Sustainability in software and green software has increased attention in software engineering (SE), given the potential of software to contribute positively to sustainable development initiatives. This trend is substantiated by the numerous systematic reviews (SRs) that have been published on the matter. However, a significant gap in understanding remains concerning the sustainability concepts and their dimensions within the field. This tertiary study aims to construct a comprehensive map of sustainability topics in SE. As a result, 80 SRs were selected in this report. A notable lack of consensus exists regarding SE sustainability definitions and the dimensions involved. The environmental dimension is the most frequently reported, capturing 55% of the research focus, with a predominant emphasis on energy efficiency. Approximately 52.5% of studies delve into products related to system performance and evolvability and software architecture. However, limited attention is given to the social, economic, and individual dimensions. Despite the considerable focus on the green dimension, there is a necessity for further research in both empirical primary studies and SRs to enhance the reliability of the findings. Achieving consensus on definitions of terminology and implementing standardized measurement methods are essential steps to advance understanding the sustainable SE.

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.

ABSTRACT Background After the pandemic, software engineers were forced to work remotely, in many cases without prior experience of doing so. Objective The objective of this work is to analyze the factors that influence engineers' motivation, stress and performance when working remotely after the pandemic, and to what level. Methods A significant number (around 1000) of Latin‐American software development professionals from different countries who work remotely were surveyed in order to study the factors that affect them and how when they work in this manner. The data collected from the survey were then statistically analyzed using the partial least square‐structural equation modeling (PLS‐SEM) method. Conclusions The analysis of the data made it possible to conclude that there are direct negative effects of stress on performance and direct positive effects of motivation on performance. In addition, we found that skills, experience, and teamwork behavior, such as trust, communication, and knowledge sharing, play an important role when working remotely.

Quantum computing is considered a revolutionary technology due to its ability to solve computational problems that are beyond the capabilities of classical computers. However, quantum computing requires great amounts of energy to run. Therefore, a factor in deciding whether to use quantum computing should be not only the complexity of the problem to be solved, but also the energy required to solve it. This paper presents an empirical study developed with the aim of comparing classical and quantum computing in terms of energy efficiency to determine whether the increased power of quantum computers is offset by their higher energy consumption. To achieve this, a variety of problems with different levels of complexity were tested on both types of computers. Specifically, we used the IBM Quantum computers with a maximum of 5 qubits and an Intel i7, as a classical computer. In addition to this we have also analysed the evolution of the quantum computers, performing measurements on three time periods. Our empirical study showed that there is a variability of results obtained in the three time periods and that quantum computing is not recommended for low-complexity problems, given its high energy consumption, particularly when compared to traditional computing.

Abstract Enterprise architecture is a growing trend that aims to help deal with the complexity of socio‐technical systems such as human organizations, as well as their information technology and systems areas. Nevertheless, the contribution of enterprise architecture to the field of software engineering remains unclear. The purpose of this systematic literature review is to see how enterprise architecture is used in software development and maintenance practice. To this end, we first carried out a search in the SCOPUS database and then organized the papers according to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge to determine what areas of software engineering are covered by each research study. To understand how enterprise architecture is used, we established a classification based on ISO 42010 and TOGAF. From the systematic literature review, we noticed that the early stages of development are the most impacted by the enterprise architecture. On the other hand, we observed that enterprise architecture is of assistance in the areas of engineering management, engineering processes, and engineering models and methods; these tasks are carried out by teams or managers using different, often agile, development methods or standards. In turn, we found that the most common categories are architecture descriptions; these are often used to facilitate communication and information‐sharing between different stakeholders, in addition to frameworks, which will help to establish common practices in the organization related to the joint use of enterprise architecture and software development.

