Monica Villavicencio

Facts and perceptions regarding software measurement in education and in practice: preliminary results

How is software measurement addressed in undergraduate and graduate programs in universities? Do organizations consider that the graduating students they hire have an adequate knowledge of software measurement? To answer these and related questions, a survey was administered to participants who attended the IWSM-MENSURA 2010 conference in Stuttgart, Germany. Forty-seven of the 69 conference participants (including software development practitioners, software measurement consultants, university professors, and graduate students) took part in the survey. The results indicate that software measurement topics are: 1) covered mostly at the graduate level and not at the undergraduate level, and 2) not mandatory. Graduate students and professors consider that, of the measurement topics covered in university curricula, specific topics, such as measures for the requirements phase, and measurement techniques and tools, receive more attention in the academic context. A common observation of the practitioners who participated in the survey was that students hired as new employees bring limited software measurement-related knowledge to their organizations. Discussion of the findings and directions for future research are presented.

Educational Issues in the Teaching of Software Measurement in Software Engineering Undergraduate Programs

In mature engineering disciplines and science, mathematics and measurement are considered as important subjects to be taught in university programs. This paper discusses about these subjects in terms of their respective meanings and complementarities. It also presents a discussion regarding their maturity, relevance and innovations in their teaching in engineering programs. This paper pays special attention to the teaching of software measurement in higher education, in particular with respect to mathematics and measurement in engineering in general. The findings from this analysis will be useful for researchers and educators interested in the enhancement of educational issues related to software measurement.

Software Measurement in Software Engineering Education: A Delphi Study to Develop a List of Teaching Topics and Related Levels of Learning

Software engineering education is aimed at preparing professionals to achieve software quality, manage risk, and deliver projects on time and on budget. This paper reports on the findings of a Delphi study as part of a series of research studies designed to identify the software measurement topics that should be taught in software engineering programs. It also outlines the levels of learning and skills that are expected to be reached by undergraduate students.

Looking for Usability and Functionality Issues: A Case Study

Looking for quality issues in a system can be a very demanding activity. In this article, we propose an approach based on text mining techniques to quickly identify usability and functionality drawbacks in a learning management system - LMS. The techniques were performed to 421 comments written by university students who frequently use a LMS. Results indicate that a dendrogram is a suitable tool to have a quick look of the issues faced by LMS’ users as well as their expectations about new functionalities that the system should provide. By using these techniques, we identified more than ten usability issues and the need for seven new functionalities to be implemented in the system.

Application of Formal Methods to Verify Business Processes

Formal specifications and modeling languages can be used to provide support for Business Process (BP) analysts and designers to verify the behavior of BPs with respect to business performance indicators (i.e., service time, waiting time or queue size). This article presents the application of the Timed Automata (TA) formal language to check BPs modeled with Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) using the model checking verification technique. Also, a set of transformation rules and two algorithms are introduced to obtain TA-networks from BPMN models, allowing the formal specification of a BP-task model equivalent to the BPMN model. The approach presented here contributes to conduct the qualitative analysis of BPMN models.

Towards the Development of a Framework for Education in Software Measurement

Even though software engineering education embraces the teaching of software measurement topics, there is a lack of guidelines to address this teaching in undergraduate programs. In order to facilitate the education of these topics at the undergraduate level, a set of studies was conducted since 2010 and an educational framework is being developed based on the opinions of experts in the field. The framework provides guidelines for university teachers and instructors to facilitate the teaching and learning process of software measurement for undergraduate students or beginners in the field. The structure of this framework can be applied in other educational fields.

A Survey of Big Data Use in Large and Medium Ecuadorian Companies

Big data has become a subject of great interest among a variety of organizations, both from the scientific and business sectors. In this line, it is important to know the focus of attention that companies have on big data. This paper presents a study conducted in Ecuador about big data initiatives among large and medium companies. Results indicate that companies do not have a clear understanding of the implications of big data for their own benefits. Also, higher interest on big data initiatives comes from the private rather than the public sector. And, companies have a preference for contracting big data services from third-parties instead of hiring specialized personnel.

Affinity Groups: A Linguistic Analysis for Social Network Groups Identification

Socially cohesive groups tend to share similar ideas and express themselves in similar ways when posting their thoughts in online social networks. Therefore, some researchers have conducted studies to uncover the issues discussed by groups who are structurally connected in a network. In this study, we take advantage of the language usage patterns present in online communication to unveil affinity groups, i.e. like-minded people, who are not necessarily interacting in the network currently. We analyze 735K tweets written by 620 unique users and compute scores for 14 grammatical categories using the linguistic inquiry word count software (LIWC). With the LIWC scores, we build a vector for each user, apply a similarity measure and feed an affinity propagation clustering algorithm to find the affinity groups. Following the proposed method, clusters of religious activists, journalists, entrepreneurs, among others emerge. We automatically characterize each cluster using a topic modeling algorithm and validate the generated topics with a user study conducted with 200 people. As a result, more than 70% of the participants agreed on their selection. These results confirm that communities share certain similarities in the use of language, traits that characterize their behavior and grouping.

Formal verification of business processes as timed automata

Despite the representation of a business process (BP) with Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) can provide support for business designers, BPMN models lack of a formal semantics to conduct qualitative analysis. In this work, we describe the use of timed automata (TA) formal language to check BPs modelled with BPMN using the model checking verification technique. Two algorithms are introduced to transform a BPMN model into TA to obtain the formal specification of a BP-task model tantamount to a BPMN model. Our approach allows business analysts and designers to perform evaluation of BPMN models with respect to business performance indicators (e.g., service time, waiting time or queue size) derived from business needs. Our approach also incorporates the UPPAAL MC tool, as it is shown in an instance of an enterprise-project.

Towards the evaluation of open educational resources for learning software engineering

Educational resources have been around for quite some time; yet, the growing of internet and the development of information technologies have contributed to their evolution and massive distribution. The present work is in an initial state of a larger-scope project that aims to identify, classify and evaluate open educational resources (OER) useful for self or guided learning of software engineering topics. As a result, a list of OERs addressing topics like requirements, planning, design, testing and refactoring was developed. Moreover, a set of criteria for evaluating such OERs is also proposed for choosing valuable resources, suitable for university courses or training programs. The methodology used in this study can be applied to other OERs and even other disciplines.