Laura N. Aballay

Effectiveness of traditional software requirement elicitation techniques applied in distributed software development scenarios

In the last years, global software development has grown as a business model and this trend is accentuated. Benefits of these new processes of building distributed software are constrained by difficulties associated with the geographic and cultural distance between team members. In this context, the software requirement elicitation, key activity in the software engineering process, supports perhaps the greatest challenges due to high communicational flow required at this stage of software process. This paper presents a preliminary comparative study of the effectiveness of traditional elicitation techniques applied to distributed scenarios of software construction.

Adaptation Model Content Based in Cultural Profile into Learning Environment

The adaptation of the user interface is present in several areas, reaching to embrace virtual learning environments. One possible source of adaptation could be based on the students cultural profile. People from diverse countries have dissimilar cultures and interact with the user interface in different way, prefer graphic designs, and have expectations and behavior patterns. Therefore, the user interface should be adapted to the needs of each geographical location to provide optimal user experience. This paper presents a preliminary adapting model for interface according to the cultural profile of the user / student, specifically in a ubiquitous environment for collaborative learning.

Supporting Instructional Software Engineering Activities Using CODILA: Some Latin American Experiences

Computer science students must be able to support the global software development phenomena; therefore they should enhance their teamwork, communication, negotiation, leadership and collaboration skills. It pushes the educational institutions to rethink the way in which they are transferring the soft skills, e.g. collaboration capabilities, to the new software engineers. Advances in developing platforms, wideband communications, global markets, technological trends and outsourcing promote the conception of a global software engineering. Trying to help address this issue, this paper describes the results of two experiences where a CODILA (Collaborative and Distributed Learning Activity) was used to solve a software engineering problem in a distributed way. These experiences involved students and instructors of eight Latin American universities. We have measured the development of collaboration skills and satisfaction level of computer science students participating in these distributed collaborative practices, and the obtained results are highly encouraging.

A CMT-based modeling language for courseware design

This paper presents a language for courseware design that tries to overcome usability limitations shown by the Course Modeling Technique (CMT). The proposed language is able to deal with the key aspects of courseware design: objectives, contents, and instructional path. Given that its potential users are non-technical, the representation of the language is close to natural language. For its design, an emperical experimentation was made comparing its expressivity power regard to CMT. The results showed that the proposed language is more expressive and avoids some ambiguities that appears when CMT is used. Finally, the designers who participate in the tests, think that the new language is better than CMT in terms of effort required to use it.