Abstract DevOps has emerged as a practical approach to the interaction between development and operations. This approach has been extended to the interaction with business functions, generating the term BizDevOps. Although many proposals and tools support BizDevOps from a technical viewpoint, there has been no significant improvement in management aspects, such as evaluating the practices and processes involved in the area. This paper presents two case studies on the assessment of BizDevOps practices using MMBDO (Maturity Model for BizDevOps), a maturity model for BizDevOps based on international ICT standards. The case studies were conducted in two organizations with different profiles: a large multinational ICT company with a unit specialized in providing DevOps to the rest of the company and a small software development company that implements DevOps practices as part of its development system. The evidence we obtained in the case studies supports the adequacy of MMBDO for assessing the maturity of BizDevOps in real companies. Also, the combination of the two case studies supports the adequacy of the model for being used in companies with different sizes and levels of maturity. MMBDO is an adequate proposal for assessing the maturity of BizDevOps in software organizations and a suitable tool for process improvement.

Project managers tend to confront multiple challenges in Global Software Development (GSD), including misunderstandings about the project requirements, complex estimations of costs, risks, and efforts, along with increases in task allocation and a lack of coordination. “Soft skills” play a fundamental role in solving these challenges, as they are the human or social abilities that facilitate the resolution of conflicts and involve dealing with people and managing projects in their most social and creative dimension. However, developing the soft skills that allow project managers to lead in an effective manner is not an easy task, especially in global or distributed environments, where coordination and control problems are commonplace. One suitable mechanism with which to develop these soft skills is that of serious games, which focus on learning by doing and allow users to simulate real scenarios. The authors of this article are aware of the usefulness of this type of teaching method and have, therefore, developed the serious game described herein. This serious game is denominated as Global Manager and is focused on helping both students and novice project managers to become aware of the factors that may affect GSD projects. Global Manager was evaluated by means of a quasi-experiment based on a pretest-posttest design, which was used to assess whether the game can increase the players’ awareness and knowledge of the factors that a project manager should consider in GSD projects. The results obtained after evaluating the game were quite satisfactory, as the game taught the players to differentiate between global and distributed software projects and to experience situations that may and do occur in these settings. Furthermore, Global Manager helped improve players' perceptions of the importance of different influencing factors in GSD.

Abstract Business processes can have variants depending on specific business requirements, which lead to the definition of a so-called business process family. Since conventional business process modeling languages, e.g., the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), do not explicitly support variants’ specification, several proposals have emerged to deal with it. However, they mainly focus on languages’ definition, while less emphasis is made on providing complete variability management. This article presents a Model-Driven Engineering approach for managing BPMN-based business process families composed of a metamodel for conceptualizing process families, a high-level process for managing them (involving model transformations for the configuration of variants), and tool support for the complete approach. We validated the proposal using a real-world example from a university and an empirical study with real users. Users rated the support tool’s principal functional suitability and usability features as very good. Many improvement opportunities were detected, e.g., version control, collaborative work, and error reporting. We also provide a literature review and thorough evaluation of BPMN-based business process families’ proposals using the VIVACE framework.

In order to improve and sustain their competitiveness over time, organisations nowadays need to undertake different initiatives to adopt frameworks, models and standards that will allow them to align and improve their business processes. In spite of these efforts, organisations may still encounter governance and management problems. This is whereRisk Management (RM)can play a major role, since its purpose is to contribute to the creation and preservation of value in the context of the organisation's processes. RM is a complex and subjective activity that requires experience and a high level of knowledge about risks, and it is for this reason that standardisation institutions and researchers have made great efforts to define initiatives to overcome these challenges. However, the RM field nevertheless presents a lack of uniformity in its terms and concepts, due to the different contexts and scopes of application, a situation that can generate ambiguities and misunderstandings. To address these issues, this paper aims to present an ontology calledSRMO (Software Risk Management Ontology), which seeks to unify the terms and concepts associated with RM and provide an integrated and holistic view of risk. In doing so, the Pipeline framework has been applied in order to assure and verify the quality of the proposed ontology, and it has been implemented in Protégé and validated by means of competency questions. Three application scenarios of this ontology demonstrating their usefulness in the software engineering field are presented in this paper. We believe that this ontology can be useful for organisations that are interested in: (i) establishing an RM strategy from an integrated approach, (ii) defining the elements that help to identify risks and the criteria that support decision-making in risk assessment, and (iii) helping the involved stakeholders during the process of risk management.

