Vera Maria Benjamim Werneck

Reusable knowledge for satisficing usability requirements

Usability is becoming increasingly recognized as being an important factor in the acceptance of systems by end users. There is a basic need for systematic approaches to reason, model and analyze usability from the early stages of software development. Furthermore, it is necessary to develop a usable ontology or classification of measurable aspects that can be used to aid in the specification of usability requirements. These ontologies should be represented in a way that facilitates their use as guidelines for the requirements elicitation process. This work builds on review of literature in the area of human-computer interaction and the emerging field of usability engineering in developing a catalog of aspects of usability that can be considered during requirements gathering. This catalogue is used to guide the requirements engineer through alternatives for achieving usability for information systems. The approach uses i* framework, having usability modeled as a special type of goal.

Teaching software engineering with SimulES-W

This work presents an educational board and card game named SimulES-W, as a tool for teaching Software Engineering. It encompasses 5 years of evolution, in which the game Problems and Programmers was the fundamental source. SimulES-W innovates in three distinct areas: it is a web based game, it relies on a broad view of the software process and it is customizable for content. SimulES-W is supported by collaborative software that implements the SimulES board game. The paper describes the game, stresses its strong points, provides initial data on its use and discusses its future.

Modeling an Educational Multi-Agent System in MaSE

The growing complexity of modern systems is demanding more and more time from software designers and developers. The challenge of constructing complex systems is complicated by the geographic distribution of the systems. An agent oriented paradigm reinforces the software flexibility and the agents social possibilities, taking space as a solution in software engineering. The idea of independent and autonomous entities capable of relating in the search of the system goals originated the multi-agent systems, where at least two agents are capable of interaction. Such systems possess great applicability in different knowledge areas, as for example, in Education. This work defines an Education Multi-Agent System, which is a learning education environment with multi-agents. The system aims at helping the teaching process on a specific topic. The system agents were modeled using the MaSE (Multi-Agent System Engineering) method.

Employing Multi-agents in 3-D Game for Cognitive Stimulation

Multi-agents are increasingly gaining the attention of researchers and developers of virtual games. The agents can control the user performance, adapting the interface and automatically changing the difficulty level of tasks. The objective of this paper is to describe the development of a game that combines the technologies of Virtual Reality and Multi-Agent. This system aims at improving the cognitive functions in patients with neuropsychiatric disorders. The integration of different technologies, the development methodology and the test procedures are described throughout the paper.

Developing an Educational Medical Game Using AgilePASSI Multi-agent Methodology

Games applied to health education have emerged as a motivational improvement in learning and clinical performance of students from the health care area. Currently, there are several agent oriented methodologies that support the multi-agent systems development. However none are specific to the domain of medical and health education. Agent-oriented development of medical educational games must have special features such working with a multidisciplinary team, have a high degree of user involvement and allow a mutuality of game requirements. Within this context, this paper presents the development of MEDEDUC, an educational systems technology applying agile development through the AGILE-PASSI methodology. This game, which has five levels of difficulty, allows the student to study pulmonology answering questions that explore multimedia presentations. The results of this study stressed the advantages of the agile development methodology game that combines medical theory and multi-agent.

The challenges of representing transparency as patterns

Patterns are an invaluable tool for capturing and reusing Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) knowledge. Their construction, however, requires one to pay close attention to the semantics of its elements. This paper reports two important insights realized when developing a collection of Transparency patterns; they concern the semantics of the HELP contribution link and of the correlation link between NFR softgoals. The drawbacks of using these interdependency types are discussed and solutions are presented. The discussion is relevant to anyone attempting to develop precise catalogs for capturing NFR knowledge.

Transparently teaching in the context of game-based learning: the case of simulES-W

This work presents a pedagogical proposal, in the context of game-based learning (GBL), that uses the concept of Transparency Pedagogy. As such, it aims to improve the quality of teaching, and the relationship between student, teacher and teaching methods. Transparency is anchored in the principle of information disclosure. In pedagogy, transparency emerges as an important issue that proposes to raise student awareness about the educational processes. Using GBL as an educational strategy we managed to make the game, a software, transparent. That is we made the inner processes of the game known to the students. As such, besides learning by playing, students had access to the game design, through intentional modeling. We collected evidence that, by disclosure of the information about the design, students better performed on learning software engineering.

Assessing composition in modeling approaches

Modeling approaches are based on various paradigms, e.g., aspect-oriented, feature-oriented, object-oriented, and logic-based. Modeling approaches may cover requirements models to low-level design models, are developed for various purposes, use various means of composition, and thus are difficult to compare. However, such comparisons are critical to help practitioners know under which conditions approaches are most applicable, and how they might be successfully generalized and combined to achieve end-to-end methods. This paper reports on work done at the 2nd International Comparing Modeling Approaches (CMA) workshop towards the goal of identifying potential comprehensive modeling methodologies with a particular emphasis on composition: (i) an improved set of comparison criteria; (ii) 19 assessments of modeling approaches based on the comparison criteria and a common, focused case study.

Evaluating MaSE Methodology in the Requirements Identification

Agent orientation appears as a solution for constructing complex systems adapting the requirements identification to cope with agent properties like autonomy, sociability and pro-activeness. Many methodologies were proposed adopting this new paradigm. However, most of them are still in development and therefore need to be adapted. In this work MaSE, an agent-oriented methodology is evaluated. We use an exemplar proposed in 2001 by Yu and Cysneiros [1] to evaluate both agent/goal orientation and object orientation. This evaluation aims at analysing which are the strengths and weaknesses of MaSE through the methodologies questions proposed in the exemplar.

InspectorX: A game for software inspection training and learning

Software inspections are recommended for improving the quality of software artifacts, but their effectiveness heavily depends on properly training inspectors and other stakeholders in the inspection process. We previously proposed InspectorX, a serious game for learning and training on software inspections, whose design accounts for an optimized cognitive load by offering different levels of difficulty. The game has already been evaluated regarding its learning potential in the detection of defects, revealing positive outcomes. Since then, InspectorX has extended its coverage to other stages of the inspection process, for a more realistic simulation. This paper presents the games novel features and a new experiment that evaluates them with a bigger sample. Results indicate that there was considerable knowledge retention with just 20 minutes of gameplay. Suggestions on its design made by the experiment volunteers are also discussed.