Tomas Vera

• Engineer of computer science
• PhD Student at University of Chile

At project pre-selling time, customers and software providers collaborate to define the product required by the former; and based on it, the latter can generate a project proposal and a bid. This collaborative activity, that we have named product scoping, is not properly supported by the current tools and techniques, mainly due to the constraints i...

Performing requirements engineering (RE) during the pre-contract stage; i.e., at pre-selling time, is mandatory for software providers to conceive a project proposal and deliver a bid. In bespoke projects, this process requires that providers deal with several constraints that are usually not present in a regular RE process. For instance, the proce...

The software engineering research recognizes that small software companies are different to medium-sized and large organizations. Therefore, they require particular implementations of already known software practices to support their developments; this includes the estimation of the software development effort. The literature reports that estimatio...

Understanding the client requirements at estimation time is critical to deliver a budget. The process of building such understanding not only depends on the software company, but also it changes from project to project, and should be conducted under several restrictions. This paper presents a study that analyzes the practices used by Chilean small...

During the last decade the software engineering community formally recognized that small software companies require to use particular software practices to support their developments, given that they have characteristics that make them different to medium-sized or large organizations. One of these practices is the software development effort estima...

Determining the development effort (cost and time) is one of the main challenges of the software projects formulation and management. In order to address such a challenge, several effort estimation models have been proposed since the '80s, as a way to envision the software development effort before and during a project, and also reduce the project...

Aspects sometimes conflict between them in scenarios where they reify resource awareness concerns. These conflicts are the result of the scarcity of resources and the fact that, frequently, aspects are mutually oblivious. This kind of conflict can be solved by manag- ing aspects according to the context. Obliviousness can be retained and, at the sa...