Software Engineering Education (SEE) community has been looking for alternatives to improve teaching, since the study of Software Engineering (SE) currently involves the application of a lot of theory in the classroom and little application in scenarios that convey the reality of software development. In this sense, Immersive Learning emerges as a potential approach to support the improvement of learning outcomes in SE. Therefore, the goal of this work is to present Immersive Software Engineering Education (iSEE), in which a theoretical framework is proposed by the researchers to support the planning and development of immersive educational applications for SE, as well as a platform to encourage the use of these applications by the SEE community. An example of using the theoretical framework and a preliminary evaluation of a game to teach basic object-oriented concepts are also presented.

Systems used by an organization to achieve business objectives are supported by technologies included in its technological platform, creating a software ecosystem (SECO). Modifications on these technologies can lead essential systems to lose performance or support. Thus, IT managers and architects should pay attention while making changes by not only accounting for information on technologies, but also considering their relationships. Such information may be spread in different documents and also difficult to analyze mostly due to the organizational complexity and lack of tooling support. The purpose of this work is to assist IT managers and architects in making decisions as regards to IT architecture modification, i.e., the set of technologies that supports products and services of an organization. Firstly, critical factors for maintaining IT architecture were investigated through a systematic mapping and a survey research. As a result, an approach to support technology assessment and analysis was defined, exploring the network structure that represents the organization's ecosystem. A tool implementing the key features of the proposed approach was developed, including visualization of SECO networks and configuration of well-defined criteria. Finally, both the approach and tool were evaluated through a feasibility study on the technology and concepts acceptance within a specific, real scenario. A positive feedback on the approach's relevance and tool's resources was observed.

Software processes have been the focus of discussion in literature, but defining a software process remains a challenge. The Software Process Line (SPrL) technique offers a systematic process reuse approach that identifies processes' similarities and variability. This study aims to characterize the state-of-the-art of the software process definition using SPrL. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was conducted and 26 papers were identified to be studied in depth. The results indicate a concentration of approaches that use mapping/rules techniques to support variability resolution and the need for integrated supporting tools. In addition, three problems that affect the software process definition using SPrL were observed: (1) low understanding of SPrL models complexity and their impact, (2) lack of understanding about the impacts of the defined software process, and (3) experts' knowledge dependence issues in decision-making to solve variability.

Complexity and dynamism of day-to-day activities are inextricably linked, thus the need for constant adaptation to address emerging demands has grown. Process adaptation is the action of customizing a process instance to make it applicable to a particular situation. However, unplanned conditions may occur at any time during process execution. So, the design of a complete process model has given place to a flexible design based on reuse and adaptation. This paper addresses the problem of dynamic adaptation within a process-aware information system (IS). On top of a theory for context-aware ISs, we argue that an unexpected situation can be characterized by a number of known contextual elements and could be used to automate the decision of replanning the process flow in a specific instance, in order to preserve the process strategy. The solution was evaluated in real setting observational studies in the domains of oil and gas and air traffic control.

Organizations open up their software platforms and reusable assets to others, including partners and third-party developers around the world, creating software ecosystems (SECOs). It can contribute to minimize nontechnical barriers of software reuse in industry because it explores potential benefits from the relations among companies and stakeholders. An inhibitor is the complexity in defining value for reusable assets in a scenario where producers try to meet customers' expectations, and vice-versa. This paper presents a value-based mechanism to support component negotiation and socialization processes in a reuse repository in the SECO context as an extension of the Brechó-EcoSys environment. Social resources were integrated into the mechanism in order to aid component negotiation. An evaluation of the negotiation mechanism was performed, based on an analysis of its elements and functions against critical factors in the negotiation within a SECO, identified in a previous systematic literature review. In addition, an analysis of the social resources supporting the negotiation mechanism was performed against popular sociotechnical elements for SECOs, identified in a previous survey with experts in the field.

This paper's main goal is to structure an initial research on the Software Ecosystem (SECO) field, regarding the so called CAMSS (Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Social and Security) and IoT (Internet of Things) technologies. Our main goal is to share our first ideas and some observations we have been conducting in an empirical way. As such, Cloud SECOs bring the ecosystem environment to another level, with new challenges in all three dimensions: technology, social and business. Besides that, we have been observing a possible shift in the center of some SECOs, i.e., Those "things" connected to the Internet have introduced new players - at least in the sense they interact with the environment by providing data. As new software architectures and technologies emerge to support the new scenario being drawn, our research tries to characterize this new ecosystem and identify challenges, providing a roadmap that could help new entrants.

