Antonio Amescua | Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (original) (raw)
Uploads
Papers by Antonio Amescua
In view of the importance of knowledge as a key resource for companies sustainability and improve... more In view of the importance of knowledge as a key resource for companies sustainability and improvement, and in view of the existing efforts made to keep organizations informed about the way they should take care of their know-how, this chapter describes ALTUS, a process-oriented, knowledge maturity model, that helps organizations to assess its knowledge maturity level regarding the performance of a set of capabilities that are oriented to improve strategic or business goals through the accomplishment of several specific knowledge governance processes. This orientation through capabilities, processes and strategic/business goals achievement for knowledge governance is auditable, traceable and sustainable along the time.
Requirements Engineering, 2016
World Conference on the WWW and Internet, 1997
ABSTRACT Personal Learning Environments allow students to direct their own learning by offering k... more ABSTRACT Personal Learning Environments allow students to direct their own learning by offering knowledge from different sources according to their needs. The application of social media within these environments can make learning more attractive for students, providing them with more opportunities to interact with both their teachers and classmates. The use of social identities can also help to overcome the barrier of having to manage different identities to access the knowledge needed for learning a subject. The main objective of this research is to provide teachers with a supplementary mechanism based on social identities to transmit to their students the most important ideas discussed during a class session. The pilot experiment carried out in the scope of this research used Twitter identities to reach the audience in class with the highlights of the topics discussed during the theory lectures of three computer engineering subjects. A mobile application for tablets was also developed to help teachers to manage messages to be launch during the class sessions. Anonymous surveys and interviews to participants will help explore the effectiveness of social media in enhancing the quality of teaching and the ability of learning of students.
Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2012
Nowadays becoming competitive is a critical challenge for organizations and software process impr... more Nowadays becoming competitive is a critical challenge for organizations and software process improvement is an obvious and logical way to address this increasing need in the software industry, unfortunately not all software process improvements have the expected results, because of the lack of knowledge on how to do it and the lack of support available for organizations specially SMEs. This paper presents a state of art of research focused on software tools which help organizations in performing a successful implementation of software process improvements initiatives.
Agile Estimation Techniques and Innovative Approaches to Software Process Improvement
2012 IEEE Ninth Electronics, Robotics and Automotive Mechanics Conference, 2012
The Journal of Cost Analysis & Management, 2004
... Page 3. 16 The Journal of Cost Analysis and Management Summer 2004 Cuadrado-Gallego, Marbán... more ... Page 3. 16 The Journal of Cost Analysis and Management Summer 2004 Cuadrado-Gallego, Marbán, de Amescua, and Sánchez ... Emi, represents each one of the effort multipliers used by the model. COCOMO II Post-Architecture model using the 1995 calibrate (Boehm et al. ...
Software Quality Journal, 2012
Computer Standards & Interfaces, 2013
ABSTRACT Living Labs are innovation infrastructures where software companies and research organiz... more ABSTRACT Living Labs are innovation infrastructures where software companies and research organizations collaborate with lead users to design and develop new products and services. There is not any reference model related to the processes or practices to manage a living lab. This article presents a reference model to manage effectively the synergies of software companies with the other stakeholders participating in a living lab. The article describes the approach used to create the reference model through the analysis of a multiple case study considering six living labs and discusses the lessons learned during the creation of the process reference model.
Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2013
The implementation of any software development process involves the consumption of critical resou... more The implementation of any software development process involves the consumption of critical resources. Software engineers cannot experiment with different development processes before starting them in real projects, due to the time that would entail and the number of elements that are involved, so it is vital to have tools that allow the pre-visualization of the results of executing the software development process and how the environmental variables affect it,thus being able to anticipate under what conditions the software development process will be deployed. This paper presents the modelling and simulation of a software development process using System Dynamics (SD),which allows the graphical representation of the elements intervening in the software process, and the incorporation of as many relevant elements as possible. As a software costs estimation reference, the COCOMO estimation model was used; which beyond being reliable has a theoretical-practical foundation. As an ideal,...
