Overcoming Language Dichotomies: Toward Effective Program Comprehension for Mobile App Development

Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we provide a roadmap of directions for future work.Comment: Invited Keynote Paper for the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC'18

Software process modeling languages: A systematic literature review

Context Organizations working in software development are aware that processes are very important assets as well as they are very conscious of the need to deploy well-defined processes with the goal of improving software product development and, particularly, quality. Software process modeling languages are an important support for describing and managing software processes in software-intensive organizations. Objective This paper seeks to identify what software process modeling languages have been defined in last decade, the relationships and dependencies among them and, starting from the current state, to define directions for future research. Method A systematic literature review was developed. 1929 papers were retrieved by a manual search in 9 databases and 46 primary studies were finally included. Results Since 2000 more than 40 languages have been first reported, each of which with a concrete purpose. We show that different base technologies have been used to define software process modeling languages. We provide a scheme where each language is registered together with the year it was created, the base technology used to define it and whether it is considered a starting point for later languages. This scheme is used to illustrate the trend in software process modeling languages. Finally, we present directions for future research. Conclusion This review presents the different software process modeling languages that have been developed in the last ten years, showing the relevant fact that model-based SPMLs (Software Process Modeling Languages) are being considered as a current trend. Each one of these languages has been designed with a particular motivation, to solve problems which had been detected. However, there are still several problems to face, which have become evident in this review. This let us provide researchers with some guidelines for future research on this topic.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2010-20057-C03-02Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN 2010-12312-EJunta de Andalucía TIC-578

Firm specialisation and growth. A study of the european software industry.

This paper analyses the process of growth and restructuring of 38 large European and US software firms during the period 1984-1992. Since the end of the 1960s, an independent software industry has emerged in the US and in Europe stimulated by technological and institutional change. Particularly, the diffusion of small computers and local area networks during the 1980s is largely responsible for the high growth rate of software market compared with other information technology segments. Moreover, software is a pervasive technology in that it tends to be used in all economic sectors. This has spurred the entry of many new firms and vertical disintegration of software activities from computer hardware manufacturing. In the 1980s a wave of M&As, joint ventures and corporate restructuring (new subsidiaries, reorganisations of divisions, etc.) took place in this industry. This paper aims to analyse the objectives of these operations (exploitation of new market opportunities or new joint research opportunities) and their directions (diversification or specialisation).

Challenges in Software Evolution

Today’s information technology society increasingly relies on software at all levels. Nevertheless, software quality generally continues to fall short of expectations, and software systems continue to suffer from symptoms of aging as they are adapted to changing requirements and environments. The only way to overcome or avoid the negative effects of software aging is by placing change and evolution in the center of the software development process. In this article we describe what we believe to be some of the most important research challenges in software evolution. The goal of this document is to provide novel research directions in the software evolution domain

Metamodel Instance Generation: A systematic literature review

Modelling and thus metamodelling have become increasingly important in Software Engineering through the use of Model Driven Engineering. In this paper we present a systematic literature review of instance generation techniques for metamodels, i.e. the process of automatically generating models from a given metamodel. We start by presenting a set of research questions that our review is intended to answer. We then identify the main topics that are related to metamodel instance generation techniques, and use these to initiate our literature search. This search resulted in the identification of 34 key papers in the area, and each of these is reviewed here and discussed in detail. The outcome is that we are able to identify a knowledge gap in this field, and we offer suggestions as to some potential directions for future research.Comment: 25 page