Interoperability has been a focus of attention over at least four decades, with the emergence of several interoperability types (or levels), diverse models, frameworks, and solutions, also as a result of a continuous effort from different domains. The current heterogeneity in technologies such as blockchain, IoT and new application domains such as Industry 4.0 brings not only new interaction possibilities but also challenges for interoperability. Moreover, confusion and ambiguity in the current understanding of interoperability types exist, hampering stakeholders’ communication and decision-making. This work presents an updated panorama of software-intensive systems interoperability with particular attention to its types. For this, we conducted a tertiary study that scrutinized 37 secondary studies published from 2012 to 2023, from which we found 36 interoperability types associated with 117 different definitions, besides 13 interoperability models and six frameworks in various domains. This panorama reveals that the concern with interoperability has migrated from technical to social-technical issues going beyond the software systems’ boundary and still requiring solving many open issues. We also address the urgent actions and also potential research opportunities to leverage interoperability as a multidisciplinary research field to achieve low-coupled, cost-effective, and interoperable systems.

Software testing is a relevant activity to provide evidencies of the quality of software products. However, few courses in the computing area provide an adequate body of knowledge to the students and few of them pursue the software development practices and activities related to VV&T (Verification, Validation, and Testing), specifically testing, leading to a recognized lack of professionals that master the underlying VV&T concepts and principles. In this paper, we provide an overview concerning the software testing education in the most relevant brazilian universities and abroad. We analyze the reference curricula proposed by SBC (Brazilian Computer Society) and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) for undergraduate computer courses as well as the curricula of the most relevant universities in Brazil and abroad. We identify the effort allocated, the main approaches and the main tendencies to facilitate the teaching of software testing. It is clear that there is a need to integrate software testing education with other disciplines along the CS undergraduate courses.

Software testing is a relevant activity to provide evidence of qualifty of software products. However, there is a lack of qualified professionals in this area. This can be caused due to difficulty in teaching software testing through approaches that use only theoretical classes and traditional tools. In addition, there is a lack of motivation due to the work environment and the strategies of allocation and responsibility of these professionals in development and testing teams. To mitigate these problems, approaches have been used to support software testing education, such as: educational games, integrated teaching of software testing with programming, educational modules, among others. The objective of this paper was to develop an educational game named Testing Game, addressing the following topics: functional testing, structural testing and mutation testing. To support the development of the Testing Game, we performed a systematic mapping aiming at selecting a game engine. To evaluate the efficiency of the game, we conducted a feasibility study to evaluate the quality regarding motivation, user experience and learning from the point of view of the students. We also evaluate the usability of the Testing Game. Approximately 85.64% of people who participated in the study assessed the quality of the game in a positive perspective regarding motivation, user experience and learning from the point of view of the students. Regarding the usability of the game, students identified minor problems. Through this work, we realize that the game Testing Game can constitute as a complementary resource to support software testing education.

O uso de Jogos Educacionais Digitais (JEDs) como ferramentas de apoio à Educação em Computação tem se mostrado cada vez mais frequente. Contudo, informações sobre esses jogos ainda são escassas, principalmente em relação à qualidade e ao desenvolvimento. Portanto, o objetivo deste trabalho foi identificar JEDs de apoio à Educação em Computação nos últimos trinta anos (1994-2024). Para isso, um Mapeamento Sistemático da Literatura (MSL) foi realizado, extraindo as informações necessárias para responder às questões de pesquisa estabelecidas. Em particular, os resultados demonstram que os principais requisitos não-funcionais dos JEDs analisados são usabilidade e facilidade de aprendizado e que as áreas de Lógica de Programação e Engenharia de Software são as que possuem mais iniciativas.

Due to the increasing size and complexity of many current software systems, the architectural design of these systems has become a considerately complicated task. In this scenario, reference architectures have already proven to be very relevant to support the architectural design of systems in diverse critical application domains, such as health, avionics, transportation, and the automotive sector. However, these architectures are described in many different approaches, such as using textual description, informal models, and even modeling languages as UML. Hence, practitioners are faced with a difficult decision of the better approaches to describing reference architectures. The main contribution of this work is to depict a detailed panorama containing the state of the art (from the literature) and state of the practice (based on existing reference architectures) of approaches for describing reference architectures. For this, we firstly examined the existing approaches (e.g., processes, methods, models, and modeling languages) and compared them concerning completeness and applicability. We also examined four well-known, successful reference architectures (AUTOSAR, ARC-IT, IIRA, and AXMEDIS) in view of the approaches used to describe them. As a result, there exists a misalignment between the state of the art and state of the practice, requiring an engagement of the software architecture community, through research collaboration of academia and industry, to propose more suitable means to describe reference architectures and, as a consequence, promoting the sustainability of these architectures.