Un enfoque de recuperación de información para ayudar a los usuarios en los procesos de ingeniería de software

Documents written in natural language constitute a major part of the artifacts produced during the software engineering life cycle. There is a growing interest in creating tools that can assist users in all phases of the software life cycle. The assistance requires techniques that go beyond traditional static and dynamic analysis. An example of such a technique is the application of information retrieval (IR), which exploits information found in documents of a software engineering process. The increased availability of data created as part of the software development process allows managers to apply novel analysis techniques on the data and use the results to guide the project´s stakeholders. These data are then used to predict defects, gather insight into a project´s life-cycle, and other tasks. This work proposes an IR approach to assist users in software engineering processes according their profile. The approach consists in recommending them related documents to a retrieved one in order to users understand and follow the process in a correct way. Furthermore, the assistance concentrates on legacy systems in which engineers must acquire knowledge generated by others. Implementation of the approach and an overview of evaluation are also summarized.Os documentos escritos em linguagem natural constituem uma parte importante dos artefatos produzidos durante o ciclo de vida da engenharia de software. Há um interesse crescente em criar ferramentas que possam ajudar os usuários em todas as fases do ciclo de vida do software. A assistência requer técnicas que vão além da análise tradicional estática e dinâmica. Um exemplo de tal técnica é a aplicação de recuperação de informações (RI), que explora informações encontradas em documentos de um processo de engenharia de software. A maior disponibilidade de dados criados como parte do processo de desenvolvimento de software permite que os gerentes apliquem técnicas de análise inovadoras nos dados e usem os resultados para orientar as partes interessadas do projeto. Esses dados são usados para prever defeitos, coletar informações sobre o ciclo de vida de um projeto e outras tarefas. Este trabalho propõe uma abordagem de RI para auxiliar os usuários em processos de engenharia de software de acordo com o seu perfil. A abordagem consiste em lhes recomendar os documentos relacionados para que sejam recuperados, a fim de que os usuários compreendam e sigam o processo de maneira correta. Além disso, a assistência concentra-se em sistemas legados nos quais os engenheiros devem adquirir conhecimento gerado por outros. O desenvolvimento da abordagem e uma visão geral da avaliação são apresentados.Los documentos escritos en lenguaje natural constituyen una parte fundamental de los artefactos producidos durante el ciclo de ciclo de vida del desarrollo de software. Hay un creciente interés en las herramientas de creación que pueden ayudar a los usuarios en todas las fases del ciclo de vida del software. La asistencia requiere técnicas que van más allá del análisis estático y dinámico. Por ejemplo, la aplicación de recuperación de información (RI) explota información encontrada en los documentos del proceso de desarrollo de software. La creciente disponibilidad de datos creados a partir del proceso de desarrollo de software permite a los líderes de proyectos aplicar estrategias de análisis sobre los datos como parte del proceso y utilizar los resultados para guiar a los grupos de interesados. Estos datos se utilizan para evitar defectos, recolectar información sobre el ciclo de vida de un proyecto, y otras tareas. En este trabajo se propone un enfoque de RI para asistir a los usuarios en el proceso de desarrollo de software según su perfil. El enfoque consiste en recomendar los documentos relacionados a un usuario para que éstos entiendan y sigan el proceso en una dirección correcta. Además, la asistencia está pensada en contextos de sistemas heredados en los que los desarrolladores deben adquirir el conocimiento generado por terceros. Como conclusión, se muestran la implementación del enfoque y una descripción de la evaluación.Fil: Rodríguez, Guillermo Horacio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; Argentin

Survey on Safety Evidence Change Impact Analysis in Practice: Detailed Description and Analysis

Critical systems must comply with safety standards in many application domains. This involves gathering safety evidence in the form of artefacts such as safety analyses, system specifications, and testing results. These artefacts can evolve during a system’s lifecycle, and impact analysis might be necessary to guarantee that system safety and compliance are not jeopardised. Although extensive research has been conducted on impact analysis and on safety evidence management, the knowledge about how safety evidence change impact analysis is addressed in practice is limited. This technical report presents a survey targeted at filling this gap by analysing the circumstances under which safety evidence change impact analysis is addressed, the tool support used, and the challenges faced. We obtained 97 valid responses representing 16 application domains, 28 countries, and 47 safety standards. The results suggest that most projects deal with safety evidence change impact analysis during system development and mainly from system specifications, the level of automation in the process is low, and insufficient tool support is the most frequent challenge. Other notable findings are that safety case evolution should probably be better managed, no commercial impact analysis tool has been reported as used for all artefact types, and experience and automation do not seem to greatly help in avoiding challenges

Scenario-based modifiability evaluation of service-based systems : tool support for lightweight scenario templates

In modern software development, modifiability has arguably become one of the most important software quality attributes. There has been extensive research on the topic of the evaluation of a system's or architecture's ability to be modified. Scenario-based methods such as ALMA or SAAM have been around for a long time, and have proven to be effective ways to evaluate software. However, these methods are usually quite expensive in terms of time and require a big part of a project's stakeholders to align. One thing there has been a notable lack of is the modifiability evaluation specifically of systems using a service-based architecture. Properties of this architectural style can be useful to make more efficient assessments of a software's modifiability. This work seeks to propose a method to evaluate modifiability of service-based systems using a scenario-based analysis approach. Special emphasis is placed on this method being lightweight, i.e. less time-consuming and more flexible than similar methods. To achieve this, existing works on the topics of scenario-based software evaluation and the evolution of service-based systems were studied. Based on the acquired knowledge, a model of software change and an approach to analyze a system’s modifiability utilizing this model was designed. A tool was created to support our proposed method. Testing and applying the tool leads to iterative adjustments to the method. To demonstrate the insights that can be won using this method as well as how it is used, we perform an example application of it. The result of this work is a method that exchanges some of the reliability and accuracy of other scenario-based methods for flexibility and brevity. While the method achieves its goal of being lightweight, real-world testing and validation may lead to improvements to it

Change decision support:extraction and analysis of late architecture changes using change characterization and software metrics

Software maintenance is one of the most crucial aspects of software development. Software engineering researchers must develop practical solutions to handle the challenges presented in maintaining mature software systems. Research that addresses practical means of mitigating the risks involved when changing software, reducing the complexity of mature software systems, and eliminating the introduction of preventable bugs is paramount to today’s software engineering discipline. Giving software developers the information that they need to make quality decisions about changes that will negatively affect their software systems is a key aspect to mitigating those risks. This dissertation presents work performed to assist developers to collect and process data that plays a role in change decision-making during the maintenance phase. To address these problems, developers need a way to better understand the effects of a change prior to making the change. This research addresses the problems associated with increasing architectural complexity caused by software change using a twoold approach. The first approach is to characterize software changes to assess their architectural impact prior to their implementation. The second approach is to identify a set of architecture metrics that correlate to system quality and maintainability and to use these metrics to determine the level of difficulty involved in making a change. The two approaches have been combined and the results presented provide developers with a beneficial analysis framework that offers insight into the change process