Construction of a taxonomy for requirements engineering commercial-off-the-shelf components

This article presents a procedure for constructing a taxonomy of COTS products in the field of Requirements Engineering (RE). The taxonomy and the obtained information reach transcendental benefits to the selection of systems and tools that aid to RE-related actors to simplify and facilitate their work. This taxonomy is performed by means of a goal-oriented methodology inspired in GBRAM (Goal-Based Requirements Analysis Method), called GBTCM (Goal-Based Taxonomy Construction Method), that provides a guide to analyze sources of information and modeling requirements and domains, as well as gathering and organizing the knowledge in any segment of the COTS market. GBTCM claims to promote the use of standards and the reuse of requirements in order to support different processes of selection and integration of components.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Estimation of the disease prevalence when diagnostic tests are subject to classification error: bayesian approach

La estimación de la prevalencia de una enfermedad, la cual es definida como el número de casos con la enfermedad en una población dividida por el número de elementos en ésta, es realizado con gran precisión cuando existen pruebas 100% exactas, también llamadas gold standard. Sin embargo, en muchos casos, debido a los altos costos de las pruebas de diagnóstico o limitaciones de tecnología, la prueba gold standard no existe y debe ser reemplazada por una o más pruebas diagnósticas no tan caras pero con bajos niveles de sensibilidad o especificidad. Este estudio está enfocado en el estudio de dos enfoques bayesianos para la estimación de prevalencia cuando no es factible tener resultados de una prueba 100% exacta. El primero es un modelo con dos parámetros que toman en cuenta la asociación entre los resultados de las pruebas. El segundo es un enfoque que propone el uso del Bayesian Model Averaging para combinar los resultados de cuatro modelos donde cada uno de estos tiene suposiciones diferentes sobre la asociación entre los resultados de las pruebas diagnósticas. Ambos enfoques son estudiados mediante simulaciones para evaluar el desempeño de estos bajo diferentes escenarios. Finalmente estas técnicas serán usadas para estimar la prevalencia de enfermedad renal crónica en el Perú con datos de un estudio de cohortes de CRONICAS (Francis et al., 2015).Tesi

Domestic Violence in Rural Areas

Domestic violence (DV) negatively impacts individuals and families, including children, across the U.S. Yet, there is little research on the barriers and facilitators to services these families encounter, especially in rural areas. The goal of this study was to examine service availability in rural areas for families who have experienced domestic violence. This study was conducted using a qualitative research design. Researchers conducted face-to-face and phone interviews with nine human services professionals in one rural California community. The study used in-depth interviews with open-ended questions to encourage participants to share their views and experiences. The findings were categorized into six key themes: limited knowledge of available services, gaps in rural areas, client reluctance to seek/accept services, need for specialized training to handle crisis situations, families and providers experiencing crisis, and professional discretion on intervention. Implications from the findings suggest the need for increased advocacy, education, and specialized training for professionals and paraprofessionals who encounter DV. Furthermore, participants recommended the implementation of an immediate response team for DV and expressed a desire for an expansion of current domestic violence services in the study community such as shelters and domestic violence counselors

Systematic construction of goal-oriented COTS taxonomies

The use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components is becoming a strategic need because they offer the possibility to build systems at reduced costs and within shorter development time. Having efficient and reliable COTS components selection methods is a key issue not only for exploiting the potential benefits of this technology, but also for facing the problems and risks involved. Searching COTS components requires overcoming several obstacles: the growing size and evolvability of the COTS marketplace, the dependencies from the components to be selected with others, and the type of descriptions currently available for those components. The main goal of this thesis is to provide support for a reliable and comprehensive structuring of a reuse infrastructure for the COTS components marketplace. With this aim, we propose a method for the construction and maintenance of goal-oriented COTS taxonomies based on a solid domain analysis; guiding the gathering of sources of information, modeling requirements and dependency relationship among domains, and organizing knowledge in any segment of the COTS marketplace.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

How do software architects consider non-functional requirements: an exploratory study

© 2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Dealing with non-functional requirements (NFRs) has posed a challenge onto software engineers for many years. Over the years, many methods and techniques have been proposed to improve their elicitation, documentation, and validation. Knowing more about the state of the practice on these topics may benefit both practitioners' and researchers' daily work. A few empirical studies have been conducted in the past, but none under the perspective of software architects, in spite of the great influence that NFRs have on daily architects' practices. This paper presents some of the findings of an empirical study based on 13 interviews with software architects. It addresses questions such as: who decides the NFRs, what types of NFRs matter to architects, how are NFRs documented, and how are NFRs validated. The results are contextualized with existing previous work.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

