Raquel Mainardi Pillat

Background: The Brazilian digital games industry has been expanding rapidly, requiring effective Project Management (PM) practices to ensure success across cost, time, and scope dimensions. Purpose: This study investigates the PM practices, artifacts, and systems adopted by game studios and independent developers in Brazil, aiming to provide an empirical reference for researchers and practitioners. Methods: Using the Linaker survey methodology, we collected responses from 41 professionals across 21 studios, addressing four key research questions related to PM approaches, artifacts, and tools. Results: The findings reveal Scrum and Kanban as the most widely used methodologies, with artifacts such as the Game Design Document (GDD), prototypes, and Kanban boards frequently supporting project activities. Tools such as Trello, Miro, and ClickUp dominate the usage, but the lack of a standardized PM system highlights significant variability between studios. Despite the diversity, agile methods are preferred for their adaptability and alignment with industry demands. Conclusion: The study concludes that while Brazilian studios exhibit good PM practices, there are still gaps in the integration of academic insight with practical applications. The results provide valuable insights for the development of customized PM solutions for the digital games industry, emphasizing the need for further research to address scalability and complexity in larger projects.

A produção de jogos digitais no Brasil tem crescido anualmente. Contudo, para que os projetos obtenham sucesso, é fundamental que haja um Gerenciamento de Projetos (GP) respaldado por práticas, artefatos e sistemas que permitam alcançar sucesso na tríplice restrição (custos, tempo e escopo). Este estudo tem como objetivo fornecer um referencial empírico para pesquisadores e a indústria sobre as soluções que estúdios e desenvolvedores independentes praticam para realizar o GP em seus projetos. Para isso, realizamos uma pesquisa de levantamento (survey), aplicando um questionário a 41 participantes de 21 estúdios distintos. Como resultado, destaca-se que entre as práticas de GP, Scrum e Kanban são as mais adotadas. Quanto aos artefatos de apoio, o Game Design Document (GDD), Protótipos e Quadro Kanban são muito utilizados, e predomina o uso de sistemas baseados em métodos ágeis na condução do GP. Dessa forma, concluímos que os participantes do levantamento e seus estúdios adotam boas práticas na condução do GP de jogos digitais.

O gerenciamento de projetos de software enfrenta desafios significativos, incluindo questões econômicas, sociais e tecnológicas. A Engenharia de Software tem buscado soluções, muitas vezes padronizadas, para enfrentar esses desafios. No entanto, o Gerenciamento de Projetos de Jogos Digitais (GPJD) apresenta desafios adicionais devido a sua natureza artística e criativa. Este trabalho propõe uma abordagem baseada no Kernel Essence, apoiada por processos de ES experimental, para o GPJD. Além disso, realizou-se uma avaliação da abordagem proposta usando um grupo focal com cinco participantes de um laboratório de jogos digitais de uma universidade privada. Conclui-se que a extensão do Kernel Essence pode ser uma contribuição valiosa para o GPJD, alinhada com as necessidades e realidades identificadas nos experimentos.

Context: Business process modeling is widely used to increase the competitive advantage of organizations and Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is the standard language for modeling such processes. However, it is often extended to handle domain-specific processes or enhance the language itself. Problem: Applications of process-oriented approaches have reached new challenging, knowledge-intensive scenarios, such as healthcare, case management, and others. For these scenarios, it is common to observe functions involving collaborative resources and processes that are little structured, which do not have the same level of predictability as a structured work routine. This fact led to the definition of a new class of business processes, Knowledge-Intensive Processes (KIP). Solution: This paper investigates which requirements related to the modeling of KIP are met by the standard BPMN language and its extensions proposed in the literature. IS Theory: The paper explores the interaction between Structured Process Modeling Theory and Organizational Information Processing Theory applied to the context of business process management, especially related to knowledge-intensive processes in organizations. Method: We performed an analysis of the adherence of standard BPMN to the KIP modeling requirements and a systematic literature review identifying BPMN extensions, analyzing these proposals regarding their adherence to the same requirements. Summarization of Results: Twelve BPMN extensions were analyzed and compared according to a set of criteria. These extensions were obtained from the SCOPUS digital library and guided the conduct of the research. Contributions and Impact in the IS area: This paper is the first evaluation of BPMN and its extensions regarding KIP requirements. Moreover, we identified the main trends in the development of BPMN extensions related to KIP and some opportunities for future researches.

Summary: Increasingly enterprises rely on software applications to support their business processes. Since such processes are continually evolving to keep up with market dynamism, companies strive to increase their efficiency, for example, by optimising the integration of applications supporting these processes. Integration platforms are specialised software tools that allow creating integration processes so that applications can share data and functionality. However, this integration involves several challenges, especially when large volumes of heterogeneous data should be integrated and shared. The performance of an integration process, in terms of message processing, is directly related to the run‐time system of the integration platform. This article investigates the impact of the volume of messages and the number of threads used by a run‐time system on makespan and performance of an integration process. The greater is the number of messages per second received by the integration process, the high is the volume of messages. The study was based on a run‐time system with task‐based execution model and follows a strict protocol to conduct and report our empirical study. We observed an increment of makespan when increasing the volume of messages to integration processes and different behaviours when increasing the number of threads used in their executions. Makespan reduces as the number of threads increases, but only when the volume of inbound messages is not very high. We confirmed that there is a performance gain by increasing the number of threads to execute an integration process, but observed that the continuous increment of threads leads to degradation of the performance in this model.

Since building software processes from scratch involves considerable effort, process tailoring should be practiced to adapt existing processes deriving new alternate ones that fit specific needs. Although several approaches have already been proposed to specify software process tailoring, some challenges remain open. Techniques and mechanisms are still required to specify and track specific variations on the software process control-flow. Thus, this paper presents a new representation structure for software process tailoring that is based on high-level operations defined as BPMN extension concepts and associated support mechanisms. Such structure intents to contribute allowing the specification, record, and traceability of detailed control-flow variations required in the context of software process tailoring as well as facilitating the specification of such variations and improving their understanding.