Software Ecosystem (SECO) is often understood as a set of actors interacting among themselves and manipulating artifacts with the support of a common technology platform. SECO can represent an environment in which the component repository is gathering stakeholders, and software products and components. By manipulating software artifacts, a technical network emerges from component repositories that support Software Reuse. Those repositories often lack resources to support actors' relationships. Introducing social resources in SECO aims at stimulating actors' interactions, information exchange and better understanding on how artifacts are manipulated in such social relations. In this paper, we focus on investigating SECO representing component repositories that include socio-technical resources. A survey with experts was planned and executed. The goal was to identify the relevance of each resource for a SECO based on component repositories, initially focused on the Brazilian scenario. This paper also describes the analysis of the data collected in this survey. Some information of other SECO elements extracted from the data is also presented, e.g., the participants' profile and how they behave within a SECO.

Software development comprises the execution of a variety of tasks, such as bug discovery, finding reusable assets, dependency analysis etc. A better understanding of the task at hand and its surroundings can improve the development performance in general. Software visualizations can support such understanding by addressing different issues according to the necessity of stakeholders. However, knowing which visualizations better fit a given task in progress is not a trivial skill. In this sense, a feature model, intended for organizing the knowledge of a given domain and allowing the reuse of components, can support the identification, categorization and selection of information visualization elements. This work presents an ongoing domain analysis performed for building an information visualization feature model, whose goal is to support the process of choosing and building proper, suitable software visualizations.

Visualization approaches support stakeholders in a variety of tasks. However, they are spread in the literature and their information is usually not clearly organized, classified and categorized, which makes them hard to be found and used in practice. This paper presents the use of a task-oriented framework in the context of a characterization study of visualizations that provide support for software reuse tasks. Such framework was extended in order to capture more detailed information that may be useful for assessing the suitability of a particular visualization. Besides enabling a better organization of the findings, the use of the extended framework allows to identify aspects that lack more support, indicating opportunities for researchers on software reuse and software visualization.

The essence of the software ecosystem concept encourages external developers to interact with a software platform, enabling them to contribute or evolve such platform. Trying to expand a product into a platform on which components, services and applications can be created, a company may provide the basis for an ecosystem and its life cycle. In this paper, we describe the evolution process of an application towards an ecosystem using current models and taking into account the reuse of an existing software system. The application DiaDia has been developed for smartphones and its main function consists in helping the treatment of diabetic patients. Two different models are used to discuss the transition of the application to an ecosystem: one is an adaptation of the Software Supply Network which represents the main actors that interact with the ecosystem, and the other covers the process of creating an application and its evolution to an ecosystem through Business Process Model and Notation.

Considering the Computer Science challenge related to quality in technology development, the teaching and learning process of Software Engineering (SE) takes an important role because it impacts the formation of human resources. However, SE does not explore the broader development and use of didactic material such as games. These resources can propitiate an experience that reflects typical situations of real world and motivate students. This paper presents UbiRE, a game to understand Requirements Engineering in the context of ubiquitous systems. Its design, development and initial evaluation experience is discussed from a development process of educational game perspective, contributing to improve this process in the SE education scenario.

Complexity and dynamism of day-to-day activities in organizations are inextricably linked, one impacting the other, increasing the challenges for constant adaptation on the way to organize work to address emerging demands. Market is demanding systems that are aware of organizations processes and able to evolve and adapt to new situations in everyday working activities. We argue that flexibility in processes could be managed in real time, by PAIS (Process-aware Information Systems), using context information collected in the work environment. This paper proposes CGAdapt, a context management architecture approach that aims to improve and automate dynamic process adaptation. We explain how process adaptation may occur in real time through an existent scenario using this proposal and discuss the value of context-awareness to reason about process alternative adaptations in a goal oriented approach.

SUMMARY Running scientific workflows in distributed and heterogeneous environments has been a motivating approach for provenance management, which is loosely coupled to the workflow execution engine. This kind of approach is interesting because it allows both storage and access to provenance data in a homogeneous way, even in an environment where different workflow management systems work together. However, current approaches overload scientists with many ad hoc tasks, such as script adaptations and implementations of extra functionalities to provide provenance independence. This paper proposes ProvManager, a provenance management approach that eases the gathering, storage, and analysis of provenance information in a distributed and heterogeneous environment scenario, without putting the burden of adaptations on the scientist. ProvManager leverages the provenance management at the experiment level by integrating different workflow executions from multiple workflow management systems. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Organizations have been relying on collaboration for productivity improvement and knowledge sharing. The first step to foster collaboration in organizations is to make it explicit. With this aim, the Collaboration Maturity Model (CollabMM) was proposed and evaluated. The lessons learned during model applications in previous work pointed out the need to review both the model and its evaluation instruments. A literature review also showed some improvement opportunities. Therefore, the objective of this work is to develop a roadmap to highlight the main opportunities of evolution in CollabMM. These opportunities will compose our research agenda in this topic and guide future work.