The emergence of Global Software Development (GSD) has led to certain difficulties in the life cycle of global projects, in addition to the traditional challenges of collocated development, particularly as regards Project Management (PM). These difficulties are caused by the geographical, linguistic and cultural distance among the members of the team, signifying that the project manager requires special skills with which to mitigate these issues. Bearing this in mind, this paper describes a serious game (SG), denominated as GLOBAL-MANAGER, whose objective is to provide training in the management of GSD projects. The game attempts to develop several skills in its players whilst simultaneously providing them with an immersive, pleasant and attractive experience. The skills developed are related to coordination, communication and control, which are three of the principal challenges in GSD.

A Software Process Line (SPrL) is potentially suitable for constructing software development methodologies by reusing core assets. However, adopting this approach without prior assessment of its suitability can lead to failure. The aim of this paper is to identify a set of requirements that can be used for deciding whether to adopt the SPrL approach in an organization. Identification of the requirements was accomplished in two stages: the characteristics important in method tailoring were first identified via a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) that focused on analyzing 43 primary studies; the degree of importance of the identified characteristics was then determined using a questionnaire survey in which 31 experts participated. By analyzing the results of the SMS and the survey, we have identified 12 product-related, 22 project-related, and 10 organization-related requirements. In addition to these requirements, we have also identified two relevant requirements by studying previous research on Software Product Lines (SPL) and Business Process Lines (BPL). The requirements thus identified can help organizations decide on whether to adopt the SPrL approach: the more an organization satisfies the requirements, the more frequently method tailoring occurs in that organization, and hence, the more justified it is to adopt the SPrL approach.

Global Software Development (GSD) is currently a strong industry trend. This means that if computer science engineers are to be trained to deal with this model, it is very important to include the topic in software engineering courses, attempting to ensure that students learn about GSD and become familiar with its advantages and challenges. However, software engineering courses do not always consider including it in their curricula. It must also be recognized that it is difficult to find a suitable method to teach/develop the different skills needed for GSD. There is often a lot of content and not a great deal of time available to teach it. In this article, we propose the use of a serious game called GSD-Aware, with which students can “suffer” some of the typical challenges of GSD by interacting with avatars and by using several means of communication to solve a number of problems posed. The article focuses on the description of the game and on the empirical study conducted to analyze whether GSD-Aware helps students to be conscious of GSD challenges. It was discovered that after 50 minutes playing the game, the students were aware of the greater influence that the following factors can have: lack of coordination, lack of trust, cultural differences, lack of face-to-face and informal communication, time difference, and lack of team spirit. In their final analysis, students agreed that the serious game scenarios helped them to understand what GSD is and to grasp the importance of some GSD challenges.

Modeling variability in software systems or processes promotes reuse of core assets.In particular, variability in software development processes allows customization of activities, artifacts, roles and other elements to specific projects, in what is called a process variant.Each process variant is derived from a base common process, called process tailoring, which is usually a tedious and error prone manual process.In the last years, there has been a growing interest in supporting the process variability approach, being v-SPEM a proposal that integrates and advanced view of variability into the SPEM standard.In this paper we present an extension of v-SPEM support for final users, with automated generation of variants, to help during process tailoring.The use of automatic mechanisms reduces errors and simplifies the tailoring process by hiding the details to the end users.

Quality demands on current and future software systems need to address diverse quality characteristics considered important for the diversity of stakeholders. Dealing with software quality may require achieving a balance between relevant quality characteristics. Current literature shows that software organizations barely handle them. However, the lack of management of these interactions may be a causal factor in failed projects. In this paper, we present a process for monitoring interactions between quality requirements based on an interaction model of quality characteristics. This process is part of the SQIMF framework and supports the identification and characterization of the interactions between quality requirements. An exploratory case study was conducted in order to understand the factors that could influence the interactions that occur.

Improving a particular quality characteristic in a software product may have a negative impact on the others. The literature shows that few organizations handle interactions between quality characteristics; this neglect may be a causal factor in failed projects. That led us to propose a process framework to support organizations that want to manage the interactions between quality characteristics. In this paper, we present the methods that may be used when the process framework is deployed. The methods were extracted from a published mapping study on software quality trade-offs. They were classified with regard to the particular context facet addressed and the specific decision-making approach used. Our contribution is a set of methods to manage interaction between quality characteristics, organized into a software process framework.

