How do practitioners perceive the relevance of requirements engineering research? An ongoing study

The relevance of Requirements Engineering (RE) research to practitioners is a prerequisite for problem-driven research in the area and key for a long-term dissemination of research results to everyday practice. To understand better how industry practitioners perceive the practical relevance of RE research, we have initiated the RE-Pract project, an international collaboration conducting an empirical study. This project opts for a replication of previous work done in two different domains and relies on survey research. To this end, we have designed a survey to be sent to several hundred industry practitioners at various companies around the world and ask them to rate their perceived practical relevance of the research described in a sample of 418 RE papers published between 2010 and 2015 at the RE, ICSE, FSE, ESEC/FSE, ESEM and REFSQ conferences. In this paper, we summarize our research protocol and present the current status of our study and the planned future steps.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Qual a relevância da literatura open-source sob a perspectiva de profissionais e estudantes de graduação

Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso (graduação)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Ciências Exatas, Departamento de Ciência da Computação, 2019.Com um aumento significativo de trabalhos de pesquisa em Engenharia de Software nos últimos anos, especialmente daqueles focados no modelo Open-Source, devido à sua ascendência relativamente recente, uma questão que naturalmente surge diz respeito à sua relevância. Diante desse questionamento, esse trabalho busca investigar se a pesquisa em Engenharia de Software, focada particularmente no modelo Open-Source, produz resultados considerados relevantes na percepção dos usuários. Para investigar a relevância percebida da literatura disponível nós conduzimos dois Surveys: um na Universidade de Brasília (UnB), em que nós convidamos os estudantes a avaliar a relevância de ideias e resultados contidos em sumários construídos a partir de trabalhos de pesquisa publicados em um período de dez anos, e outro com profissionais e pesquisadores que contribuem de alguma forma com as comunidades Open-Source, onde a relevância de artigos publicados em um período de cinco anos foi avaliada com base na leitura do título e resumo originais dos trabalhos. Dessa forma, é possível apresentar um feedback dos estudantes, profissionais e pesquisadores, possibilitando o discernimento de questões de pesquisa que são consideradas relevantes e consequentemente passíveis de serem disseminadas dentro da comunidade Open-Source e acadêmica. Durante a investigação da relevância dos trabalhos selecionados, a abordagem proposta considerou duas questões: Uma sobre o escopo dos trabalhos identificados e outra sobre a relevância percebida desses trabalhos. Para a primeira questão, foram conduzidos dois mapeamentos sistemáticos da literatura em bases distintas, os quais revelaram um conjunto de trabalhos compostos por uma grande diversidade de resultados. Utilizando sumários elaborados a partir desses trabalhos para o primeiro Survey e os próprios resumos para o segundo, foram então aplicados os Surveys aos estudantes, profissionais e pesquisadores. Nossos achados representam um cenário muito favorável para a pesquisa voltada ao modelo open source, indicando que 77.01% dos estudantes consideram os trabalhos relevantes e que 80.56% dos pesquisadores e desenvolvedores também consideraram os trabalhos como relevantes.The number of Software Engineering research papers has grown significantly over the last few years, especially those related to the open source model. Naturally, this fact raises the question of whether the research on these areas are considered to be relevant or not. This paper aims at accessing the perspective of the open source community as well as the perspective of undergraduate students regarding the relevance of the open source research. To answer about the relevance of available work, two questions were addressed: one about the scope of the studies and another about the perceived quality of these works. For the first one, two Systematic Literature Mappings were performed, each for a different survey to be conducted, revealing two set of works composed by a great diversity of results. Using these identified works, two different surveys were conducted, one with developers and researchers from several open source communities around the world and another at University of Brasília (UnB) where undergraduate students of Computer Science and related courses were invited to rate the relevance of the selected research papers. Both surveys revealed a very positive outlook on the relevance of this research area, where 77.01% of the students and 80.56% of the the open source practitioners rated the works as relevant. With these results, in addition to providing an overview of the current open source research scenario, it is also possible to give feedback from the open source community and students, providing a way to produce useful and, consequently, more disseminated works among open source practitioners

An Empirical Study of the Landscape of Open Source Projects in Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent

Open source software has drawn more and more attention from researchers, developers and companies nowadays. Meanwhile, many Chinese technology companies are embracing open source and choosing to open source their projects. Nevertheless, most previous studies are concentrated on international companies such as Microsoft or Google, while the practical values of open source projects of Chinese technology companies remain unclear. To address this issue, we conduct a mixed-method study to investigate the landscape of projects open sourced by three large Chinese technology companies, namely Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (BAT). We study the categories and characteristics of open source projects, the developer's perceptions towards open sourcing effort for these companies, and the internationalization effort of their open source projects. We collected 1,000 open source projects that were open sourced by BAT in GitHub and performed an online survey that received 101 responses from developers of these projects. Some key findings include: 1) BAT prefer to open source frontend development projects, 2) 88\% of the respondents are positive towards open sourcing software projects in their respective companies, 3) 64\% of the respondents reveal that the most common motivations for BAT to open source their projects are the desire to gain fame, expand their influence and gain recruitment advantage, 4) respondents believe that the most common internationalization effort is "providing an English version of readme files", 5) projects with more internationalization effort (i.e., include an English readme file) are more popular. Our findings provide directions for software engineering researchers and provide practical suggestions to software developers and Chinese technology companies

Using GitHub in Large Software Engineering Classes: An Exploratory Case Study

GitHub has been recently used in Software Engineering (SE) classes to facilitate col- laboration in student team projects. The underlying tenet is that the technical and social feature of GitHub can help students to communicate and collaborate more effectively as a team as well as help teachers to evaluate individual student contribution more objectively. To shed more light on this, in this case study, we explore the benefits and drawbacks of using GitHub in SE classes. Our study is conducted in a software engineering class of 91 students divided into 18 teams. Our research method includes an entry and an exit surveys and a qualitative analysis of students’ commit behavior throughout the period of the project. Our findings show that a) enforcing GitHub in SE classes can be an effective approach for enhancing students’ skills in configuration management and version control, and b) despite the steep learning curve, most teams managed to optimize their commit behavior over time. In terms of student evaluation, our analysis exposed the risks of using GitHub for individual effort assessment. The work in this paper provides several valuable insights for researchers and makes several recommendations for practitioners (teachers) about integrating GitHub in SE classes

What we know about testing embedded software

To cost-effectively test embedded software, practitioners and researchers have proposed many test techniques, approaches, tools, and frameworks. However, obtaining an overview of the state of the art and state of the practice in this area is challenging for practitioners or new researchers. In addition, owing to an inadequate overview of what already exists in this area, some companies often reinvent the wheel by designing a test approach that’s new to them but already exists. To address these problems, the authors conducted a systematic literature review of this area that covered the testing topics, testing activities, test artifacts, and industries on which the studies focused. The results can benefit both practitioners and researchers by serving as an index to the vast body of knowledge in this important, fast-growing area