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More and more organizations make parts of their information systems available to their business partners and often face integration and interoperability issues. To counter these problems, web services appeared as a promising technology to bridge the gap between organizations and their partners. While web services generally focus on the implementation of functional concerns (FC) such as ordering of goods, the reservation of flights, etc. also non‐functional concerns (NFC) such as security, reliable messaging, performance, and availability have to be addressed appropriately. The purpose of this paper is to identify web services' requirements.

In this paper the authors provide a survey on works in the area of NFCs in web services. After presenting a common terminology, the most important requirements in that context are presented. Further, the authors assess these works against the requirements.

The evaluation reveals that there is no approach that supports the requirements to a satisfying degree. Based on that, the authors motivate the need for a novel holistic approach to NFCs in web services.

The paper presents an extended version of one of the papers presented at iiWAS2010.

The aspect‐oriented (AO) paradigm is first proposed to deal with programing modularity issues, but different researchers have been exploring AO concepts in the designing and definition of software systems. The goal of this paper is to discuss and present a proposal that addresses the application of AO concepts to the design of business processes (BPs) in order to improve usability and understandability of process models.

The paper departs from previous work on analyzing the application of AO for software design. The observations were backed by a case study, which was used to illustrate the issues by means of examples.

The paper presents findings on important issues related to the integration of AO paradigm and BP modeling, such as crosscutting representation, crosscutting composition, quantification, and join point exposure.

The paper explores a new frontier: the application of AO concepts to the design of BPs. As of now, few works have explored this new view on process modularity. The paper claims that application of AO concepts to the design of BPs is important in the consideration of usability and understandability. Its contributions are also backed by a prototype process editor, CrossOryx, a web‐based editor for modeling process using AO concepts.

Mobile widgets represent applications exploiting web technologies and providing specific functionalities in an efficient and user‐friendly way. Owing to the low or medium complexity of the mobile widgets, their development may be simplified and optimized through automatic mechanisms. This paper aims to address this issue.

This paper presents an approach to the automatic generation of widgets, which is based on the separation of concerns between the specification of their structural and functional characteristics, and their appearance. The structural and functional features are expressed at a high abstraction level through the authors' Widget Markup Language, while their appearance through pre‐defined or personalized templates. The authors' automatic generator of mobile widgets translates the XML‐based documents containing the widgets description based on the Widget Markup Language into functional widgets for various available technologies.

The main non‐functional properties of the authors' widget generator are related to its extensibility towards new technologies, and the structural and functional aspects of the widgets. The validation of their solution has been done through various case studies, among which they mention the DISCo widget, a mobile widget which provides academic information for the students of the Computer Science Department at the University of Milano‐Bicocca in Italy.

The main advantages of the authors' approach for the development of mobile widgets can be summarized as following: adherence to the Write‐Once‐Run Everywhere paradigm, which allows developers to save time and to not have to be aware of all the differences among the different technologies; the high‐level specification of a widget is simpler than its creation from scratch, and is, therefore, accessible to a greater number of potential developers; separation between the specification and the graphical layout of the widgets; generating widgets can consider, in addition to the platform, the characteristics of devices such as screen resolution or pointing mechanism, saving the developer the management of these aspects and industrial production of widgets, such as scalable management of creating and updating a large number of applications.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of quality related to the context of software development using the ISO, TickIT and CMM frameworks. The paper also seeks to stress the fact that the different perspectives of those involved in software development will influence how quality is seen and measured. In the context of software engineering projects, quality takes on a broad meaning that refers not only to the way in which companies manage software engineering projects, but also to the software development process itself.

The approach and methodology adopted for this paper were a review of the literature and best practice in software engineering. It is argued that users of software systems are more interested in how easy the software is to use than in the underlying application code that is used to generate the system. Using the body of knowledge that is software quality the basic characteristics of software quality are described and compared in terms of quality standards such as ISO, TickIT and CMM. Each of these standards is decomposed further in order to clarify its usefulness.

The findings in the paper suggest that, whilst there are many differences in the quality standards used, there are a number of similar characteristics. In essence the underlying philosophies of ISO and CMM have at the core the same goals. Some academics see CMM as being technically over‐engineered; a CMM‐compliant quality system is in many respects far in advance of ISO.