A software service supporting software quality forecasting

Software repositories such as source control, defect tracking systems and project management tools, are used to support the progress of software projects. The exploitation of such data with techniques like forecasting is becoming an increasing need in several domains to support decision-making processes. However, although there exist several statistical tools and languages supporting forecasting, there is a lack of friendly approaches that enable practitioners to exploit the advantages of creating and using such models in their dashboard tools. Therefore, we have developed a modular and flexible forecasting service allowing the interconnection with different kinds of databases/data repositories for creating and exploiting forecasting models based on methods like ARIMA or ETS. The service is open source software, has been developed in Java and R and exposes its functionalities through a REST API. Architecture details are provided, along with functionalities’ description and an example of its use for software quality forecasting.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Selection of third party software in Off-The-Shelf-based software development: an interview study with industrial practitioners

The success of software development using third party components highly depends on the ability to select a suitable component for the intended application. The evidence shows that there is limited knowledge about current industrial OTS selection practices. As a result, there is often a gap between theory and practice, and the proposed methods for supporting selection are rarely adopted in the industrial practice. This paper's goal is to investigate the actual industrial practice of component selection in order to provide an initial empirical basis that allows the reconciliation of research and industrial endeavors. The study consisted of semi-structured interviews with 23 employees from 20 different software-intensive companies that mostly develop web information system applications. It provides qualitative information that help to further understand these practices, and emphasize some aspects that have been overlooked by researchers. For instance, although the literature claims that component repositories are important for locating reusable components; these are hardly used in industrial practice. Instead, other resources that have not received considerable attention are used with this aim. Practices and potential market niches for software-intensive companies have been also identified. The results are valuable from both the research and the industrial perspectives as they provide a basis for formulating well-substantiated hypotheses and more effective improvement strategies.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Experiencias en la formación de un cuerpo académico multidisciplinar en el área de las Bellas Artes

Este texto presenta las experiencias de éxito en la planeación y formación del cuerpo académico UCOL-CA92: Arte y Sociedad. Agrupación académica multidisciplinar que pretende definir procesos pedagógicos para que exista un diálogo didáctico e incluyente entre las artes en favor de la formación integral de los alumnos del nivel pregrado del Instituto Universitario de Bellas Artes de la Universidad de Colima. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo aportar ideas y experiencias a investigadores interesados en constituir cuerpos académicos multidisciplinares, en el área de las artes, con interés en la investigación interdisciplinar al tiempo que propone proyectos que involucran a través de la vinculación, al estado, la universidad y las empresas privadas.This text presents the experiences of success in the planning and formation of the academic body UCOL-CA92: Art and Society. Multidisciplinary academic grouping that intends to define pedagogical processes so that there is a didactic and inclusive dialogue between the arts in favor of the integral formation of the students of the undergraduate level of the University Institute of Fine Arts of the University of Colima. This work aims to contribute ideas and experiences to researchers interested in forming multidisciplinary academic bodies, in the area of the arts, with interest in interdisciplinary research while proposing projects that involve through linking, the state, university and Private companies

El desarrollo artístico de niños en comunidades indígenas mexicanas

This paper explains the actual circumstances of indigenous people in Mexico related to the art education of their children, there is a lot of evidence that most indigenous communities produce or make art, mainly art crafts. We can also see that while some of the members of the communities are making these art crafts or preparing paintings or modest sculptures to perform some rites, children are learning the skills to do that too. This is the art education we find in the indigenous community; this text compares it with a formal art education and gives an overview of what can we learn from an informal art education practice and from their artistic development.Este documento explica las circunstancias de los pueblos indígenas en México relacionadas con la educación artística de sus hijos, hay muchas pruebas de que la mayoría de las comunidades indígenas producen o hacen arte, principalmente artesanías. También podemos ver que mientras algunos de los miembros de las comunidades están haciendo manualidades, o preparando pinturas o esculturas modestas para realizar algunos ritos, los niños también están aprendiendo las habilidades para hacerlo. Esta es la educación artística que encontramos en las comunidades indígenas, este texto la compara con una educación artística formal y ofrece una visión general de lo que podemos aprender de una práctica informal de educación artística y de su desarrollo artístico. Una conclusión general es que incluso a pesar de las circunstancias difíciles en las que viven; el desarrollo artístico les ayuda a sobrevivir y enfrentar la vida y su realidad