IET Software
It is important to count on tools to help software professionals to evaluate the software process... more It is important to count on tools to help software professionals to evaluate the software process and how it may be affected by factors related to its deployment. Simulation models are a valuable means to illustrate the behaviour of such a process since scenario generation supports the prediction of potential outcomes and the prevention of undesired scenarios which are harmful to the process and the company in charge of the project to be developed. This work explores the effectiveness of introducing system dynamics (SD) models in the software engineers' process of understanding, from a management perspective, the software process dynamics. The used SD simulation model of the software process emphasises the representation of an iterative process. The COCOMO II model drivers and their main attributes were used, providing a set of reference factors that affect the software process, the estimation of project cost and the effort required. A set of 59 junior software professionals with no previous knowledge about SD participated in a validation study. For simple predictive scenarios, there was no important improvement effect, while for more complex predictive scenarios SD helped them to guess better and provide a rationale for the expected behaviour of the software process performance. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
J. Inf. Sci. Eng., 2013
This paper defines and validates a solution to support organizational learning through the intera... more This paper defines and validates a solution to support organizational learning through the interactive evolution of organizational knowledge. The approach includes mechanisms to acquire the experiences of individuals working in different teams and environments, combine them with the existing company's knowledge assets, and disseminate the evolved knowledge to all the project teams. This solution was validated in a controlled experiment involving junior engineers in a training course over a two-year period. The main objective of this experiment was to assess whether the proposed solution provides an effective learning environment to develop quality products. Results show that the approach helps engineers to improve their ability to learn and adopt new practices for software development, obtaining also high levels of quality in the products developed. These improvements are not immediate, however, so the benefits only become evident with time.
Kybernetes, 2021
Purpose Information technology/software (IT/SW) professionals use the business model canvas (BMC)... more Purpose Information technology/software (IT/SW) professionals use the business model canvas (BMC) to identify innovative digital solutions that improve their client’s business values. This paper aims to address the issue of considering, for a client company, the status of its intangible assets (IAs) in decision-making on the most innovative digital solution. Design/methodology/approach This paper provides a method (BMCIA-method) and a simulation tool (BMCIA-NetSim) to help IT/SW professionals identify and assess an organization’s IAs and their impact on the BMC of digital business. Findings IT/SW professionals used this approach, at 14 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), to identify innovative solutions and add digital value to their businesses. They used the BMCIA to provide their clients (SME’s chief executive officer or chief operating officer) with a view of the BMC enhanced with the status of IAs. These expressed interest in the use of the BMCIA and underscore its import...
In view of the importance of knowledge as a key resource for companies sustainability and improve... more In view of the importance of knowledge as a key resource for companies sustainability and improvement, and in view of the existing efforts made to keep organizations informed about the way they should take care of their know-how, this chapter describes ALTUS, a process-oriented, knowledge maturity model, that helps organizations to assess its knowledge maturity level regarding the performance of a set of capabilities that are oriented to improve strategic or business goals through the accomplishment of several specific knowledge governance processes. This orientation through capabilities, processes and strategic/business goals achievement for knowledge governance is auditable, traceable and sustainable along the time.
Requirements Engineering, 2016
World Conference on the WWW and Internet, 1997
ABSTRACT Personal Learning Environments allow students to direct their own learning by offering k... more ABSTRACT Personal Learning Environments allow students to direct their own learning by offering knowledge from different sources according to their needs. The application of social media within these environments can make learning more attractive for students, providing them with more opportunities to interact with both their teachers and classmates. The use of social identities can also help to overcome the barrier of having to manage different identities to access the knowledge needed for learning a subject. The main objective of this research is to provide teachers with a supplementary mechanism based on social identities to transmit to their students the most important ideas discussed during a class session. The pilot experiment carried out in the scope of this research used Twitter identities to reach the audience in class with the highlights of the topics discussed during the theory lectures of three computer engineering subjects. A mobile application for tablets was also developed to help teachers to manage messages to be launch during the class sessions. Anonymous surveys and interviews to participants will help explore the effectiveness of social media in enhancing the quality of teaching and the ability of learning of students.
Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2012
Nowadays becoming competitive is a critical challenge for organizations and software process impr... more Nowadays becoming competitive is a critical challenge for organizations and software process improvement is an obvious and logical way to address this increasing need in the software industry, unfortunately not all software process improvements have the expected results, because of the lack of knowledge on how to do it and the lack of support available for organizations specially SMEs. This paper presents a state of art of research focused on software tools which help organizations in performing a successful implementation of software process improvements initiatives.
Agile Estimation Techniques and Innovative Approaches to Software Process Improvement
2012 IEEE Ninth Electronics, Robotics and Automotive Mechanics Conference, 2012
The Journal of Cost Analysis & Management, 2004
... Page 3. 16 The Journal of Cost Analysis and Management Summer 2004 Cuadrado-Gallego, Marbán... more ... Page 3. 16 The Journal of Cost Analysis and Management Summer 2004 Cuadrado-Gallego, Marbán, de Amescua, and Sánchez ... Emi, represents each one of the effort multipliers used by the model. COCOMO II Post-Architecture model using the 1995 calibrate (Boehm et al. ...
Software Quality Journal, 2012
Computer Standards & Interfaces, 2013
ABSTRACT Living Labs are innovation infrastructures where software companies and research organiz... more ABSTRACT Living Labs are innovation infrastructures where software companies and research organizations collaborate with lead users to design and develop new products and services. There is not any reference model related to the processes or practices to manage a living lab. This article presents a reference model to manage effectively the synergies of software companies with the other stakeholders participating in a living lab. The article describes the approach used to create the reference model through the analysis of a multiple case study considering six living labs and discusses the lessons learned during the creation of the process reference model.
Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2013
The implementation of any software development process involves the consumption of critical resou... more The implementation of any software development process involves the consumption of critical resources. Software engineers cannot experiment with different development processes before starting them in real projects, due to the time that would entail and the number of elements that are involved, so it is vital to have tools that allow the pre-visualization of the results of executing the software development process and how the environmental variables affect it,thus being able to anticipate under what conditions the software development process will be deployed. This paper presents the modelling and simulation of a software development process using System Dynamics (SD),which allows the graphical representation of the elements intervening in the software process, and the incorporation of as many relevant elements as possible. As a software costs estimation reference, the COCOMO estimation model was used; which beyond being reliable has a theoretical-practical foundation. As an ideal,...
IET Software
It is important to count on tools to help software professionals to evaluate the software process... more It is important to count on tools to help software professionals to evaluate the software process and how it may be affected by factors related to its deployment. Simulation models are a valuable means to illustrate the behaviour of such a process since scenario generation supports the prediction of potential outcomes and the prevention of undesired scenarios which are harmful to the process and the company in charge of the project to be developed. This work explores the effectiveness of introducing system dynamics (SD) models in the software engineers' process of understanding, from a management perspective, the software process dynamics. The used SD simulation model of the software process emphasises the representation of an iterative process. The COCOMO II model drivers and their main attributes were used, providing a set of reference factors that affect the software process, the estimation of project cost and the effort required. A set of 59 junior software professionals with no previous knowledge about SD participated in a validation study. For simple predictive scenarios, there was no important improvement effect, while for more complex predictive scenarios SD helped them to guess better and provide a rationale for the expected behaviour of the software process performance. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
J. Inf. Sci. Eng., 2013
This paper defines and validates a solution to support organizational learning through the intera... more This paper defines and validates a solution to support organizational learning through the interactive evolution of organizational knowledge. The approach includes mechanisms to acquire the experiences of individuals working in different teams and environments, combine them with the existing company's knowledge assets, and disseminate the evolved knowledge to all the project teams. This solution was validated in a controlled experiment involving junior engineers in a training course over a two-year period. The main objective of this experiment was to assess whether the proposed solution provides an effective learning environment to develop quality products. Results show that the approach helps engineers to improve their ability to learn and adopt new practices for software development, obtaining also high levels of quality in the products developed. These improvements are not immediate, however, so the benefits only become evident with time.
