Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Scenario: The current markets require online processing and analysis of data as soon as they arrive to make decisions or implement actions as soon as possible. PAbMM is a real-time processing architecture specialized in measurement projects, where the processing is guided by measurement metadata derived from a measurement framework through the project definition. Objective: To extend the measurement framework incorporating scenarios and entity states as a way to online interpret the indicator’s decision criteria according to scenarios and entity states, approaching their conditional likelihoods. Methodology: An extension based on entity and context states is proposed to implement scenarios and entity states. A memory structure based on the occurrence matrix is defined to approach the associated conditional likelihoods while the data are processed. A new hierarchical complimentary schema is introduced to foster the project definition interoperability considering the new concepts. An extension of the cincamipd library was carried forward to support the complementary schema. An application case is shown as a proof-of-concept. Results: A discrete simulation is introduced for describing the times and sizes associated with the new schema when the volume of the projects to update grow-up. The results of the discrete simulation are very promising, only 0.308 seconds were necessary for updating 1000 active projects. Conclusions: The simulation provides an applicability reference to analyse its convenience according to the project requirements. This allows implementing scenarios and entity states to increase the suitability between indicators and decision criteria according to the current scenario and entity state under analysis.

Background: Software engineering has been formalized to a greater extent since 2000; this can be seen in the development of different bodies of knowledge. Objective: This work aims to contribute to organizing software engineering education knowledge, a sub-area in which formalization is still necessary.Method: We propose a process for the construction of controlled vocabularies. We instantiated this process twice; first, using automatic clustering techniques to analyze over 1,000 articles; and then, we focused on concepts related to teaching techniques and methods.Findings: We present a taxonomy with 60 terms organized in three facets at its highest level. The `teaching approaches and methods' category covers 26 terms with their definitions and most relevant references.Implications: The taxonomy can be used by teachers and researchers to understand the breadth of the field, to place their research initiatives in a broader context and to conduct more rigorous searches in the literature. We believe it is necessary to continue working on the taxonomy's expansion and also to carry out validation activities, if possible, including experts' validation.

The application of Artificial Intelligence mechanisms allows the development of systems capable to solve very complex engineering problems. Multi-agent systems (MAS) are one paradigm that allows an alternative way to design distributed control systems. While research in this area grew exponentially before 2009, there is a need to understand the status quo of the field from 2009 to June 2017. An extension of the results of a SLR related to Multi-Agent Systems, its applications and research gaps, following Kitchenham and Wholin guidelines are presented in this paper. From the analysis of 279 papers (out of 3522 candidates), our findings suggest that: a) there were 20 gaps related to agent-oriented methodologies; coordination, cooperation and negotiation; modelling, developing, testing and debugging; b) 24 gaps related to specific domains (recycling, dynamic evacuation, hazard management, health-care, industry, logistics and manufacturing, machine learning, ambient assisted living); and 14 gaps related to specific areas within MAS (A-Teams, dynamic MAS and mobile agents, ABMS, evolutionary MAS, and self-organizing MAS). These gaps specify lines of research where the MAS community must work to achieve the unification of the agent-oriented paradigm; as well as strengthen ties with the industry.

Considering black women in Brazil as a research subject involves new challenges about topics that are increasingly complex. In this sense, pertinent questions arise in seeking to comprehend contemporary phenomena and, consequently, leave room for disputable formulations, especially in areas of which science and technology have little understanding. This article offers a bibliographical essay that aims to begin the path to include black women in computing and technology, in a social background of sexism and racial segregation. Furthermore, it presents a summary of the resistance strategies used in black women’s course in this area by analyzing the elements of black identity strengthened by these initiatives in Brazil and abroad.

Mobile devices have gained more attention from the society that is using them increasingly for a variety of purposes. For complete insertion of the population in this constant digital evolution it is fundamental that mobile applications also offer access to different user profiles, regardless of their disabilities or limitations. Considering quality, productivity, and speed of application creation, there is a wide range of good development practices and evaluations. However, methods that involve usability and accessibility are still developing. The purpose of this article is to present the Acc-MobileCheck, which is a checklist of accessibility and usability for mobile devices apps, based on good software development practices and guided by Design Patterns. The Acc-MobileCheck, composed of 47 verification items, consists of questions that look for evidence of problems of comprehension, operation, perception, and adaptation in mobile apps. The evaluation method aims to address difficulties that can be faced by people with hearing, visual, intellectual, or mobility impairment. Five experts and three developers of mobile apps had evaluated the Acc-MobileCheck. The conclusive results show that the checklist is usable and includes essential issues for the evaluation of accessibility and usability. The data obtained allowed a restructuring of the evaluation method developed, and the positive comments about the checklist demonstrate its adequacy to attend the demand.

