Abstract
This study provides some empirical insight on the barriers that chief information officers face in their Job. The findings of the survey we conducted directed to the chief information officers of the 500 large Portuguese companies by gross revenue, suggest; three main barriers: the lack of time to think and define strategies, the overwhelming backlog of requests and projects and inadequate budgets. The knowledge and understanding of the identified barriers contributes to the characterization of chief information officer role state of the art and should be useful for practitioners, who may use it as a basis for developing solutions in order to overcome these barriers.

Abstract
Information technology and information systems have evolved dramatically over the last half-century, playing an absolutely central and crucial role in the success of today's organizations. Therefore the complexity of the work of the chief information officer has also increased significantly with the current demand for the use of more evolved software tools to support the chief information officer job. With the purpose of identifying and characterizing which software tools chief information officers of large Portuguese companies use in their work,, we dei,eloped a study with the participation. of several chief information officers. The study seeks answers to the question: Does the chief information officer in Portuguese large companies uses advanced information technology solutions in his/her work or, as that old saying, the shoemaker's wife is the worse shod. The findings of this study reveal that the chief information officers are not using all the potential of the software tools that would give them a better performance in their jobs.

Abstract

Abstract
It is commonly accepted that the educational environment has been undergoing considerable change due to the use of the Information and Communication tools. But learning depends upon actions such as experimenting, comprehending, visualizing, abstracting and demonstrating, by means of which the learner succeeds in constructing his own knowledge. It is not always easy to achieve these actions through current distance learning approaches. Since we live in a society that demands creativity, globalization, responsibility, autonomy and the ability to deal with virtuality and new technologies, Role Playing Games (RPG) may well develop such capacities. The creation of an interactive computer game with RPG characteristics, about the 500th anniversary of the city of Funchal, the capital of Madeira Island, is invested with compelling educational/pedagogical implications, aiming clearly at teaching history and social relations through playing. By incorporating the concept "games to teach", players will interpret different characters in different settings/scenarios, experiencing adventures, meeting challenges and reaching multiple and simultaneous goals in the areas of education, entertainment and social integration along the first 150 years of the history of Funchal. Through this process they will live and understand all the social and historical factors of that age.

Abstract
It is commonly accepted that the educational environment has been undergoing considerable change due to the use of the Information and Communication tools. But learning depends upon actions such as experimenting, visualizing and demonstrating through which the learner succeeds in constructing his own knowledge. Although it is not easy. to achieve these actions through current ICT supported learning approaches, Role Playing Games (RPG) may well develop such capacities. The creation of an interactive computer game with RPG characteristics, about the 500th anniversary of the city of Funchal, the capital of Madeira Island, is invested with compelling educational/pedagogical implications, aiming clearly at teaching history and social relations through playing. Players interpret different characters in different settings/scenarios, experiencing adventures, meeting challenges and trying to reach multiple and simultaneous goals in the areas of education, entertainment and social integration along the first 150 years of the history of Funchal. Through this process they will live and understand all the social and historical factors of that epoch.

Abstract
This paper presents a new Visual Notation for QUI modelling and testing (VAN4GUIM) which aims to hide, as much as possible, formalism details inherent to models used in model-based testing (MBT) approaches and to promote the use of MBT in industrial environments providing a visual front-end for modelling which is more attractive to testers than textual notation. This visual notation is developed as five different UML profiles and based on three notations/concepts: Canonical Abstract Prototyping notation; ConcurTaskTrees (CTT) notation; and the Window Manager concept. A set of translation rules was defined in order to automatically perform conversion from VAN4GUIM to Speck GUI models are developed with VAN4GUIM notation then translated automatically to Spec# that can be then completed manually with additional behaviour not included in the visual model. As soon as a Spec# model is completed, it can be used as input to Spec Explorer (model-based testing tool) which generates test cases and executes those tests automatically.