Guillermo Luján Rodríguez

Supporting Virtual Meetings in Distributed Scrum Teams

Scrum has gained surprising momentum as an agile project management approach. It provides effective social integration by building up social team capital, and it provides much needed control and coordination mechanisms. Especially, daily Scrum meetings ensure an open channel for communication. However, this channel has been threatened by distributed software development which has highly been adopted in software industries. To support virtual meetings regardless physical locations of team members, we developed a 3D tool based on Scrum life cycle. The tool provides a virtual world consisted in technology to hold meetings in a Scrum context. We used a questionnaire to evaluate the usability and effectiveness of the tool with undergraduate students.

AI-based Web Service Composition: A Review

ABSTRACT Web service composition allows developers to create applications by capitalizing on the service-oriented architecture paradigm. Such applications are rapidly deployable and offer developers reuse opportunities and access to an ample variety of complex systems. However, the challenge when composing services is addressing quality-of-service (QoS) issues. Thus, we attempt to shed light on the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in assisting developers to deal with QoS-based web service compositions. This paper characterizes contemporary approaches that use AI to explore alternative solutions. We concluded that AI has aimed at exploiting the semantic resources to produce flexible and adaptive-to-change web service compositions.

Supporting assessment of practices in software engineering courses

The main goal of the software engineering courses is to prepare students to face typical problems that occur in professional contexts. Thus, students need to be provided with tools and resources to be trained correctly, and therefore, courses need to be reoriented towards software industry demands without neglecting the academic quality. In this context, Scrum, which is widely used for manufacturing software, arises as a suitable teaching strategy to introduce students the main software engineering practices usually performed by the industry. This work proposes a teaching model based on Scrum and reinforced with agile coaching. This novel model has been compared to RUP (Rational Unified Process) and validated using the framework CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) to measure the coverage of practices achieved by our model. The results show that our agile teaching model allows students to achieve higher coverage of software engineering practices, and maximize their learning experience.

A case-based reasoning approach to reuse quality-driven designs in service-oriented architectures

Abstract Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has become a dominant approach for developing distributed enterprise-wide applications. Most organizations capitalize on SOA by discovering and reusing services already accessible over the Internet. In addition to functional requirements, the implementation of a SOA design must consider quality-attribute properties (e.g., performance, interoperability or security, among others), which require developers to explore and assess candidate solutions fulfilling the same functional requirements. This exploration is usually driven by architectural knowledge and SOA principles, but it can be a time-consuming and error-prone process, even for expert developers. To deal with this issue, we present a case-based reasoning approach called AWESOME to assist developers in exploring different development alternatives, by modeling quality-attribute aspects and SOA design patterns as cases. Our approach has been evaluated with four case-studies, and the results have shown that the solutions generated by AWESOME are judged as satisfactory by a number of SOA experts.

Creative monument: Towards mediated educational practices for the socialization of heritage

The purpose of this paper is to present the advances in a research, development and innovation of a project which objective promotes the co-construction of a participatory and non-exclusive socio-technical network for educational purposes around the heritage of “National Historic Flag Monument” Rosario, Argentina. It is intended to configure a device in its social, technical, institutional and textual aspects, enabling the deployment of mediated educational practices for the active appropriation of the heritage, enhancing the creative, exploratory and playful use of Information and Communication Technologies. The methodology of the development of the first prototype called “Creative Monument” has an interdisciplinary character under a socio-technical approach. The instruments and techniques come from the qualitative perspective and software engineering. The regional socio-technical alliance that constitutes the working group is composed of several well-known actors of the city, members of government institutions, research and education. The selected open source content management system is Drupal. The collaborative editing content file was designed from tree interrelated categories: Citizenship Builders, Creative Itineraries and Open Works. The work prospective is focused on having a scalable operational prototype coming from the community participation.

Evaluation of usability and user experience regarding the gamification of educational systems

Gamification, which is the use of game techniques in contexts not related to games, has been increasingly used in the educational area to motivate and engage students. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the usability and the user experience of gamified educational systems. For this, a heuristic evaluation using the ergonomic criteria as guideline was conducted in 10 different gamified educational systems. From them, 4 systems with more problems were selected to perform usability testing in the laboratory and to fill out a questionnaire by participants. In the end, the usability and user experience problems found are discussed and a comparison between the evaluations of experts and users is performed.

Monitoring and Analytical Evaluation of Interactivity Mediated by a Dynamic Hypermedia Device

This paper describes the first prototype of an integrated tool that assists people in monitoring and analytical evaluation of interactivity, mediated by a Dynamic Hypermedia Device (DHD). To carry out this practice, the basic technological elements are explained, as well as a model which takes into account experiences related to the addition of new components in implementations solved for this kind of framework. Furthermore, it is also explained how the tool articulates the simulation results obtained from a runtime DEVS (Discrete Event System) that integrates the metrics needed for flexible weights. All the technological developments have been adapted to the educational platform MOODLE as well as to SAKAI collaborative environment. To exemplify this development, a use case has been presented providing functional features and details that outline the methodological steps of the model from the final users’ perspective. Thus, an analysis which enables qualitative versatile units in terms of levels of interactivity to the DHD has been achieved.