Kybernetes, 2021
Purpose Information technology/software (IT/SW) professionals use the business model canvas (BMC)... more Purpose Information technology/software (IT/SW) professionals use the business model canvas (BMC) to identify innovative digital solutions that improve their client’s business values. This paper aims to address the issue of considering, for a client company, the status of its intangible assets (IAs) in decision-making on the most innovative digital solution. Design/methodology/approach This paper provides a method (BMCIA-method) and a simulation tool (BMCIA-NetSim) to help IT/SW professionals identify and assess an organization’s IAs and their impact on the BMC of digital business. Findings IT/SW professionals used this approach, at 14 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), to identify innovative solutions and add digital value to their businesses. They used the BMCIA to provide their clients (SME’s chief executive officer or chief operating officer) with a view of the BMC enhanced with the status of IAs. These expressed interest in the use of the BMCIA and underscore its import...
Knowledge, People, and Digital Transformation, 2020
In view of the importance of knowledge as a key resource for companies sustainability and improve... more In view of the importance of knowledge as a key resource for companies sustainability and improvement, and in view of the existing efforts made to keep organizations informed about the way they should take care of their know-how, this chapter describes ALTUS, a process-oriented, knowledge maturity model, that helps organizations to assess its knowledge maturity level regarding the performance of a set of capabilities that are oriented to improve strategic or business goals through the accomplishment of several specific knowledge governance processes. This orientation through capabilities, processes and strategic/business goals achievement for knowledge governance is auditable, traceable and sustainable along the time.
Seventh Business Systems Laboratory International Symposium, 2020
In the business world, digital transformation is considered a major question. It is a #1 concern ... more In the business world, digital transformation is considered a major question. It is a #1 concern risk for directors, CEOs and other senior executives since the failure rate is overwhelming: more than 70% of all digital transformations do not achieve its goals. Furthermore, the investment in digitalization in 2018 was quite high: about 1.3trillionfromwhichitisestimatedthat1.3 trillion from which it is estimated that 1.3trillionfromwhichitisestimatedthat900 billion where wasted because of the failures (Tabrizi, Lam, Girard, & Irvin, 2019). The understanding of what a digital transformation may be is difficult to ascertain because it is very different from one company to another. Nonetheless, there are general definitions from which a very accurate one says as follows (Innovation & Technology Business School e-Zigurat, 2019; The Enterprisers Project, 2019):
“Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of business, mainly changing how the business is operated and its value is delivered to its customers. It is also a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment often, and get comfortable with failure. This sometimes means walking away from long-standing business processes that companies were built upon in favour of relatively new practices that are still being defined.”
In these days, businesses need to evolve not only to reach their objectives, but also to survive, and to do so they need to integrate technology and make good use of the possibilities that digital solutions can provide. It is a matter of survival in the competitive environment that things like Internet of Things, Cloud, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, among other technologies, are setting in (de la Boutetière, Montagner, & Reich, 2018). And because of that, software engineers, as experts in IT, need to be prepared to offer good digital solutions to the companies, aligned to the business’s goals and based on the strong points the companies have.
Professionals in the area of Software Engineering share the responsibility to carry the digital transformations of any business on to its best possible state, making use of available business models and developing technology that ease that task. And that is what this work is about: to keep up the research and the challenges in the areas of “Software Engineering Economics” and “Business” to facilitate the pre-project phase of a digital solution development gathering and making use of recent and well proven technologies. By easing this first step of every digital solution project for the software engineers, many problems that ultimately result in the high failure rate mentioned (Tabrizi et al., 2019) can be early corrected.