project to be developed. This work explores the effectiveness of introducing system dynamics (SD) models in the software engineers’ process of understanding, from a management perspective, the software process dynamics. The used SD simulation model of the software process emphasises the representation of an iterative process. The COCOMO II model drivers and their main attributes were used, providing a set of reference factors that affect the software process, the estimation of project cost and the effort required. A set of 59 junior software professionals with no previous knowledge about SD participated in a validation study. For simple predictive scenarios, there was no important improvement effect, while for more complex predictive scenarios SD helped them to guess better and provide a rationale for the expected behaviour of the software process performance.

Abstract Software engineers and IT professionals face the challenge of envisioning the needs and wishes of their client companies, whose long‐term survivability depends on their adaptability to the digital business ecosystem, which is impregnating more or less every single sector of the economy. Looking at the data reported on the business digitalization project success rate, we realize that there is a lot of room for improvement. In this paper, we focus on the results of developing 10 business digitalization projects for 10 small and medium enterprises, where the software engineers in charge of the projects assessed the knowledge governance maturity of client companies before proposing any specific projects to support their digital businesses. We surveyed the software engineers participating in the above projects to gather their impressions of using knowledge governance assessment as a tool to predictively visualize the digital solution that best fits each digitalization project.

One of Industry 4.0 main challenge is focused on building Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) platforms to handle data management across industrial systems and components, enabling interoperability and seamless integration. In this paper, we present INDIGO, an IIOT Data Management platform which fosters semantics for fully-fledged data integration.

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.

Society is becoming a great source of knowledge and innovation, the synergy of all the ideas that are coming from all the countries across the world is fostering the rise of a new kind of society where knowledge plays an important role, nevertheless today's society needs a global strategy to improve knowledge management in order to ensure its accessibility. This paper introduces a global strategy supported on the one hand, by a methodological framework that proposes a transactive memory system to allow encoding, storing, and retrieving knowledge collectively in a smart manner, on the other hand, it is supported by a technological framework based on Web 2.0 technologies aimed to implement the methods and strategies defined in the transactive memory system. Moreover, this global strategy must ensure the maturity of the generated knowledge in order to foster innovation, also knowledge use must be tracked and measured in order to allow knowledge to become intellectual capital, which is one of the most valuable assets of current society.