José Alfonso Aguilar

A Solution Proposal for Complex Web Application Modeling with the I-Star Framework

In Web Engineering (WE), several Goal-oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) approaches have emerged using its advantages, such as the representation of actors, their intentions, goals and the tasks needed to achieve the goal, for requirements specification with promising results. Regrettably, the use of GORE approaches has one, among others, gap detected, the scalability. In these modeling frameworks, when the designer performs the requirements specification, the requirements diagram (model) trends to rapidly grow, becoming very difficult to use in projects with a considerable amount of requirements changing and growing constantly. In this paper, we propose an association form for the i* goal-oriented modeling framework in order to define the creation of two type of modules: Navigational and Service modules, since these are the two types of functional requirements more used for requirements specification in our proposal. Furthermore, we provide an example of application. Finally, with this approach, the benefits are: firstly, the scalability of the Web requirements model will be increased, therefore the model will be less complex and easier to understand and maintain, and secondly, the construction of modeling tools improving the user experience, the maintainability of the models and its reuse.

Dealing with dependencies among functional and non-functional requirements for impact analysis in web engineering

Due to the dynamic nature of the Web as well as its heterogeneous audience, web applications are more likely to rapidly evolve leading to inconsistencies among requirements during the development process. With the purpose to deal with these inconsistencies, web developers need to know dependencies among requirements considering that the understanding of these dependencies helps in better managing and maintaining web applications. In this paper, an algorithm has been defined and implemented in order to analyze dependencies among functional and non-functional requirements (in a goal-oriented approach) for understanding which is the impact derived from a change during the Model-Driven Web Engineering process. This Impact Analysis would support web developer in selecting requirements to be implemented ensuring that web applications finally satisfy the audience.

Using Mobile Technologies to Support Learning in Computer Science Students

This paper describes an investigation to determine the impact of mobile technologies to support student learning in Computer Science students. It has been taken as sample students of the Faculty of Computer Science (Facultad de Informática) of the “Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa, México”. Has been considered 152 study subjects, who are a representative sample, all of them use mobile devices in their daily lives, even during their stay in the University. An instrument was designed to survey: the 152 individuals, among which were interviewed: i) teachers, from the eight knowledge areas that compose the academies; ii) the computer labs managers; and iii) the school control department administrators. All the individuals interviewed, students, teachers and administrative staff, felt that mobile technology is the source of improvement of students qualifications and their academic performance. The reasons exposed by them agreed in the availability of access to Internet, ease of communication with teachers, classmates and the motivation to use a mobile device connected to the Internet. Interesting, from the 152 respondents, 86% say they use their smart phone or tablet to play, but most of them also used as support in their learning, and the 79% of these fellows would like to be implemented officially mobile technology as a means of learning in the University.

A Requirements Engineering Techniques Review in Agile Software Development Methods.

The first phase in the software development process is the Requirements Engineering (RE). Several methods for software development and RE techniques have been used to extract these users’ needs depending on the software complexity. Our goal is to map the evidence available about requirements engineering techniques adopted and challenges faced by agile methods in order to understand how traditional requirements engineering issues are resolved using agile requirements engineering. The agile methods considered for this work are: SCRUM, Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), Adaptive Software Development (ASD) and Crystal Family. The present work is based on the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method proposed by Kitchenham; we have reviewed publications from ACM, IEEE, Science Direct, DBLP and World Wide Web. From a population of 34 papers, we identified 15 primary studies, which provide information concerning RE used in Agile Software Development Processes.

A Mobile-Sensor Fire Prevention System Based on the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the industrial sectors, business models and processes. In this context, a special area positively affected by IoT is the prevention of risk factors. A permanently connected network of new products, machines, people and organizations, is a technological advance that can be oriented to combat the risks of fires in places of greater vulnerability in the business areas. This paper presents an application project regarding to a fire prevention system in places where temperature can be measured using the new IoT tools. This project and its novel advantages can be helpful in the development of preventive to increase safety in industry.

