Promises and Perils of Mining Software Package Ecosystem Data

The use of third-party packages is becoming increasingly popular and has led to the emergence of large software package ecosystems with a maze of inter-dependencies. Since the reliance on these ecosystems enables developers to reduce development effort and increase productivity, it has attracted the interest of researchers: understanding the infrastructure and dynamics of package ecosystems has given rise to approaches for better code reuse, automated updates, and the avoidance of vulnerabilities, to name a few examples. But the reality of these ecosystems also poses challenges to software engineering researchers, such as: How do we obtain the complete network of dependencies along with the corresponding versioning information? What are the boundaries of these package ecosystems? How do we consistently detect dependencies that are declared but not used? How do we consistently identify developers within a package ecosystem? How much of the ecosystem do we need to understand to analyse a single component? How well do our approaches generalise across different programming languages and package ecosystems? In this chapter, we review promises and perils of mining the rich data related to software package ecosystems available to software engineering researchers.Comment: Submitted as a Book Chapte

Construction of a repository of assets agile development software for applying a method of applications for reuse

En este artículo de investigación se expone el estudio y la construcción  de  un repositorio de activos de software para el desarrollo ágil de aplicaciones aplicando un método para el reúso que permite manejar,  manipular, crear, almacenar, recuperar y reutilizar diversas fuentes de códigos y activos de software para la agilización de procesos sistemáticos con el fin de crear cimientos en procesos industriales que requieran la intervención directa de un software. Este software ha sido desarrollado luego de una amplia investigación y recopilación de antecedentes, una amplia arquitectura de reglas de manejo, enfoque en minería de datos y propósitos de promover el reúso de activos de software como una importante metodología dentro de la ingeniería, así con dicha implementación de esta herramienta se busca explorar, ayudar, fundamentar y respaldar en etapas tempranas de formación de un software, donde el campo de interés radica en pequeñas y medianas empresas de software que necesitan una metodología y una herramienta elástica para la mejora de procesos en sus instalaciones sin escatimar la calidad que del producto final que definitiva es el intangible “software”.In this research paper the study and construction of a repository of software assets for agile development of applying a method to reuse that allows you to manage, manipulate, create, store, retrieve and reuse various sources of codes and active applications exposed software for streamlining systematic processes in order to create foundations in industrial processes requiring direct intervention of a software.This software has been developed after extensive research and gathering background, a wide architecture management rules, focus on data mining and purposes of promoting the reuse of software assets as an important methodology in engineering, and with that implementation of this tool seeks to explore, help, inform and support in the early stages of forming a software, where the field of interest lies in small and medium software companies that need a methodology and an elastic tool for process improvement in their without skimping quality facilities that the final product is the ultimate intangible "software"

Application of mutual information-based sequential feature selection to ISBSG mixed data

[EN] There is still little research work focused on feature selection (FS) techniques including both categorical and continuous features in Software Development Effort Estimation (SDEE) literature. This paper addresses the problem of selecting the most relevant features from ISBSG (International Software Benchmarking Standards Group) dataset to be used in SDEE. The aim is to show the usefulness of splitting the ranked list of features provided by a mutual information-based sequential FS approach in two, regarding categorical and continuous features. These lists are later recombined according to the accuracy of a case-based reasoning model. Thus, four FS algorithms are compared using a complete dataset with 621 projects and 12 features from ISBSG. On the one hand, two algorithms just consider the relevance, while the remaining two follow the criterion of maximizing relevance and also minimizing redundancy between any independent feature and the already selected features. On the other hand, the algorithms that do not discriminate between continuous and categorical features consider just one list, whereas those that differentiate them use two lists that are later combined. As a result, the algorithms that use two lists present better performance than those algorithms that use one list. Thus, it is meaningful to consider two different lists of features so that the categorical features may be selected more frequently. We also suggest promoting the usage of Application Group, Project Elapsed Time, and First Data Base System features with preference over the more frequently used Development Type, Language Type, and Development Platform.Fernández-Diego, M.; González-Ladrón-De-Guevara, F. (2018). Application of mutual information-based sequential feature selection to ISBSG mixed data. Software Quality Journal. 26(4):1299-1325. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-017-9391-5S12991325264Angelis, L., & Stamelos, I. (2000). 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