J. Antão B. Moura

On the risk exposure and priority determination of changes in IT service management

This paper deals with the Change Management process within IT Service Management. Change Management includes several activities, some of which need to evaluate the risk exposure associated with changes to be made to the infrastructure and services. We present a method by which risk exposure associated with a change can be evaluated and the risk exposure metric is applied to the problem of automatically assigning priorities to changes. A formal model is developed to this end; the model captures the business perspective by using financial metrics in the evaluation of risk. A case study, performed in conjunction with a large IT service provider, is reported and provides good results when compared to decisions made by human managers.

SLA Design and Service Provisioning for Outsourced Services

In this work, a business-driven approach to designing Service Level Agreements in an e-commerce environment is proposed. In contrast to conventional SLA design approaches, the one proposed better captures the relationship between service provider and service client by considering the negative business impact (business loss) originated from IT infrastructure failures and performance degradation and introduces such knowledge into the SLA itself. A complete example scenario shows the value of the proposed approach. A main conclusion is that the SLA established using the business-driven perspective is superior to the one based on a conventional approach since both service provider and client can simultaneously obtain higher profit.

Marketplace-Driven, Game-Changing IT Games to Address Complex, Costly Community Problems

This chapter illustrates how digital marketplaces may be allied to gamified IT applications/systems to support solutions for complex, costly community challenges in a sustainable manner. A generic modular architectural design for these marketplace‐based games is proposed and instantiated to public health and water management problem scenarios so that the resulting games support expected solutions. Preliminary validation studies of the games’ usefulness as a solution‐support and business‐promotion tool have been carried out for the cases of a game to combat disease‐carrying mosquitoes and of a water conservation game. These games have then been applied to real‐case scenarios pilot tests. The chapter reports on validation results and the contribution the embedded marketplaces may bring to these games and their sustainability.

Simultaneously Improving Quality and Time-to-Market in Agile Development

More recently, “post-agile” techniques seem to favor releasing early over quality. Pressure for low cost, rapid development and to code for new features leads to the allocation of resources to software development tasks preferably rather than to quality control. Such practices may put the responsibilities for development and test on the same team and even facilitate sloppy testing. Here, we present our experience in organizing an agile team that is divided into two independent cells, each one playing a different role: (i) software development, and (ii) testing exclusively. Results obtained by using a grid computing backup system as a case study point out to higher test efficiency and, surprisingly, possible shorter time-to-market simultaneously when the agile team is split into those two cells, and some complementary practices are adopted as well. These results may contribute to the on-going discussion on the role and impact of testing in agile development.

ReadAct - Alternate Reality, Serious Games for Reading-Acting to Engage Population and Schools on Social Challenges.

This paper presents a gamified empowerment approach to train future teachers. The approach aims to innovate teaching strategies and to provide a system which motivates players to read and to apply acquired knowledge towards actions to address social challenges within their community. The approach is supported by an alternate reality serious game called “ReadAct” which blends reading instruction with opportunities to act on social responsibility in the real world. Validation results are offered for experiments with the ReadAct approach in different but related contexts of drama reading, environmental education and introduction to computing. Results provide evidence that ReadAct motivates players (young readers) to engage themselves and to attract their schools’ and families’ communities to act on social challenges. The underlying challenges in the experiments are water conservation, urban violence and bullying at school. The paper contributes to the literature on computer-based educat ion by indicating how a ReadAct game may turn the school community, where it is played out, into a community school with an integrated view of academics and social services.

Teaching of Programming - An Educational Performance Booster for Students at Economically Disadvantaged Schools.

The technological advances made in recent years bring with them the importance of introducing computer courses in the school context, and with this, a need for digital inclusion of students from economically disadvantaged schools. This paper reports on research to introduce programming in such school curricula and to evaluate possible benefits of such introduction for students’ motivation towards learning in general. The research was based on the creation of a methodology for designing and offering programming courses at public and private schools and to verify possible correlations between students’ performance and schools’ economic scenarios they find themselves in. Preliminary results indicate that students who participated in the courses at schools with economic restrictions and inferior quality of IT infrastructure may still present better results in the courses. In addition, there is evidence of gains in their motivation towards learnig other subjects. The paper details results, analyzes causes for them and illustrates and explores implications for participating students at schools operating across the economic spectrum.

Gamification in Location-based M-Learning: Students' Perceptions of Game Elements.

Applications for Mobile-Learning, used in conjunction with strategies based on games, provide new opportunities for the learning process in the physical and virtual worlds. Although previous works evaluated location-based mobile applications (and its variations), most of them focused almost entirely on specific metrics, leaving the player’s perspective aside. This paper presents study results for the evaluation of mLearning applications from the students’ perspective regarding the learning experience based on location and the game elements that might make the learning process more appealing to them. The study collected major game elements from the literature and applied questionnaires to 53 students from public high schools (junior high) in two states of Northeast Brazil. The results suggest that the majority of students have interest in this learning approach and consider most of the analysed game elements important to promote learning motivation, even though there are elements that are not as appealing. The paper contributes to the design of gamified location-based m-Learning applications in the sense that it provides insight into the importance of their requirements players perceive and may thus, serve as a guide for such applications versioning.