The pre-eminence of the service sector in a country's economy is clearly proportional to its level of development. On average, the service sector accounts for around 65% of the employment of the world's population and is currently the sector that generates the highest employment rates. Improving quality and productivity in this sector requires a new professional profile that integrates the knowledge of different disciplines that make up the science of services. And, for the creation of this new profile we need a different type of training. The challenge is to move from teaching in silos, where the knowledge of each subject is taught in isolation, to trans disciplinary teaching, which integrates the different disciplines required for the development and management of services. In this article we focus specifically on the profile of the Service Software Engineer, a new type of engineer capable of meeting the challenges posed by the development of services strongly influenced by technologies and by the need to build a future of more connected, accessible, sustainable, and quality services.

This paper introduces a modelling environment for service design that currently supports 5 different notations (Business Model Canvas, e 3 value, Service Blueprint, Process Chain Network and BPMN). Besides, the tool supports the generation of partial views of models based on a particular notation from models made with another one, along with the corresponding relations model.

In 2014, Rey Juan Carlos University (from Spain) has implemented the Service Science, Management and Engineering career. From the study conducted in 2016, the formulated hypothesis that the students' evidenced performance in the different modules of the career (i.e., Fundamentals, Technology, Personal Skills, Services and Companies) is affected by the secondary school modality of provenance. Aimed at monitoring the performance of first-year students of this career, in the present work we propose the use of a Holistic Evaluation Approach for Quality. This approach has a family of integrated evaluation strategies which allows achieving goals for diverse purposes such as to understand, compare, monitor, among others. In a nutshell, a strategy integrates a conceptual base with process and method specifications, which ensures that evaluation projects' results are consistent and comparable over time. Particularly, in this work, we use the monitoring strategy for understanding the performance of students, in the first year of the abovementioned career, from 2014 to 2017 period of time. The yielded outcomes will serve as a basis for the development of a predictive model. This will allow to the University to propose instruments aimed at improving the performance of students regarding the predominant modality of provenance.

All organizations, both public and private should set goals or objectives at different organizational levels. So higher education institutions should not be the exception. A holistic evaluation approach can be useful for analyzing whether the pursued strategic or tactical objectives are achieved regarding different information needs at operational level. While teachers may aim at facilitating the learning process of all their students, department directors may need to understand the students' performance with the objective of planning extracurricular courses for helping them to improve their skills in specific areas. This paper illustrates a systematic strategy for evaluation and analysis which includes activities and methods for understanding the current situation of an entity in order to foster better decision making. Particularly, it is used to understand and analyze the students' performance in the Service Science, Management and Engineering career of a Spanish university considering the profile of provenance, i.e., the secondary school modality.

Visual Domain Specific Languages play a fundamental role in the development of model-driven software. The increase in this type of visual languages and the inherent complexity as regards the development of graphical editors for them has, in recent years, led to the emergence of several tools that provide technical support for this task. Most of these tools are based on the use of models and increase the level of automation of software development, which are the basic principles of Model Driven Engineering. This paper therefore reviews the main features, potential advantages and current limitations of the main tools that exist for the development of graphical editors for visual DSLs.

There is a growing tendency in modern enterprises to understand business activities from a service-oriented perspective. The alignment of business and service-oriented architectures, and the provision of methods or techniques to help in such gap have become, therefore, crucial aspects in service-oriented software development. In this work we present a proposal that aim to solve this gap by means of the definition of an architecture-centric method. This paper present the development of a service-oriented system that provide services for the citizens using intelligent pavement. Key benefits of our proposal are: the provision of a method for the alignment of business and service-oriented software, and, the definition of a new business model that can be used to understand the “structure” of a business and to complement other well-known business models such as business value or business process.

The key role of models in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) provides a new landscape for dealing with traceability. However, despite the certain maturity reached by some MDE tools, providing efficient views of traceability data is still in its early stages. To contribute in this direction, this work introduces the visualization mechanisms provided by iTrace, a framework for the management of traceability in MDE projects. In particular, a multipanel editor for trace models supports the low-level edition of traceability data whereas different dashboards provide high-level views of such data. Both proposals are illustrated by means of a running example.

Traceability has always been acknowledged as a relevant topic in Software Engineering. However, keeping track of the relationships between the different assets involved in a development process is a complex and tedious task. The fact that the main assets handled in any model-driven engineering project are models and model transformations eases the task. In order to take advantage of this scenario, which has not been appropriately capitalized on by the most widely adopted model transformation languages before, this work presents MeTAGeM-Trace, a methodological and technical proposal with which to support the model-driven development of model transformations that include trace generation. The underlying idea is to start from a high-level specification of the transformation which is subsequently refined into lower-level transformation models in terms of a set of DSLs until the source code that implements the transformation can be generated. Running this transformation produces not only the corresponding target models, but also a trace model between the elements of the source and target models. As part of the proposal, an EMF-based toolkit has been developed to support the development of ATL and ETL model transformations. This toolkit has been empirically validated by conducting a set of case studies following a systematic research methodology.

