A Guideline Tool for Ongoing Product Evaluation in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

As consumer demand for user friendly software increases, usability evaluation is crucial to develop software systems which are easy to learn and use. However, implementation of usability evaluation is challenging for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) due to factors such as lack of technical expertise, knowledge and experience of methods and standards. This results in neglect, or poorly executed evaluations of projects, resulting in software that disappoints and frustrates clients. To overcome this loss of competitiveness, we propose here a visual incorporation tool derived from ISO standards that would assist software development teams in SMEs in understanding and implementing usability evaluations. It shows fundamental Usability Engineering (UE) and Software Engineering (SE) activities and artifacts relevant to the usability evaluation and software development process, with potential incorporation points being highlighted. Dependencies and relationships are shown by links between activities and artifacts. Additionally, convergent artifacts of both disciplines were identified and shown. Evaluation of the proposed tool was based on the questionnaire results of software development practitioners from SMEs

RML: Runtime Monitoring Language

Runtime verification is a relatively new software verification technique that aims to prove the correctness of a specific run of a program, rather than statically verify the code. The program is instrumented in order to collect all the relevant information, and the resulting trace of events is inspected by a monitor that verifies its compliance with respect to a specification of the expected properties of the system under scrutiny. Many languages exist that can be used to formally express the expected behavior of a system, with different design choices and degrees of expressivity. This thesis presents RML, a specification language designed for runtime verification, with the goal of being completely modular and independent from the instrumentation and the kind of system being monitored. RML is highly expressive, and allows one to express complex, parametric, non-context-free properties concisely. RML is compiled down to TC, a lower level calculus, which is fully formalized with a deterministic, rewriting-based semantics. In order to evaluate the approach, an open source implementation has been developed, and several examples with Node.js programs have been tested. Benchmarks show the ability of the monitors automatically generated from RML specifications to effectively and efficiently verify complex properties

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, FASE 2022, which was held during April 4-5, 2022, in Munich, Germany, as part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2022. The 17 regular papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. The proceedings also contain 3 contributions from the Test-Comp Competition. The papers deal with the foundations on which software engineering is built, including topics like software engineering as an engineering discipline, requirements engineering, software architectures, software quality, model-driven development, software processes, software evolution, AI-based software engineering, and the specification, design, and implementation of particular classes of systems, such as (self-)adaptive, collaborative, AI, embedded, distributed, mobile, pervasive, cyber-physical, or service-oriented applications

ICSEA 2021: the sixteenth international conference on software engineering advances

The Sixteenth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances (ICSEA 2021), held on October 3 - 7, 2021 in Barcelona, Spain, continued a series of events covering a broad spectrum of software-related topics. The conference covered fundamentals on designing, implementing, testing, validating and maintaining various kinds of software. The tracks treated the topics from theory to practice, in terms of methodologies, design, implementation, testing, use cases, tools, and lessons learnt. The conference topics covered classical and advanced methodologies, open source, agile software, as well as software deployment and software economics and education. The conference had the following tracks: Advances in fundamentals for software development Advanced mechanisms for software development Advanced design tools for developing software Software engineering for service computing (SOA and Cloud) Advanced facilities for accessing software Software performance Software security, privacy, safeness Advances in software testing Specialized software advanced applications Web Accessibility Open source software Agile and Lean approaches in software engineering Software deployment and maintenance Software engineering techniques, metrics, and formalisms Software economics, adoption, and education Business technology Improving productivity in research on software engineering Trends and achievements Similar to the previous edition, this event continued to be very competitive in its selection process and very well perceived by the international software engineering community. As such, it is attracting excellent contributions and active participation from all over the world. We were very pleased to receive a large amount of top quality contributions. We take here the opportunity to warmly thank all the members of the ICSEA 2021 technical program committee as well as the numerous reviewers. The creation of such a broad and high quality conference program would not have been possible without their involvement. We also kindly thank all the authors that dedicated much of their time and efforts to contribute to the ICSEA 2021. We truly believe that thanks to all these efforts, the final conference program consists of top quality contributions. This event could also not have been a reality without the support of many individuals, organizations and sponsors. We also gratefully thank the members of the ICSEA 2021 organizing committee for their help in handling the logistics and for their work that is making this professional meeting a success. We hope the ICSEA 2021 was a successful international forum for the exchange of ideas and results between academia and industry and to promote further progress in software engineering research

Classes-Chave em sistemas orientados a objetos: detecção e uso

Several object-oriented systems, such as Lucene, Tomcat, Javac have their respective design documented using key-classes, defined as important/central classes to understand the object-oriented design. Considering this fact, and considering that, in general, software architecture is not formally documented to help developers understanding and assessing software design, Keecle is proposed as an approach based on dynamic and static analysis for detection of key classes in a semi-automatic way. The application of filtering mechanisms on the search space of the dynamic data is proposed in order to obtain a reduced set of key classes. The approach is evaluated with fourteen proprietary and open source systems in order to verify that the found classes correspond to the key classes of the ground-truth, which is defined from the documentation or defined by the developers. The results were analyzed in terms of precision and recall, and have shown to be superior to the state-of-the-art approach. The role of key classes in assessing design has also been investigated. The organization of the key classes in a dependency graph, which highlights explicit dependency relations in the source code, was evaluated to be adequate for design comprehension and assessment. Key classes were evaluated whether they are more prone to bad smells, and whether specific types of bad smells are associated with different levels of cohesion and coupling metrics. In addition, the ownership of key classes was shown to be more concentrated in a reduced set of developers. Finally, we conducted an experimental study with students and a survey with developers to evaluate documentation based on key classes. The results indicate that the documentation based on key classes are a feasible alternative for use as complementary documentation to the existing one, or for use as main documentation in environments where documentation is not available.FAPEG - Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de GoiásTese (Doutorado)Vários sistemas orientados a objetos, tais como Lucene, Tomcat, Javac tem seus respectivos projetos (designs) documentados usando classes-chave, definidas como sendo classes importantes/centrais para compreender o projeto de sistemas orientados a objetos. Considerando este fato, e considerando que geralmente a arquitetura não é formalmente documentada para auxiliar os desenvolvedores a entenderem e avaliarem o projeto do software, é proposta Keecle, uma abordagem baseada em análise dinâmica e estática para detecção de classes-chave de maneira semi-automática. É proposta a aplicação de mecanismos de filtragem no espaço de busca dos dados dinâmicos, para obter um conjunto reduzido de classes-chave. A abordagem é avaliada com quatorze sistemas de código aberto e proprietários, a fim de verificar se as classes encontradas correspondem às classes-chave definidas na documentação ou definidas pelos desenvolvedores. Os resultados foram analisados em termos de precisão e recall e são superiores às abordagens da literatura. O papel das classes-chave para avaliar o projeto também foi investigado. Foi avaliado se a organização das classes-chave em um grafo de dependências, o qual destaca relações de dependência explícitas no código fonte, é um mecanismo adequado para avaliar o design. Foi analisado estatisticamente, se classes-chave são mais propensas a bad smells, e se tipos específicos de bad smells estão associados a diferentes níveis de métricas de coesão e acoplamento. Além disso, a propriedade (ownership) das classes-chave foi analisada, indicando concentração em um conjunto reduzido de desenvolvedores. Por fim, foram conduzidos um estudo experimental com estudantes e um survey com desenvolvedores para avaliar a documentação baseada em classes-chave. Os resultados demonstram que a documentação baseada em classes-chave apresenta resultados que indicam a viabilidade de uso como documentação complementar à existente ou como documentação principal em ambientes onde a documentação não está disponível