António Nestor Ribeiro

An integrated approach to develop professional and technical skills for Informatics Engineering students

Many of the current approaches used in teaching and learning in engineering education are not the most appropriate to prepare students for the challenges they will face in their professional careers. The active involvement of students in their learning process facilitates the development of the technical and professional competencies they need as professionals. This article describes the organisation and impact of a mini-conference and project work – the creation of a software product and its introduction in the market – aimed at the development of professional competencies in general and writing skills in particular. The course was evaluated by assessing the students’ perception of the development of a number of professional competencies through a questionnaire completed by 125 students from two consecutive year groups. The results indicate that the project work and the mini-conference had a positive impact on students’ perceptions of the development of professional competencies.

Application of ontologies in identifying requirements patterns in use cases

This is partly funded by project LATiCES (ref. NORTE-07-0124-FEDER-000062), co-financed by the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (ON.2 - O Novo Norte), under the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF), through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and by national funds, through the Portuguese foundation for science and technology (FCT).

Development Challenges in Web Apps for Public Displays

Digital public displays can have a key role in urban ubiquitous computing infrastructures, but they have not yet managed to fill this role. A key step in that direction would be the emergence of an application model for open display networks that would enable anyone to create applications for display infrastructures. In this work, we study the development of web-based applications for public displays. We report on our experience of application development for real world public deployment and also on an experiment with external web developers to assess their ability to create such applications using our own development tools. The results show that the web-based app model can effectively be used in the context of public displays and that web developers are able to leverage upon their expertise to create this type of applications.

MapIt: A Model Based Pattern Recovery Tool

Design patterns provide a means to reuse proven solutions during development, but also to identify good practices during analysis. These are particularly relevant in complex and critical software, such as is the case of ubiquitous and pervasive systems. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) presents a solution for this problem, with the usage of high level models. As part of an effort to develop approaches to the migration of applications to mobile contexts, this paper reports on a tool that identifies design patterns in source code. Code is transformed into both platform specific and independent models, and from these design patterns are inferred. MapIt, the tool which implements these functionalities is described.

A Study on the Viability of Formalizing Use Cases

Use case scenarios are known as powerful means for requirements specification. On the one hand, they join in the same modelling space the expectations of the stakeholders and the needs of the developers involved in the process. On the other hand, they describe the desired high level functionalities. By formalizing these descriptions we are able to extract relevant informations from them. Specifically, we are interested in identifying requirements patterns (common requirements with typical implementation solutions) in support for a requirements based software development approach. This paper addresses the transformation of use case descriptions expressed in a Controller Natural Language into an ontology expressed in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), as well as the query process for such information. It reports on a study aimed at validating our approach and our tool with real users. A preliminary set of results is discussed.

The Modelery: A Collaborative Web Based Repository

Software development processes are known to produce a large set of artifacts such as models, code and documentation. Keeping track of these artifacts without supporting tools is not easy, and making them available to others can be even harder. Standard version control systems are not able to solve this issue. More than keeping track of versions, a system to help organize and make artifacts available in meaningful ways is needed. In this paper we review a number of alternative systems, and present the requirements and the implementation of a collaborative web repository which we developed to solve this issue.

Integration of SIP protocol in Android Media Framework

The transmission of multimedia content between mobile devices is increasingly an area of exploration. The evolution of mobile devices and networks that support them, provide potential to create more sophisticated and innovating services. The fact that the Android platform does not provide the SIP protocol in its architecture, is a limiting factor for the development of new streaming applications. Throughout this paper the Android platform is presented, and more specifically the streaming protocols supported by the current streaming Media Framework. Based on the current Android Media Framework, this paper presents a possible architecture for the integration of the SIP protocol. The integration of this architecture is to surpass the limitations of the current Android platform and promote an improved performance in the current SIP applications, which is reflected in a lower power consumption of the device.

Promoting entrepreneurship among informatics engineering students: insights from a case study

ABSTRACT Universities seek to promote entrepreneurship through effective education approaches, which need to be in permanent evolution. Nevertheless, the literature in entrepreneurship education lacks empirical evidence. This article discusses relevant issues related to promoting entrepreneurship in the software field, based on the experience of a 15-European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System course. This course seeks to instil in the students the recognition of the need to reconcile technical and business visions, organisational and commercial aspects, most of which have never been addressed previously. A series of semi-structured interviews made it possible to obtain relevant insights about the teaching–learning process underlying this course and its evolution over a seven-year period. Materials related with this course have been analysed, namely guidelines produced by the teachers and deliverables produced by the students. This article discusses the dimensions that were identified as fundamental for promoting entrepreneurship skills in the field of software, namely teamwork, project engagement, and contact with the market.

An Automated Model Based Approach to Mobile UI Specification and Development

One of the problems of current software development lies on the existence of solutions to address properly the code portability for the increasing number of platforms. To build abstract models is one efficient and correct way to achieve this. The Model-Driven Software Engineering MDSE is a development methodology where models are the key for all project lifecycle, from requisites gathering, through modelling and to the development stage, as well as on testing. Pervasive computing demands the use of several technical specifications, such as wireless connections, advanced electronics, and the Internet, as well as it stresses the need to adjust the user interface layer to each one of the platforms. Using a model-driven approach it is possible to reuse software solutions between different targets, since models are not affected by the device diversity and its evolution. This paper reports on a tool, which is highly parameterizable and driven to support Model-2-Model and Model-2-Code transformations. Also, instead of using a predefined technology, the tool was built to be scalable and extensible for many different targets and also by addressing the user interface layer generation.

The Modelery: a model-based software development repository

Purpose – This paper aims to present the Modelery, a platform for collaborative repository to support model-based software development. The Modelery is a Web platform, composed both by a Web page and Web services for interoperability. Design/methodology/approach – By performing a study in the existing platforms, it was possible to achieve a set of issues to tackle. The issues enabled the possibility to define a set of requirements that allowed the authors to design a new platform, and to perform a model-driven software development process, which started from the requirements until reaching the final software solution. Findings – With this work, it was possible to perform a survey on the currently available artifacts repositories, categorize them and identify their shortcomings. This was essential to define the set of requirements for a new platform to overcome the identified issues. This process leads to a platform able to improve the currently available solutions, and validated in the scientific communit...