An Analysis of Techniques and Tools for Requirements Elicitation in Model-Driven Web Engineering Methods

Until now, is well-known that Requirements Engineering RE is one of the critical factors for success software. In current literature we can find several reasons of this affirmation. One particular phase, which is vital for developing any new software application is the Requirements Elicitation, is spite of this, most of the development of new software fail because of wrong elicitation phase. Several proposals exist for Requirements Elicitation in Software Engineering, but in the current software development market is focusing on the development of Web and mobile applications, specially using Model-Driven methods, thats the reason why we asume that it is necessary to know the Elicitation techniques applied in Model-Driven Web Engineering. To do this, we selected the most representative methods such as NDT, UWE and WebML. We have reviewed 189 publications from ACM, IEEE, Science Direct, DBLP and World Wide Web. Publications from the RE literature were analyzed by means of the strict consideration of the current techniques for Requirements Elicitation.

Improving Requirements Specification in WebREd-Tool by Using a NFR’s Classification

In Software Engineering (SE), a system has properties that emerge from the combination of its parts, these emergent properties will surely be a matter of system failure if the Non-Fuctional Requirements (NFRs), or system qualities, are not specified in advance. In Web Engineering (WE) field occurs very similar, but with some other issues related to special characteristics of the Web applications such as the navigation (with the application of the security). In this paper, we improve our Model-Driven tool, named WebREd-Tool, extending the requirements metamodel with a NFRs classification, the main idea is to help the Web application designer with the NFRs specification to make better design decisions and also to be used to validate the quality of the final Web application.

A Survey About the Impact of Requirements Engineering Practice in Small-Sized Software Factories in Sinaloa, Mexico

Scientific literature over time highlighted the relevance of requirements engineering for software development process for desktop, web or mobile applications. Nevertheless, not much contemporary information with regard to current practices in small-sized software factories is available. This is specially true in the region of Sinaloa, Mexico, for that reason this work presents an exploratory study which provides insight into industrial practices in Sinaloa. A combination of both qualitative and quantitative data is collected, using semi-structured interviews and a detailed questionnaire from sixteen software factories. A Pearson (r) correlation analysis was performed independently between the variables Company location (EU), Scope of coverage (AC), Number of workers (NT), Time to live in the market (TV), Projects completed (PY), Time dedicated to activities related to the project (TA), Outdated projects completed (PC) in order to determine the degree of relationship between each of the variables mentioned, with all. A correlation analysis and an analysis of variance (ANOVA) were performed. The quantitative results offers opportunities for further interpretation and comparison.

Software factories in Sinaloa: Requirements engineering application priority issues

Nowadays is well known the relevance of requirements engineering in software development processes. Regrettably, the correct application of the activities is living aside for some developers teams. This study presents the priority given by software factories in Sinaloa, México. A set of software factories (25 in total) in Sinaloa were interviewed in order to obtain the relevance given for requirements engineering regarding the tools and techniques they use; an analysis is presented. Software factories names are omitted due to privacy policies.

A Baseline Domain Specific Language Proposal for Model-Driven Web Engineering Code Generation

It is well-known that Model-Driven Web Engineering requires the development of code-generation tools in order to be adopted outside research field as a complete solution in Web application development industry. Regrettably, a fully-guided methodology supported by a complete code-generation tool that considers a complete development process based on MDA (Model-Driven Architecture) is missing. The idea behind MDA is that requirements are considered (functional and nonfunctional requirements) from the Computational Independent Model (CIM), to the Platform Specific Model (PSM) passing for the Platform Independent Model (PIM) to generate the source code for the Web application. In our work is presented a baseline DSL (Domain Specific Language) for Web application code-generation considering the basic language used in a small software factory in Mexico. This is an ongoing work which is part of a institutional project in order to build a suite of tools for code-generation for Web application development.