Marta López

Formalizing a Systematic Review Updating Process

The objective of a systematic review is to obtain empirical evidence about the topic under review and to allow moving forward the body of knowledge of a discipline. Therefore, systematic reviewing is a tool we can apply in Software Engineering to develop well founded guidelines with the final goal of improving the quality of the software systems. However, we still do not have as much experience in performing systematic reviews as in other disciplines like medicine, and therefore we need detailed guidance. This paper presents a proposal of a improved process to perform systematic reviews in software engineering. This process is the result of the tasks carried out in a first review and a subsequent update concerning the effectiveness of elicitation techniques.

Application of an evaluation framework for analyzing the architecture tradeoff analysis method SM

Evaluation is a critical analytical process in all disciplines and fields and therefore also in software engineering. For developing and analyzing an evaluation method a framework of six basic components (target, evaluation criteria, yardstick, data-gathering techniques, synthesis techniques, and evaluation process) can be applied. This framework was developed based on the analysis of theoretical and methodological evaluation concepts applied in software and non-software disciplines. In particular, in this paper we present the application of the framework for analyzing the architecture tradeoff analysis methodTM (ATAMSM), developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). The results of the matching of the framework with the ATAM definition facilitate the identification of each evaluation component and stress some key aspects, such as the relevant role of stakeholders and the significance of attribute-based architectural styles in an ATAM evaluation.

Integrated Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering Teaching Experiences

This paper presents the motivations, experiences and results of teaching integrated Software Engineering (SE) and Knowledge Engineering (KE), specifically as part of the master course organized by the Polytechnic University of Madrid (School of Computer Science). The paper outlines a possible approach to this instruction, whose aim is for software practitioners thus educated to have a flexible and moldable view of the software systems development process. This broad and malleable approach allows future practitioners to better address the increasingly more complex, divergent and innovative problems and needs raised by users. This approach is the result of a gradual and continuous process. This paper discusses the current stage of integration, giving a detailed description and justification of the scope of the integrated instruction. For the purpose of quantitatively analyzing this experience, the paper also shows the results of the evaluation conducted throughout this process at three levels (industry, students and projects).

A Tagging Recommender Service for Mobile Terminals

This paper introduces more Tourism, a hybrid recommendation platform that provides information about tourist resources depending on the user profile, location, schedule and the amount of time for visiting interest points isolated or combined in a route. This platform is enriched with several services, such as: mashups, socialization, and adaptive interfaces in order to enrich the users experience when visiting touristic attractions. The system is able to find touristic resources taking into account users’ likes, through the use of hybrid Content-based Filtering + Collaborative Filtering techniques combined with tagging and folksonomies. To our knowledge, this is the first recommendation service oriented to mobile terminals that use extensively the advantages of Web 2.0 for social collaborative tagging.

Identifying moderator variables through requirements elicitation experiments limitations

Interviews are the most widely used elicitation technique in Requirements Engineering (RE). Despite its importance, research in interviews is quite limited, in particular from an experimental perspective. We have performed a series of experiments exploring the relative effectiveness of structured and unstructured interviews. This line of research has been active in Information Systems in the past years, so that our experiments can be aggregated together with existing ones to obtain guidelines for practice. Experimental aggregation is a demanding task. It requires not only a large number of experiments, but also considering the influence of the existing moderators. However, in the current state of the practice in RE, those moderators are unknown. We believe that analyzing the threats to validity in interviewing experiments may give insight about how to improve further replications and the corresponding aggregations. It is likely that this strategy may be applied in other Software Engineering areas as well.