Software maintenance is recognized as an important knowledge area within the most common international curricula in software engineering. Despite this fact, and its importance in the industry, software maintenance and supporting techniques such as reengineering are hardly ever taught in practical lessons. This paper presents a reengineering teaching experience conducted during two last years in lab sessions by using reverse engineering and code generation tools. The experience was carried out by merging traditional methods (such as teaching lessons) with a practical exercise in laboratory. The teaching-learning process was qualitative- and quantitatively assessed by comparing results between an initial and final evaluation, as well as between the experiences conducted during two last years with different syllabus of courses. In fact, the effect of the experience in both syllabi proved to be effective. The reported results show that students do not know reengineering as a software maintenance technique although their satisfaction with the experience was high or very high (62%) or medium (30%). The key learned lessons are that students recognized the usage of reengineering tools as very convenient for their performance as future practitioners and the need to devote additional time in classroom to learn such tools.

Global Software Development (GSD) is set to be the paradigm that will support software industries in the increasingly globalized 21st century. It opens the door to companies from emerging countries to compete for their own gap in the market. It does, however, still bring some challenges with it. It must integrate different cultures, work styles, and work timetables in the same development process. In fact, GSD methodologies do indeed include specific activities to coordinate different work teams, but they fail precisely where any other methodology does: in the need to be truly useful by meeting the distinct cultural requirements of every organization involved, all at the same time. Up to now, process tailoring has been managed through variability mechanisms. Since these successfully merge original structure with cultural assets, they are also useful for adjusting global methodologies so that they suit each particular development context. This paper presents a case study of the use of the Variant-Rich Process paradigm (VRP) to support tailoring in a GSD methodology. It reveals the suitability of the VRP mechanisms, given that they support the two tailoring dimensions a GSD project involves, i.e., they take into account the circumstances of the entire global project, as well as the need to fit the internal characteristics of each organization; furthermore, they save effort in the tailoring process.

Business process modeling is recognized as a key part of the business process lifecycle. It is during this stage that a conceptual model is produced by collecting business process requirements and representing them with a specific business process notation. While there has been much research into process modeling techniques, little has taken place with regard to the characteristics that should be considered for an effective assessment of the models' quality. This paper presents a synthesis of quality characteristics for business process models, based on a systematic review of the relevant literature. It then goes on to describe a reference model for the quality assessment of business process models, and to relate the aforementioned quality characteristics to existing relevant process model measures. These relations may help organizations to guide the improvement of their business process models according to their chosen quality characteristics.

Background: Maturity models have been developed to assist organizations to enhance software quality, and the software engineering community has proposed numerous types of these, most of them based on CMM, ISO/IEC 15504 and CMMI-DEV. The great proliferation of maturity models leads to a need for systematic approaches to build them. Aim: To discover and analyze the existing methods and recommended practices for developing maturity models. Method: A systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted. Results: 1500 papers were returned as a result of the searches, from which 23 were chosen as candidates, and 7 of these, published between 2005 and 2010, were eventually selected as primary studies. Conclusions: The proposal of methods for maturity models development is an emerging topic in literature. Most published maturity models are based on practices and success factors from projects that showed good results in an organization or industry, but which lack a sound theoretical basis and methodology. The proposed methods highlight as main activities: to establish goals for maturity model development, to design model architecture, to set out capability levels and dimensions, to and pilot testing. However, the creation of an assessment questionnaire and specific activities for maintenance are poorly supported. The SLR results have served to propose a method for developing maturity models that is focused on product quality characteristics.

Background: Measurement is a technique that is widely-used to quantify quality of process models. Evaluation of measurement results implies comparison against limit values, called thresholds. Determining thresholds is no trivial task and it requires the application of complex techniques. There are several techniques that have been published to date, proposing different approaches for threshold extraction. Two of the most prominent techniques are ROC curves and the Bender method. Although they come from different fields, both use logistic regression analysis as a discriminator function. Aim: For this reason, the main hypothesis is that thresholds obtained by both of those techniques are equally efficient in classifying the measurement results. Method: To check the hypothesis, we obtained thresholds for a group of empirically-validated measures for business process models, by applying both techniques. Then we checked the accuracy of the results. Results: The results indicate that the hypothesis should be rejected. Conclusions: ROC curves obtained more accurate thresholds for measurement evaluation.