As big data has become increasingly necessary in modern farming techniques, the dependence on high quality and quantity of ground truth data has risen. Collecting ground truth data is one of the most labor-intensive aspects of the research process. A crowdsourcing platform application to aid lay people in completing ground truth data can improve the quality and quantity of data for growers and agricultural researchers. In this study, a user-centered design process was used to develop a prototype of a mobile application which will teach people how to classify certain characteristics of lambsquarters in the District of Columbia. Focus group results demonstrated that the greatest motivation for the participants was having opportunities to develop their skills and access to educational resources. From the focus groups, design personas were created and wireframe prototypes were produced. The prototypes were evaluated by users using the System Usability Scale and qualitative feedback. The design received an average score of 75.95, which indicates an acceptable design. From the feedback of the users, improvements to the design were made in the mobile application development of the system.

As a result of the growth of non-developer users of OSS applications, usability has over the last ten years begun to attract the interest of the OSS community. The OSS community has some special characteristics which are an obstacle to the direct adoption of many usability techniques as specified in the HCI field. The aim of this research is to adapt and evaluate the feasibility of applying the Personas usability technique to one OSS project from the viewpoint of the development team. The applied research method was a case study of the following OSS project LibreOffice-Writer. We formalized the application procedure of the adapted usability technique. We found that either there were no procedures for adopting usability technique in OSS or they were not fully systematized. Additionally, we identified the adverse conditions that are an obstacle to their adoption in OSS and propose the special adaptations required to overcome the obstacles. To avoid some of the adverse conditions, we created web artefacts (e.g. wiki) that are very popular in the OSS field. Additionally, we found that there are obstacles to the application of the technique. Despite these obstacles, it is feasible to apply the adapted Personas technique in OSS project.

To achieve a business objective, organizations may require variants of the same business process that depend on the context in which they are enacted. Several proposals have emerged to deal with the variability of business processes, focused on the modeling of a so-called process family. The proposals try to avoid modeling each variant separately, which implies duplication and maintenance of the common parts. Few of them also focus on automatically deriving a process variant from the definition of a process family, which is a central and complex task. One of these proposals is the Common Variability Language (CVL), which allows representing variability transparently in a host language. This article aims to explore the use of CVL together with the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN 2.0) for modeling business process families, and the use of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques for the automatic generation of process variants. We also present a graphical tool supporting these ideas and a qualitative evaluation of the variability approach by using the VIVACE framework.

This paper presents a research model in didactics of programming elaborated within the theoretical framework of the epistemological theory of Jean Piaget. That theory explains the construction of scientific knowledge based on empirical studies made by Piaget over many years. The model arises from the analysis of the results of the application of principles of the theory, especially the triad of intra-inter-trans stages, to the empirical study of the construction of the concepts of algorithm, data structure and program. The elaboration of the model is a contribution to the development of the didactics of programming and, in general, of the didactics of computer science, since the model can be used in other computer science topics. Didactics is a specific area within computer science, with its own foundations and methods, which studies in depth topics related to education in the discipline. Two empirical studies about the construction of knowledge of algorithms and data structures, and of the corresponding programs as executable objects, are briefly described to illustrate the model.Both examples use a search algorithm (binary and linear) and the implementations are in the programming language C.

A formal language for game design is an endeavor many academics and industry personalities have been tackling since the mid-nineties. One of the most renowned formal models for game design, the MDA Framework, includes steps to delimit and conceptualize the experience with a top-down approach. There is, however, a significant lack of high detail models for mechanic construction as well as difficulty balancing. In this paper we propose two formal models for novice designers. The 5-Part-Model (5PM) for building and diagnosing game mechanics, and the Dimensions of Challenge (DoC) formal model for balancing and fine-tuning difficulty in games.