CMS-based Web applications have increased their presence in the market because of the advantages they offer with regard to information management, thus offering a new landscape in Web application development. In this paper we analyze the current state-of-the-art on the existing approaches for the development of CMS-based Web applications. To do it, we have followed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). As a result of this SLR we found four approaches in the literature focused on this issue. In this paper we focus our attention in studying the insights of each approach by following four criteria (Web Engineering views, MDA abstraction levels, modeling language and level of automation) and we discuss about the interest shown by the Web Engineering community about the CMS-based Web application development.

Model-driven development is recognized as one of the most promising approaches in software engineering. Recent research in the area highlights the importance of using an explicit architectural model in this context. Since service-oriented architectures have also demonstrated to be adequate to overcome current software needs, the idea of using the model-driven approach to generate service-oriented architectural models has successfully flourished in the last years. However, the emphasis on the Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm has led to the design of architectures lacking some desirable features. Knowing the benefits provided by architectural styles, we have found that their use can help us to overcome those needs. Our goal is to obtain a service-oriented model which satisfies the requirements of the concrete architecture and complies with the constraints and vocabulary defined for a specific architectural style. To achieve this, here, we propose to use a weaving model which merges the concrete architectural model with a model of the architectural style of choice.

In recent years, the automation of business processes has become one of the most prominent and promising uses of Web service technology. Consequently several languages have been created for the execution of business processes, making it possible to define new and more complex services or business processes which are implemented for example by means of Web service composition. Nevertheless, these kinds of languages are not suitable for use in the early stages of the development process of information systems. Special methodologies or techniques are therefore necessary to allow systems analysts to understand services from a business point of view, while facilitating the design and development of Web service composition. In this paper, we present a service-oriented approach to information system development that starts by identifying, through business modeling, the services required by the customers of a business, to make it possible to create a Web service composition model. This model will facilitate the transformation to specific languages for business process execution, thereby reducing the development efforts made in service-oriented applications. The method proposed is illustrated by means of a Web application for the management of medical images, which we have taken as a case study.

Although the development of service-based software has evolved greatly in the last years, there is still a lack of accurate development methodologies applied to service orientation. To solve this, we focus on the model- driven development approach, and more specifically in MDA, the proposal by the OMG, as it is one of the main trends in nowadays software engineering. Accordingly, we propose to define a service-oriented software architecture (SOSA) model within a model-driven methodological framework called MIDAS, for the adaptable and flexible development of modern systems. In the present work we study the concepts and elements that need to be defined at a platform independent and neutral abstraction level. This paper reflects our proposal of PIM-level architecture model for service-oriented software architectures within MIDAS.

There is a significant disconnect between the ideals of ‘on-demand’ business and the way in which we currently develop information systems. Growing competition, globalization, increasing regulation...

Medical information systems are not designed for clinical trials using clinical imaging. This paper presents a conceptual model for clinical trials based on medical imaging from two complementary points of view: a technical model and a business model. A Web information system (WIS) for supporting multicenter clinical trials has been designed to implement the proposed model. We show that our approach overcomes the actual limitations by facilitating medical image management in the context of clinical trials or cooperative research.

Nowadays, there is an enormous amount of study about the semantic Web, especially regarding one specific technology: semantic Web services. However, to be widely adopted by users and to succeed in real-world applications, semantic Web services development must catch up with mainstream software trends. As has already occurred with traditional Web services, Web development should be adapted to support the systematic development of the new components required by applications involving semantic Web services. In this paper we present, through a case study, an approach for developing semantic Web services. This approach is based on the extension of MIDAS, a model-driven methodology for Web Information Systems development.

In recent years, Internet has become the platform that supports most areas in organizations. This fact has led to the appearance of specific tools for the construction of Web Information Systems (WIS). However, in these tools an absence of functionalities for verification and validation (V&V) of the models built has been detected. This work aims to redress this absence with the definition of a strategy for the specification of the models used in the WIS development that can be used with V&V objectives. The approach has been validated in a specific methodology (MIDAS) and an associated tool (MIDAS-CASE), both aligned with the MDA proposal. One of the diagrams used in this methodology has been formalized: the extended navigation model, achieving a precise specification of this diagram. This specification permits the definition and formal verification of properties related to this diagram, as well as its validation. The specification and verification of a concrete property are also shown.

Innovation in technologies such as XML and Web services, has led to an interest in business processes. Consequently, several languages for the execution of business processes have been created. Nevertheless, as these languages cannot be used in the early stages of the development process of Web information systems (WIS), it is necessary to include methodologies that allow the systems analysts to understand the business process as well as to model the services composition. This work presents a process for the business process development based on Web services, which starts with the identification of the services that are offered to the user and ends with the definition of a service composition model. This process is illustrated by means of a WIS for the management of medical images that we have taken as a case study. Because it is one of the most widely used for Web services composition, we have chosen the BPEL4WS language for the implementation of the business processes. However, we have found several limitations in such language which are also described in this paper