Ricardo Colomo-Palacios

Business Process Analytics Using a Big Data Approach

Continuous improvement of business processes is a challenging task that requires complex and robust supporting systems. Using advanced analytics methods and emerging technologies--such as business intelligence systems, business activity monitoring, predictive analytics, behavioral pattern recognition, and type simulations--can help business users continuously improve their processes. However, the high volumes of event data produced by the execution of processes during the business lifetime prevent business users from efficiently accessing timely analytics data. This article presents a technological solution using a big data approach to provide business analysts with visibility on distributed process and business performance. The proposed architecture lets users analyze business performance in highly distributed environments with a short time response. This article is part of a special issue on leveraging big data and business analytics.

Using the Affect Grid to Measure Emotions in Software Requirements Engineering

Computer systems are designed and used by humans. And human being is characterized, among other things, by emotions. Giving this fact, the process of designing and developing computer systems is, like any other facet in our lives, driven by emotions. Requirements engineering is one of the main phases in software development. In Requirements engineering, several tasks include acceptance and negotiation activities in which the emotional factor represents a key role. This paper presents a study based on the application of affect grid by Russell in requirements engineering main stakeholders: developers and users. Results show that high arousal and low pleasure levels in the process are predictors of conflictive requirements.

Mentoring programmes: a study of the Spanish software industry

Mentoring is a very important tool for the development of human capital in Information Technology (IT) organisations. In such organisational environments, professional practice must be continually revised and improved in order to adapt workers competences to technical innovations. As a result of these circumstances, mentoring practices are widely accepted in these particular types of organisations and several maturity frameworks in the IT field (such as People-Capability Maturity Model (People-CMM)) recommend mentoring as a practice to develop and retain IT personnel. Due to the ever-growing importance of mentoring processes in technology firms, in this work we point out the best way to design and apply mentoring programmes in three multinational companies devoted to technological consulting. Our main goal is to compare and provide an accurate benchmarking of the application of mentoring programmes in these three companies, with the recommendations provided by reference frameworks such as People-CMM. The outcome shows that there is a potentially large discrepancy between the practical application of mentoring programmes in the selected multinational companies and the relevant theoretical recommendations of People-CMM guidelines.

Social Global Repository: using semantics and social web in software projects

Software has become crucial for everyday matters. In this context, the effective management of the software development process has become an essential issue for business survival in an ever more competitive industry. In order to gain business strengths from the development process, organisations need to carry out software development in the most efficient manner possible, avoiding redundancy and time losses. This paper presents an architecture which combines the strengths of two technologies, web 2.0 and the semantic web, as a solution to reuse and extrapolate knowledge and software products across projects and organisations. The Social Global Repository (SGR) is a tool which incorporates the established methodological recommendations of Software Engineering (SE) in an environment which provides support, flexibility and up-to-date solutions to software development teams.

ProLink: a semantics-based social network for software projects

One of the core challenges in the IT world is to harness the possibilities of reusing knowledge, expertise and lessons learned from previous software projects. In this paper, we present ProLink, a semantic-based social network, a proof-of-concept architecture and implementation of how this approach could foster expertise sharing and its potentially tremendous impact on work organisation and software development.

The IT Crowd: Are We Stereotypes?

The power of technology and its impact on the average IT employees working life has led to new job titles and responsibilities. IT workers increased visibility also correlates to a new social image reflected in the media. The authors completed an empirical study to examine how IT workers are portrayed, particularly on television, and the resulting perception of the profession, which future IT professionals will likely reflect.

ReSySTER: A hybrid recommender system for Scrum team roles based on fuzzy and rough sets

Agile development is a crucial issue within software engineering because one of the goals of any project leader is to increase the speed and flexibility in the development of new commercial products. In this sense, project managers must find the best resource configuration for each of the work packages necessary for the management of software development processes in order to keep the team motivated and committed to the project and to improve productivity and quality. This paper presents ReSySTER, a hybrid recommender system based on fuzzy logic, rough set theory and semantic technologies, aimed at helping project leaders to manage software development projects. The proposed system provides a powerful tool for project managers supporting the development process in Scrum environments and helping to form the most suitable team for different work packages. The system has been evaluated in a real scenario of development with the Scrum framework obtaining promising results.

SemCASS: technical competence assessment within software development teams enabled by semantics

The environment surrounding organisations is characterised by an increasing necessity of competent personnel that need to be assessed. Moreover, personnel factors are capital for software development projects. Given the importance of people in certain sectors, this paper introduces SemCASS, a tool based on semantic technologies to feed competence evaluation with competence evidences within software development projects. These evidences are taken from two different sources. On the one hand competence facts derived from the analysis of project repositories using natural language processing techniques. On the other hand, standard competence evidences collected using mobile technologies. SemCASS benefits from the standardisation of personnel performance metrics related to software development teams as well as the capital importance of competence ontologies and semantic reasoning as basic support of new knowledge management efforts. Due to these set of features, the reliability and precision of the competence assessment will increase drastically.

Semantic Annotation Architecture for Accessible Multimedia Resources

The paper discusses a platform that enables the semantic annotation of multimedia content when the subtitling and audio description tasks are being carried out.

Personnel Performance Assessment in Information Systems Outsourcing Environments.

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to present a tool which uses semantic technologies for personnel performance and workplace learning assessment in outsourced information technology environments.Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents the tool from a technical perspective and introduces a use case that depicts the main features related to human resource management issues.Findings – Semantic technologies enable the monitoring of personnel throughout all of the phases of the management of outsourcing, basing itself on established communication standards used in leading business management tools and recent outsourcing efforts. This monitoring provides to human resource management issues an integrated approach to assess both employee performance and learning outcomes as a result of competence evaluation.Originality/value – The paper shows that semantic technologies can be applied to human resource management tools to bring its intrinsic characteristics to human resource management tasks including pe...