Our world’s needs have evolved dramatically since the origins of software engineering in the 1960s. The future software engineer must be able to anticipate our needs and desires in an era where complex challenges continually emerge, and adaptive solutions must be delivered on the fly. This paper addresses the evolution of the IEEE Computer Society’s Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK Guide) and its impact on software engineering higher education and professional training that should prepare engineers to fulfill their mission in this dynamic digital future.

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.

Over the past two decades, the HCI community has proposed specific features that software applications should include to overcome some of the most common usability problems. However, incorporating such usability features into software applications may not be a straightforward process for software developers who have not been trained in usability (i.e., determining when, how, and why usability features should been considered). We have defined a set of usability guidelines for software development to help software engineers incorporate particular usability features into their applications. In this paper, we focus on the software design artifacts provided by the guidelines. We detail the structure of the proposed design artifacts and how they should be used according to the software development process and software architecture used in each application. We have tested our guidelines in an academic setting. Preliminary validation shows that the use of the guidelines reduces development time, improves the quality of the resulting designs, and significantly decreases the perceived complexity of the usability features from the developers' perspective.

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.

Like any other quality attribute, usability imposes specific constraints on software components. Features that raise the software system's usability have to be considered from the earliest development stages. But, discovering and documenting usability features is likely to be beyond the usability knowledge of most requirements engineers, developers, and users. We propose an approach based on developing specific guidelines that capitalize upon key elements recurrently intervening in the usability features elicitation and specification process. The use of these guidelines provides requirements analysts with a knowledge repository. They can use this repository to ask the right questions and capture precise usability requirements information.

Software architects have techniques to deal with many quality attributes such as performance, reliability, and maintainability. Usability, however, has traditionally been concerned primarily with presentation and not been a concern of software architects beyond separating the user interface from the remainder of the application. In this paper, we present usability-supporting architectural patterns. Each pattern describes a usability concern that is not supported by separation alone. For each concern, a usability-supporting architectural pattern provides the forces from the characteristics of the task and environment, the human, and the state of the software to motivate an implementation independent solution cast in terms of the responsibilities that must be fulfilled to satisfy the forces. Furthermore, each pattern includes a sample solution implemented in the context of an overriding separation based pattern such as J2EE Model View Controller.

Abstract The development of future interactive systems (FIS) is in its infancy, so detailed guides describing the process to design them hardly exist. This may be due to the fact that their development is quite recent and what their components are and how they must be combined to develop a FIS are not yet clear or widely accepted. Our approach towards a thorough understanding of FIS was to analyse the different types of FIS and to extract general characteristics, which can be considered generic, in order to describe what a FIS consists of and how it works. In this paper, we present a classification of the components of a generic FIS and propose interactive behaviour patterns, which can be used to design the FIS components more easily. These patterns are part of the SENDA framework, which was defined to facilitate the rigorous development of a specific kind of FIS, which is Virtual Environments (VEs). The results obtained from the application of the proposed patterns to VEs development are also presented.

Abstract Virtual environments (VEs) are special kinds of interactive systems currently used in many fields such as education, training and medicine. However, as VE development is relatively recent, there is little experience in the area. Software engineering, the discipline which assures quality software, has not been successfully applied to date. In developing VEs, the object‐oriented software engineering paradigm is the most suitable even though principles and techniques are insufficient. In this paper, we will demonstrate this inadequacy through the development of two different VEs, identify the processes to be improved, offer a set of guidelines to improve them (coined SENDA), and present the results obtained with SENDA. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.