SUMMARY Software maintenance is an important, indeed vital, activity for software companies. For many organizations, including small firms, it is also a business opportunity. In the quest to help companies of this type, for whom strengthening their maintenance process is a chief concern, we present Agile_MANTEMA. This is a methodological proposal for software maintenance, one which focuses on small companies. The methodology defines an agile maintenance strategy, setting out in detail what is to be carried out, when, how and by whom; that is to say, it seeks to give a detailed guide for the implementation of the maintenance process in these kinds of companies. Agile_MANTEMA also establishes a set of elements, such as types of maintenance, service levels and capability levels, which aim to: (i) handle the complexity that is inherent to the maintenance process and (ii) allow a small company to define its own maintenance process, taking into account its particular characteristics and needs. In an effort to improve their maintenance process, two small firms conducted an improvement project in which Agile_MANTEMA was used. The experiences reported by these companies tell us that this methodology offers a strategy that can be useful, practical and suitable for small companies as they tackle software maintenance. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Business process mining is a powerful tool to retrieve the valuable business knowledge embedded in existing information systems. The effectiveness of this kind of proposal is usually evaluated using recall and precision, which respectively measure the completeness and exactness of the retrieved business processes. Since the effectiveness assessment of business process mining is a difficult and error-prone activity, the main hypothesis of this work studies the possibility of obtaining thresholds to determine when recall and precision values are appropriate. The business process mining technique under study is MARBLE, a model-driven framework to retrieve business processes from existing information systems. The Bender method was applied to obtain the thresholds of the recall and precision measures. The experimental data used as input were obtained from a set of 44 business processes retrieved with MARBLE through a family of case studies carried out over the last two years. The study provides thresholds for recall and precision measures, which facilitates the interpretation of their values by means of five linguistic labels that range from low to very high. As a result, recall must be high (with at least a medium precision above 0.56), and precision must also be high (with at least a low recall of 0.70) to ensure that business processes were recovered (by using MARBLE) with an effectiveness value above 0.65. The thresholds allowed us to ascertain with more confidence whether MARBLE can effectively mine business processes from existing information systems. In addition, the provided results can be used as reference values to compare MARBLE with other similar business process mining techniques.

Abstract This article presents the results and lessons learned in the application of the Framework for the Modelling and Measurement of Software Processes (FMESP) in a software company dedicated to the development and maintenance of software for information systems. The aim of FMESP is to provide companies with a conceptual and technological framework for the management of their process models and measurement models in an integrated way. Modelling and measurement are two key factors to promote continuous process improvement. As a result, important benefits were obtained. The company improved the maturity of its processes which allowed it to obtain the ISO 9000 certification. From a research point of view, Action‐Research was successfully applied and as a result the framework was improved and important feedback was obtained, bringing to light new important issues which will be tacked in future work. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Evolving software's design requires that the members of the team acquire a deep and complete knowledge of the domain, the architectural components, and their integration. Such information is scarcely addressed within the design documentation and it is not trivial to derive it. A strategy for enforcing the consciousness of such hidden aspects of software's design is needed. One of the expected benefits of pair programming is fostering (tacit) knowledge building between the components of the pair and fastening its diffusion within the project's team. We have applied the paradigm of pair programming to the design phase and we have named it ‘pair designing’. We have realized an experiment and a replica in order to understand if pair designing can be used as an effective means for diffusing and enforcing the design knowledge while evolving the system's design. The results suggest that pair designing could be a suitable means to disseminate and enforce design knowledge. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Different proposals exist to represent the software maintenance process. However most of them are very informal or too focussed on a specific goal. We have developed a semi-formal ontology where the main concepts, according to the literature related to software maintenance, have been described. This ontology, besides representing static aspects, also represents dynamic issues related to the management of software maintenance projects. In order to develop an ontology a suitable methodology should also be followed. REFSENO was the methodology used in this work. The ontology that this work presents is not a preliminary idea but it has already been used in software maintenance environments, such as MANTIS, which is currently working successfully.