Edmundo Tovar

Project managers in global software development teams: a study of the effects on productivity and performance

Globalization is having a deep impact on today’s world economy. One of the most affected industries is the software industry. Recently, global software development (GSD) has gained a lot of attention. This new trend of producing software is influencing all software processes, including human resource management. The aim of this study is to provide an overview of the implications of GSD for software project managers by analyzing project performance from different perspectives such as the 360-degree feedback evaluation. Results show that performance of GSD projects is lower than in-house projects, but apart from that, this study reveals that there are also negative consequences for software project managers, which need to be taken into account. For instance, the experiment revealed a lack of attention to tasks by software project managers and, as a consequence of this, performance losses. The main conclusions of this research may be valuable for software development organizations.

Guest Editorial: Open Educational Resources in Engineering Education: Various Perspectives Opening the Education of Engineers

Open Educational Resources (OER) provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education as well as facilitate policy dialog, knowledge sharing, and capacity building. One of the fundamental concepts of OER is “the ability to freely adapt and reuse existing pieces of knowledge.” Reuse of educational resources by both individuals and organizations may have significant creative and economic benefit for the educational environment. This Special Issue editorial introduces six interesting experiences, representative of the use of OER in engineering education in important areas such as the production of open content at various scales, reuse of contents, institutional open Web site initiatives, and technological applications to support the exploitation of OER, all at different degrees of maturity. Since some readers will be unfamiliar with prior work on OER, this Special Issue also outlines the hot topics in OER and the critical factors for success when joining the Open Educational Movement. Finally, the editorial provides a set of recommendations and examples offered by the Special Issue editors from their over 6 years of experience leading a research group in semantic Web technologies applied to Open Education. A key requirement, in their opinion, is to improve the metadata interoperability between various collections of open material, so as to facilitate the discoverability and subsequent combining, remixing, or adapting OER; that is, OER data should be easily accessible to any user.

Stakeholder identification as an issue in the improvement of software requirements quality

Stakeholder identification together with its needs and expectations has been poorly realized in software projects. This is probably because the process is mistakenly viewed as a self-evident task in which direct users and the development team are the only stakeholders. It could also be due to the fact that the identification area can be substituted by opinions or knowledge from other more accessible sources of information. This paper provides a review of stakeholder identification literature and an overview of the state-of-the-art in methods for that purpose, which leads to a number of issues that are important in further research (e.g. developing a methodology). The paper findings are presented from two points of view: firstly, the impact of stakeholder identification on software requirements quality, and secondly, practices developed to carry out this task. Also, the present paper aims to describe the studies analyzed uniformly and show their contributions in this field.

Open educational practices and resources based on social software, UTPL experience

Open Educational Resources (OER) are a direct reaction to knowledge privatization; they foment their exchange to the entire world with the aim of increase the human intellectual capacity.In this document, we describe the committment of Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL), Ecuador, in the promotion of open educational practices and resources and their impact in society and knowledge economy through the use of Social Software.

Building Common Spaces in Engineering Education: A Review From ICECE05

The creation of Common Spaces for Higher Education means facing different challenges. This paper reviews the main contributions to three of these key aspects: namely, the main competencies of practicing engineers, the position of the main Education Societies in building these spaces for education, and the particularities for standards in Engineering accreditation. These ideas were debated in the last Conference on Engineering and Computer Education (ICECE05) with the technical cosponsorship of the IEEE Education Society

Finding OERs with Social-Semantic search

Social and semantic web can be complementary approaches searching web resources. This cooperative approach lets enable a semantic search engine to find accurate results and annotate web resources. This work develops the components of a Social-Semantic search architecture proposed by the authors to find open educational resources (OER). By means of metadata enrichment and logic inference, OER consumers get more precise results from general search engines. The Search prototype has been applied to find OER related with computers and engineering in a domain provided by OpenCourseWare materials from two universities, MIT and UTPL. The semantic search answers reasonably well the queta collected.

Measuring collaboration and creativity skills through rubrics: Experience from UTPL collaborative social networks course

In this paper, we introduce several rubrics to measure a set of collaborative and creativity grading. Rubrics are powerful tools for both teaching - learning and assessment. Rubrics improve communication between teachers and students. This work relates the general criteria to measure the complexity levels in the development of creativity and collaborative work competences with concrete indicators associated with the use of Social Web tools and concepts. These indicators have been used in the assessment of competences in a particular course related with the use of collaborative networks.

Modeling the best practices towards the adaptation to the European credit transfer system in technical degrees within the IEEE ES chapter

Several Spanish universities have started their process of adaptation towards a common educational space as a first stage towards the implementation of the credit system as established by the regulation prior to 2010. These universities have developed several highly- illuminating experiences which could be useful to those teachers and institutions who have no previous references and models to develop new experiences of ECTS adaptation. To help these scholars and universities this paper reports on a project that has been recently completed and which has been supported by the Spanish Government and by the participation to the Spanish Chapter of IEEE Education Society. More specifically, the paper provides details about the management of the project, namely, details about the contributions of its three working groups, as well as the different tasks carried out and their monitoring. The paper also describes the results obtained with the project and provides assessment on previous pilot experiences presented by Spanish university teachers at Engineering Education Conferences as well as on the experiences compiled through the projects Web site.

Engineering education in Spain: One year with the Bologna process

This paper shows the results of a study carried out by the IEEE-Education Society Spanish Chapter on the state of implementation of the Bologna process in engineering degrees along Spain and the opinion of teachers about the main aspects of this implementation. These include the implementation of new learning methodologies (problem-based learning, collaborative learning, project-based learning, etc.), resources, assessment criteria, workload of students and teachers, the support of each university for the EHEA implementation, and the general satisfaction (or not) about the EHEA. The aim of this paper to contribute to a reflexive debate, not only in Spain but also in the international community, about the advantages and drawbacks of the EHEA implementation in engineering education.

A review of the Accreditation Bodies and Processes in Europe. A vision from the Engineering

Europe has taken the decision of strengthening its cultural links after the successful implementation of the economic union. Many of the states reached the compromise of coordinating their educational policies to create a European higher education space and to promote the mobility of their citizens. Universities play a relevant role in this process. Quality has been considered as an international determinant factor of the competitiveness of Europe. The instrument chosen has been the accreditation of the quality, as in other geographical areas or countries as the USA. This paper analyses the European process to reach the accreditation, the involved agents (like the ENQA European Network for Quality Assurance, and the ECA European Consortium for Accreditation), along with the role of the quality national agencies, as the ANECA (Spanish National Agency for Accreditation) in the Spanish case