This paper helps define the strengths and weaknesses within ISO, TickIT and CMM from a software engineering practitioner perspective.

The paper shows that software engineers need to pay more attention to the performance and conformance issues in software projects and to be proactive rather than reactive to quality issues.

It may be argued that the importance of this paper lies in the assertion that those engaged in the software engineering are in need of a multi‐perspective view on quality and, with that in mind, this paper should appeal to practitioners and members of the academic community with an interest in software quality.

The purpose of this paper was to design ontology for describing semantic context‐aware quality services, and to present a new web management tool that provides a great flexibility and enables automatic semantic adaptation and customization of mobile client services.

The tool is developed using ontology‐based approach. This ontology captures a shared conceptual schema common in the tourism domain and maintains semantic quality information in heterogeneous service providers for service model. The results of the tool will be compared to prior works from other quality and distributed based service selection methods for mobile‐based application.

The tool support is based in the ontology Context‐aware Quality Semantic Web Service called (CxQWS). At the first step, services are defined as a set of semantic metadata, reflecting service requirements and QoS parameters. At the second step, services with a semantic contextual metadata are elaborated. Such a procedure ensures that the selection decisions should be based on the semantic quality representation of the created services. The SELETOR tool results suggest that the level of intelligent method use continue to be high flexibility in World Tourism organisations.

The tourism services in a mobile environment have a critical role in creating tourist satisfaction. They are neither a uniform group, nor able to give consistently high service quality. Indeed they have significantly different platforms and a variety of heterogeneous service providers which make the management of service qualities complex.

A significant proposition is to integrate new tourism quality attributes of mobile‐based application, to provide a dynamic adaptation of selection services based on context metadata parameters (user, environment, device, and service provider context) and the management of the heterogeneity of service needs, of mobile devices capacities and their various communication protocols (GPRS, WIFI, Bluetooth, etc.) as well as the media variety (sound, video, text and image), possibly reflecting the decreased time responses and the increased visibility of standard services management methods.

The paper proposes SELECTOR, a dynamic service selection tool based on CxQWS ontology, defined as set of semantic metadata, which context and QoS parameters. The tool is based on semantic services and offer architecture, with three layers (semantic query, management and web services). The most innovative characteristic of the tool is that it profits from the potential of semantic representation techniques to express high level explicit constraints, while they may be useful to guide the selection and adaptation process. This tool provides low adaptation effort, e.g. takes into account all the heterogeneous services as its various communication protocols (GSM, 3G, Bluetooth, etc.) as consequences of self‐selection for dynamic context evolution guided by the adaptation policies.

The requirements engineering (RE) process constitutes the earliest phase of the information system development life cycle. Requirements elicitation is considered as one of the most critical activities of this phase. Moreover, requirements elicitation is still a challenge, especially in the distributed environment of so‐called inter‐company cooperative information systems (ICISs). The purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology to elicit requirements for an ICIS.

An analytical research approach was conducted. The current RE approaches, which are based either on goal, scenario or viewpoint were evaluated. Then the role of the elicitation technique selection step within the requirements elicitation process was examined. Finally the factors that affect this step in a distributed environment were studied. An example from the textile industry is used to illustrate the applicability of the proposed methodology.

Though existing requirements elicitation approaches based either on goal, scenario or viewpoint are effective techniques, they do not fit exactly to a cooperative distributed environment: more issues are created by inadequate communication, time difference between sites, cultural, language and characteristics diversity of stakeholders which affect the elicitation technique selection step and thus the requirements elicitation process. In order to tackle these issues, this paper presents a methodology called MAMIE (from Macro‐ to Micro‐level requirements Elicitation) to elicit requirements for an ICIS. A prototype tool has been developed to support the operation of the methodology.

The major limitation of the paper is that has not yet been tested in an existing organization.

To provide the analyst with well‐defined steps in order to elicit requirements of an ICIS. To understand the role of the elicitation technique selection step within the requirements elicitation process and identifying the factors which have an impact on this step. To select an appropriate elicitation technique according to these factors.

