Software Inspection is a review technique that aims to improve the quality of software artifacts through defect detection, thus reducing the cost of rework. Being a human-driven process, it depends directly on the professional's individual expertise level in the field. However, it is challenging to teach software inspection in the classroom without proper support, leading students to lose motivation and hampering their learning. To circumvent that, the InspectorX serious game was proposed as a means to support Software Inspection Education and Training. Since then, students provided feedback on what could make it more interesting. In this sense, this paper introduces InspectorX 2.0, an evolution that migrate old issues and present novel features. A preliminary assessment performed with students helped us understand the pros and cons of this version.

The use of Multiagent Systems (MAS) has been increasing over the years due to their capacity of dealing with problems in a variety of domains. The modeling of such systems is not trivial: besides the knowledge and skills on agent-oriented software engineering and a basic understanding of the target domain to be modeled, it demands familiarity with agent-oriented modeling methodologies. This is not always the case, though, especially for newcomers in the field. This work proposes a set of guidelines in the form of a questionnaire for the evaluation of MAS models, aiming at supporting the verification of their quality. The questionnaire is built upon the results of a systematic mapping conducted to identify how MAS models have been evaluated and what metrics have been used. The proposed guidelines were evaluated through (i) a peer review by experts and (ii) its actual application by graduate students applying modeling methodologies in the context of Guardian Angel (GA), a patient-centered health system that automatically supports patients suffering from chronic diseases. Participants provided an overall positive feedback and proposed some improvements on the questionnaire, most of which were promptly incorporated.

Games applied to health education have emerged as a motivational improvement in learning and clinical performance of students from the health care area. Currently, there are several agent oriented methodologies that support the multi-agent systems development. However none are specific to the domain of medical and health education. Agent-oriented development of medical educational games must have special features such working with a multidisciplinary team, have a high degree of user involvement and allow a mutuality of game requirements. Within this context, this paper presents the development of MEDEDUC, an educational systems technology applying agile development through the AGILE-PASSI methodology. This game, which has five levels of difficulty, allows the student to study pulmonology answering questions that explore multimedia presentations. The results of this study stressed the advantages of the agile development methodology game that combines medical theory and multi-agent.

This work presents a pedagogical proposal, in the context of game-based learning (GBL), that uses the concept of Transparency Pedagogy. As such, it aims to improve the quality of teaching, and the relationship between student, teacher and teaching methods. Transparency is anchored in the principle of information disclosure. In pedagogy, transparency emerges as an important issue that proposes to raise student awareness about the educational processes. Using GBL as an educational strategy we managed to make the game, a software, transparent. That is we made the inner processes of the game known to the students. As such, besides learning by playing, students had access to the game design, through intentional modeling. We collected evidence that, by disclosure of the information about the design, students better performed on learning software engineering.

Software inspections are recommended for improving the quality of software artifacts, but their effectiveness heavily depends on properly training inspectors and other stakeholders in the inspection process. We previously proposed InspectorX, a serious game for learning and training on software inspections, whose design accounts for an optimized cognitive load by offering different levels of difficulty. The game has already been evaluated regarding its learning potential in the detection of defects, revealing positive outcomes. Since then, InspectorX has extended its coverage to other stages of the inspection process, for a more realistic simulation. This paper presents the games novel features and a new experiment that evaluates them with a bigger sample. Results indicate that there was considerable knowledge retention with just 20 minutes of gameplay. Suggestions on its design made by the experiment volunteers are also discussed.

This work presents an educational board and card game named SimulES-W, as a tool for teaching Software Engineering. It encompasses 5 years of evolution, in which the game Problems and Programmers was the fundamental source. SimulES-W innovates in three distinct areas: it is a web based game, it relies on a broad view of the software process and it is customizable for content. SimulES-W is supported by collaborative software that implements the SimulES board game. The paper describes the game, stresses its strong points, provides initial data on its use and discusses its future.

Agent orientation appears as a solution for constructing complex systems adapting the requirements identification to cope with agent properties like autonomy, sociability and pro-activeness. Many methodologies were proposed adopting this new paradigm. However, most of them are still in development and therefore need to be adapted. In this work MaSE, an agent-oriented methodology is evaluated. We use an exemplar proposed in 2001 by Yu and Cysneiros [1] to evaluate both agent/goal orientation and object orientation. This evaluation aims at analysing which are the strengths and weaknesses of MaSE through the methodologies questions proposed in the exemplar.

Usability is becoming increasingly recognized as being an important factor in the acceptance of systems by end users. There is a basic need for systematic approaches to reason, model and analyze usability from the early stages of software development. Furthermore, it is necessary to develop a usable ontology or classification of measurable aspects that can be used to aid in the specification of usability requirements. These ontologies should be represented in a way that facilitates their use as guidelines for the requirements elicitation process. This work builds on review of literature in the area of human-computer interaction and the emerging field of usability engineering in developing a catalog of aspects of usability that can be considered during requirements gathering. This catalogue is used to guide the requirements engineer through alternatives for achieving usability for information systems. The approach uses i* framework, having usability modeled as a special type of goal.