Every year software development industry requires a higher number of trained software engineers who are not only skilled programmers but also talented software projects managers. To deliver high‐quality software projects, engineers require of the application of sound engineering competencies along with discipline. Obtaining those practices usually require years of experience. Companies are not prepared to invest this time on engineers resulting in a high percentage of deficient projects. Here, the authors present a bachelor‐level competency‐based approach that develops and evaluates such competencies during a challenge‐based learning experience. In this way, the rate of successful projects where software engineers are involved will be higher, as they have obtained the appropriate competencies to deliver such projects.

The wired equivalent privacy (WEP) protocol presents several vulnerabilities and therefore the IEEE 802.11 should use other cryptosystem, symmetric or asymmetric. For the former, this paper proposes the usage of advanced encryption standard-counter with cipher block chaining-message authentication code (AES-CCM); for the second the usage of elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECC). This paper presents the time required for encrypting the frame body field of the IEEE 802.11 MAC frame using WEP, AES-CCM, and ECC for several data sizes and comparable key sizes. Results confirm that symmetric crypto algorithms are more efficient than those asymmetries for providing the confidentiality service, with WEP being fastest followed by AES-CCM.

A tender process consists in competing offers from different candidate suppliers or contractors. The tender winner is supposed to supply or provide a service in better conditions than competitors. Tenders are developed using centralized unverified systems, which reduce transparency, fairness and trust on the process, it also reduces the ability to detect malicious attempts to manipulate the process. Systems that provide formal verification, decentralization, authentication, trust and transparency can mitigate these risks. Satisfiability Modulo Theories provides a formal analysis to prove correctness of tender offers properties, verified properties ensures system reliability. In addition, one technology that claims to provide decentralization is Blockchain, a chain of distributed and decentralized records linked in a way such that integrity is ensured. This paper presents a formal verified and decentralized proposal system, based on Satisfiability Modulo Theories and Blockchain technology, to make electronic procurement tenders more reliable, transparent and fair.