MAMIE integrates the three notions of goal, scenario and viewpoint to elicit requirements for an ICIS. The paper argues that these concepts may be used simultaneously and in a complementary way to improve the requirements elicitation process. Moreover, in order to increase the quality of the elicited requirements and thus the quality of the system‐to‐be, selecting an elicitation technique in MAMIE is not based on personal preferences but on situation assessment.

This paper aims to explore the changes imposed by the general data protection regulation (GDPR) on software engineering practices. The fundamental objective is to have a perception of the practices and phases that have experienced the greatest changes. Additionally, it aims to identify a set of good practices that can be adopted by software engineering companies.

This study uses a qualitative methodology through four case studies involving Portuguese software engineering companies. Two of these companies are small and medium enterprises (SMEs) while the other remaining two are micro-companies. The thematic analysis is adopted to identify patterns in the performed interviews.

The findings indicate that significant changes have occurred at all stages of software development. In particular, the initial stages of identifying requirements and modeling processes were the stages that experienced the greatest changes. On the opposite, the technical development phase has not noticeably changed but, nevertheless, it is necessary to look at the importance of training software developers for GDPR rules and practices.

Two relevant limitations were identified as follows: only four case studies involving micro-companies and SMEs were considered, and only the traditional software development methodology was considered. The use of agile methodologies was not explored in this study and the findings can only be mainly applied to the waterfall model.

This study offers mainly practical contributions by identifying a set of challenges that are posed to software engineering companies by the implementation of GDPR. Through their knowledge, it is expected to help these companies to better prepare themselves and anticipate the challenges they will necessarily face.

Currently, different experiments in (partially) outsourcing public social protection to the market are observed. This paper seeks to identify two very different paths to outsourcing social protection: fragmentation of social protection on the one hand (in personal savings accounts) and amalgamation of social protection on the other (in life‐course savings schemes).

This study is theoretically based on the combination of three concepts which allow changes in social citizenship to be analyzed by means of social policy change and changes in resource flows. First, on the concept of life‐course regimes as put forward by Kohli; second, on the concept of social citizenship as proposed by Marshall; and third, on the concept of flows of resources related to these rights. The theoretical and methodological linkage of these concepts was first applied by Frericks.

These very different concepts of outsourcing social protection have implications for social inequalities, new insecurities and foreseeable under‐insurance. This is because, on the one hand, social protection redesign changes the obligatory character of social insurance, and on the other, it changes the social construction of the “adequately” protected which may no longer correspond to the factual situation of various groups of citizens.

The outlines of upcoming gaps in social protection, however, cannot adequately be grasped by the differentiation between “insiders” and “outsiders” of welfare systems. Although these gaps are related to status, they are more the result of life‐course trajectories, life‐course timing and age, implying that both the two current policy paths change intra‐ as well as inter‐generational differences in social protection. The characteristics of the two policy concepts and their foreseeable implications for social inequalities are analysed.

In a context of international economic crisis the improvement in the efficiency and productivity of public services is seen as a way to maintain high-quality levels at lower costs. Increased productivity can be promoted through benchmarking exercises, where key performance indicators (KPIs), individually or aggregated, are used to compare health units. The purpose of this paper is to describe a benchmarking platform, called Hospital Benchmarking (HOBE), where hospital’s services are used as the unit of analysis.

HOBE platform includes a set of managerial indicators through which hospital services’ are compared. The platform also benchmarks services through aggregate service indicators, and provides an aggregate measure of hospital’s performance based on a composite indicator of the service’s performances. These aggregate indicators were obtained through data envelopment analysis (DEA).

Some results are presented for Portuguese hospitals for the trial years of 2008 and 2009, for which data is publicly available. Details for the service-level analysis are provided for a sample hospital, as well as details on the aggregate performance resulting from services performances.

HOBE’s features and outcomes show that the platform can be used to guide management actions and to support the design of health policies by administrative authorities, provided that good quality and timely data are available, and that hospitals are involved in the design of the KPIs.

The platform is innovative in the sense that it bases its analysis on hospital’s services, which are in general more comparable among hospitals than indicators of hospital overall performance. In addition, it makes use of DEA to aggregate performance indicators, allowing for user choice in the inputs and outputs to be aggregated, and it proposes a novel model to aggregate service’s efficiencies into a single measure of hospital performance.