Dynamism of day-to-day activities in organizations is inextricably linked and there is a variety of information, insight and reasoning being processed between people and systems, in carrying out a business process. We argue that flexibility in processes could be managed in real time, using context information collected in the work environment. This paper proposes a context management architecture approach that aims to improve and automate dynamic process adaptation. We explain how process adaptation may occur in real time and discuss a scenario for this proposal.

Visualization stimulates the cognitive capacity of humans and facilitates the understanding of a subject. It performs a crucial role in teaching software architecture. As systems become more complex, new education proposals have been introduced in the classroom, especially those that make teaching more attractive to students. This paper presents the VisAr3D approach which was designed to provide a 3D visualization of UML models, where the user should intuitively understand architectural elements in this 3D environment. It includes exploration, interaction and simulation resources to establish a practical and pleasant learning activity, focusing in large scale systems.

Software Ecosystems (SECOs) have emerged as an approach to improve Software Engineering (SE) in industry considering relations among companies and stakeholders. Companies have opened up their platforms and artifacts to others, including partners and third-part developers. Thus, systems architecture, businesses and social networks should be understood in an integrated way. This concern motivated an initial proposal of a framework for SECOs engineering in order to outline a set of steps that combines three different dimensions of SECOs and joins different perspectives in SECOs research literature through a survey. In this paper, the focus is on the second dimension, business. A preliminary analysis carried out on a Software Reuse Lab's SECO at COPPE/UFRJ points out that concepts explored by researchers can be merged in a broader SE approach.

This paper points to problems in the joint use of the use case model and the domain model in the system requirements definition phase. It proposes a specialization of use cases called info cases, from which a domain model can be derived. Semi-formal rules are presented for the derivation, showing evidence of the integration between these models.

Traditional techniques of traceability detection and management are not equipped to handle evolution. This is a problem for the field of software architecture, where it is critical to keep synchronized an evolving conceptual architecture with its realization in an evolving code base. ArchTrace is a new tool that addresses this problem through a policy-based infrastructure for automatically updating traceability links every time an architecture or its code base evolves. ArchTrace is pluggable, allowing developers to choose a set of traceability management policies that best match their situational needs and working styles. We discuss ArchTrace, its conceptual basis, its implementation, and our evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses in a retrospective analysis of data collected from a 20 month period of development of Odyssey, a large-scale software development environment. Results are promising: with respect to the ideal set of traceability links, the policies applied resulted in 95% precision at 89% recall

Architecture recovery is usually supported by a set of tools that implement techniques, such as concept analysis, clustering, data mining and pattern matching for abstracting low-level source code elements into higher-level architectural elements. However, the decision making in this process usually depends on a previously defined high-level model of the system architecture or on criteria that are application dependent. In this paper we present a set of application independent clustering criteria to support architectural elements definition. These criteria help the user in his decision making and can be reused in many different contexts.

Evaluation of group support is a complex task and its design must be carefully planned in order to produce useful results. Many factors may influence evaluation design, some of which have been suggested in the literature. However, in a particular evaluation context, additional factors may arise, influencing and even compromising the evaluation design. We argue that preliminary evaluations must be performed before they are conducted in a real setting in order to verify if its design will provide the expected measurements and results. This paper presents the evaluation process of awareness information resources within software diagram peer reviews. The paper describes the evaluation context, objectives, plan and design together with enactment of a preliminary case study following this design. From this preliminary study, we outline issues that arose during its enactment that influenced refinement of the evaluation design.

This paper describes an approach to support software development process descriptions in the context of the Memphis Environment (a Reuse Based Software Development Environment), allowing the organization of a software development asset, i.e., the process knowledge. The approach uses software patterns to organize the information, and provides a tool that handles the process descriptions as a source of solutions to problems detected by project management. It enhances the environment features in terms of project management support, process modeling capability, and process evolution support.

Reuse is the key paradigm for increasing productivity and quality in large-scale software development. To become systematic, reuse needs supporting tools, and among these are the packaging tools. To reuse a complex component, it is necessary to understand its objectives, its architecture and how to use it. Therefore, a reusable component should be packaged with all the documentation necessary to enhance its comprehension and use. Hypermedia can help in making the documentation of a component more attractive. The technology of patterns-describing a problem, its solution and the context within which it works-can structure the data for packaging the component. This paper describes an architecture of a packaging tool for reusable components based on hypermedia and patterns technologies.

The paper focuses the software reuse aspects when the object-oriented paradigm is used in the software development. The advantages and problems of reusable object-oriented software development are identified. A development environment for reusable object-oriented software is presented. This environment uses frameworks to construct domain models, in order to make possible the reuse of analysis information in future designs. Some basic implementation requirements for this environment, called DEROS (Design Environment for Reusable Object-oriented Software), are described.>