LLaMA-Reviewer: Advancing Code Review Automation with Large Language Models through Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (Practical Experience Report)

The automation of code review activities, a long-standing pursuit in software engineering, has been primarily addressed by numerous domain-specific pre-trained models. Despite their success, these models frequently demand extensive resources for pre-training from scratch. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) provide an intriguing alternative, given their remarkable capabilities when supplemented with domain-specific knowledge. However, their potential for automating code review tasks remains largely unexplored. In response to this research gap, we present LLaMA-Reviewer, an innovative framework that leverages the capabilities of LLaMA, a popular LLM, in the realm of code review. Mindful of resource constraints, this framework employs parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, delivering high performance while using less than 1% of trainable parameters. An extensive evaluation of LLaMA-Reviewer is conducted on two diverse, publicly available datasets. Notably, even with the smallest LLaMA base model consisting of 6.7B parameters and a limited number of tuning epochs, LLaMA-Reviewer equals the performance of existing code-review-focused models. The ablation experiments provide insights into the influence of various fine-tuning process components, including input representation, instruction tuning, and different PEFT methods. To foster continuous progress in this field, the code and all PEFT-weight plugins have been made open-source.Comment: Accepted to the 34th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2023

Business Process Management: A Research Overview and Analysis

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Complex approach to service development

Modern companies including telecommunication companies and mobile operators working in the global environment should guarantee technological effectiveness and innovation, renewing their technologies and services. Operation Support System/Business Support System is used in telecommunication companies. In current state-of-the-art approaches, several iterations involving analysts and system architects are necessary, methodologies allow modeling non-functional or functional requirements but they do not take into account the interaction between functional and non-functional requirements as well as collaboration between services. Web Services Agreement is a convenient way to contain QoS parameters but state-of-the-art SLA-aware methods cannot support all classes of non-functional parameters and provide run-time support and dynamic reconfiguration at the same time. The approach proposed in this paper fills this gap. It employs a well-defined workflow and analysis model for developing and adapting complex software systems including support of all classes of non-functional parameters and providing run-time support and dynamic reconfiguration of provided services

Semantic Model Alignment for Business Process Integration

Business process models describe an enterprise’s way of conducting business and in this form the basis for shaping the organization and engineering the appropriate supporting or even enabling IT. Thereby, a major task in working with models is their analysis and comparison for the purpose of aligning them. As models can differ semantically not only concerning the modeling languages used, but even more so in the way in which the natural language for labeling the model elements has been applied, the correct identification of the intended meaning of a legacy model is a non-trivial task that thus far has only been solved by humans. In particular at the time of reorganizations, the set-up of B2B-collaborations or mergers and acquisitions the semantic analysis of models of different origin that need to be consolidated is a manual effort that is not only tedious and error-prone but also time consuming and costly and often even repetitive. For facilitating automation of this task by means of IT, in this thesis the new method of Semantic Model Alignment is presented. Its application enables to extract and formalize the semantics of models for relating them based on the modeling language used and determining similarities based on the natural language used in model element labels. The resulting alignment supports model-based semantic business process integration. The research conducted is based on a design-science oriented approach and the method developed has been created together with all its enabling artifacts. These results have been published as the research progressed and are presented here in this thesis based on a selection of peer reviewed publications comprehensively describing the various aspects

Business Process Quality Management

During the past 25 years, research in the field of business process management as well as the practical adoption of corresponding methods and tools have made substantial progress. In particular, this development was driven by the insight that well-managed business processes enable organizations to better serve their stakeholders, save costs and, ultimately, realize competitive advantage. It is therefore not surprising that improving business processes ranks high on the list of priorities of organizations. In practice, this challenge is currently being addressed through approaches such as benchmarking, industry-specific best practice reference models or process reengineering heuristics. However, no systematic and generic proposition towards managing business process quality has achieved broad acceptance yet. To address this gap, this thesis contributes to the field of business process quality management with the results lined out in the following. First, it defines a concise notion of business process quality based on organizational targets, and applies it to a sample real-world case. This definition is not specific to any particular application field, and thus constitutes a vital first step towards systematic and generic business process quality management. On that basis, an approach is developed to model business objectives in the sense of the requirements that shall be fulfilled by the results of a business process. In turn, this approach enables appraising if a business process achieves its business objective as one of the core criteria relevant to business process quality. Further, this thesis proposes extensions to common business process meta-models which enable quality-aware business process modeling, and demonstrates how fundamental quality characteristics can be derived from corresponding models. At this stage, the results achieved have enabled an advanced understanding of business process quality. By means of these insights, a model of business process quality attributes with corresponding quality criteria is developed. This model complements and exceeds preceding approaches since, for the first time, it systematically derives relevant quality attributes from a business process management perspective instead of adopting these from related fields. It enables appraising business process quality independently of a particular field of application, and deriving recommendations to improve the processes assessed. To enable practical adoption of the concepts developed, the integration of procedures and functionality relevant to quality in business process management lifecycles and system landscapes is discussed next. To establish the contribution of this thesis beyond the previous state of the art, the proposed quality model is then compared to existing business process reengineering practices as well as propositions in the area of business process quality. Further, quality attributes are employed to improve a substantial real-world business process. This experience report demonstrates how quality management practices can be applied even if quality-aware system landscapes are not in place yet. It thus contributes to bridging the gap between the research results proposed in this thesis and the conditions present in practice today. Finally, remaining limitations with regard to the research objectives pursued are discussed, and challenges for future research are lined out. Addressing the latter will enable further leveraging the potentials of business process quality management

Focus Issue on Legacy Information Systems and Business Process Change:On the Integrated Design and Evaluation of Business Processes and Information Systems

The role of information systems in influencing and enabling organisational design is widely acknowledged. Yet limited attention is paid to the theoretical legitimacy and conceptual basis of IS-enabled organisational change i.e., business engineering. In this paper we review business engineering\u27s reference disciplines critically: process-based organisational design, IS development, and IS evaluation. Findings from a case study of business engineering provide empirical support to the theoretical analysis. Synthesis of the conclusions of the review and the case study lead to a number of propositions and potential avenues for further research into the theoretically attractive and practically important field of aligning the design of organisational structures with the design of Information Systems intended to support them