Enablers and Impediments for Collaborative Research in Software Testing: An Empirical Exploration

When it comes to industrial organizations, current collaboration efforts in software engineering research are very often kept in-house, depriving these organizations off the skills necessary to build independent collaborative research. The current trend, towards empirical software engineering research, requires certain standards to be established which would guide these collaborative efforts in creating a strong partnership that promotes independent, evidence-based, software engineering research. This paper examines key enabling factors for an efficient and effective industry-academia collaboration in the software testing domain. A major finding of the research was that while technology is a strong enabler to better collaboration, it must be complemented with industrial openness to disclose research results and the use of a dedicated tooling platform. We use as an example an automated test generation approach that has been developed in the last two years collaboratively with Bombardier Transportation AB in Sweden

Teaching The Early: Formal Methods in School

In this paper, we describe a programme of school engagement aimed at instilling a discipline of computational thinking within pupils before they embark on a university course. The workshops we deliver are designed mainly to increase the pipeline of school leavers going on to study computer science or software engineering, specifically by changing perceptions on what this means amongst the vast majority - particularly girls - who think it is just a geeky topic for boys.Over the past number of years, student enrolment has been increasing dramatically in our university's undergraduate computer science and software engineering degree programmes. Also, the performance of the students on first-year formal methods modules - which has historically been poor - has risen substantially. Whilst there are many influences contributing towards these trends, we present evidence that our efforts with school engagement has to a non-trivial extent contributed towards these: both through the way the undergraduate programme has been adapted to incorporate the Technocamps approach, and through providing a pipeline of students who understand the principles of computational thinking

Use of ontology in identifying missing artefact links

The techniques of requirement traceability have evolved over recent years. However, as much as they have contributed to the software engineering field, significant ambiguity remains in many software engineering processes. This paper reports on an investigation of requirement traceability artefacts, stakeholders, and SDLC development models. Data were collected to gather evidence of artefacts and their properties from previous studies. The aim was to find the missing link between artefacts and their relationship to one another, the stakeholders, and SDLC models. This paper undertakes the first phase of the main research project, which aims to develop a framework for guiding software developers to actively manage traceability. After inquiring into and examining previous research on this topic, the links between artefacts and their functions were identified. The analysis resulted in the development of a new model for requirement traceability, defined in the form of an ontology portraying the contributively relations between software artefacts using common properties with the aid of Protégé Software. This study thus provides an important insight into the future of the requirement artefacts relation, and thereby lays an important foundation towards increasing our understanding of their potential and limitations

Diversity in Software Engineering Conferences and Journals

Diversity with respect to ethnicity and gender has been studied in open-source and industrial settings for software development. Publication avenues such as academic conferences and journals contribute to the growing technology industry. However, there have been very few diversity-related studies conducted in the context of academia. In this paper, we study the ethnic, gender, and geographical diversity of the authors published in Software Engineering conferences and journals. We provide a systematic quantitative analysis of the diversity of publications and organizing and program committees of three top conferences and two top journals in Software Engineering, which indicates the existence of bias and entry barriers towards authors and committee members belonging to certain ethnicities, gender, and/or geographical locations in Software Engineering conferences and journal publications. For our study, we analyse publication (accepted authors) and committee data (Program and Organizing committee/ Journal Editorial Board) from the conferences ICSE, FSE, and ASE and the journals IEEE TSE and ACM TOSEM from 2010 to 2022. The analysis of the data shows that across participants and committee members, there are some communities that are consistently significantly lower in representation, for example, publications from countries in Africa, South America, and Oceania. However, a correlation study between the diversity of the committees and the participants did not yield any conclusive evidence. Furthermore, there is no conclusive evidence that papers with White authors or male authors were more likely to be cited. Finally, we see an improvement in the ethnic diversity of the authors over the years 2010-2022 but not in gender or geographical diversity.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures, 4 table

How tertiary studies perform quality assessment of secondary studies in software engineering

Best Paper Award a l’Experimental Software Engineering Track (ESELAW) de la XXIV Ibero-American Conference on Software Engineering, CIbSE 2021Context: Tertiary studies are becoming increasingly popular in software engineering as an instrument to synthesise evidence on a research topic in a systematic way. In order to understand and contextualize their findings, it is important to assess the quality of the selected secondary studies. Objective: This paper aims to provide a state of the art on the assessment of secondary studies’ quality as conducted in tertiary studies in the area of software engineering, reporting the frameworks used as instruments, the facets examined in these frameworks, and the purposes of the quality assessment. Method: We designed this study as a systematic mapping responding to four research questions derived from the objective above. We applied a rigorous search protocol over the Scopus digital library, resulting in 47 papers after application of inclusion and exclusion criteria. The extracted data was synthesised using content analysis. Results: A majority of tertiary studies perform quality assessment. It is not often used for excluding studies, but to support some kind of investigation. The DARE quality assessment framework is the most frequently used, with customizations in some cases to cover missing facets. We outline the first steps towards building a new framework to address the shortcomings identified. Conclusion: This paper is a step forward establishing a foundation for researchers in two different ways. As authors of tertiary studies, understanding the different possibilities in which they can perform quality assessment of secondary studies. As readers, having an instrument to understand the methodological rigor upon which tertiary studies may claim their findings.Peer ReviewedAward-winningPostprint (author's final draft

EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE IMPACT OF USING AUTOMATIC STATIC ANALYSIS ON CODE QUALITY

Automatic static analysis (ASA) tools analyze the source or compiled code looking for violations of recommended programming practices (called issues) that might cause faults or might degrade some dimensions of software quality. Antonio Vetro' has focused his PhD in studying how applying ASA impacts software quality, taking as reference point the different quality dimensions specified by the standard ISO/IEC 25010. The epistemological approach he used is that one of empirical software engineering. During his three years PhD, he's been conducting experiments and case studies on three main areas: Functionality/Reliability, Performance and Maintainability. He empirically proved that specific ASA issues had impact on these quality characteristics in the contexts under study: thus, removing them from the code resulted in a quality improvement. Vetro' has also investigated and proposed new research directions for this field: using ASA to improve software energy efficiency and to detect the problems deriving from the interaction of multiple languages. The contribution is enriched with the final recommendation of a generalized process for researchers and practitioners with a twofold goal: improve software quality through ASA and create a body of knowledge on the impact of using ASA on specific software quality dimensions, based on empirical evidence. This thesis represents a first step towards this goa

A hybrid approach combining control theory and AI for engineering self-adaptive systems

Control theoretical techniques have been successfully adopted as methods for self-adaptive systems design to provide formal guarantees about the effectiveness and robustness of adaptation mechanisms. However, the computational effort to obtain guarantees poses severe constraints when it comes to dynamic adaptation. In order to solve these limitations, in this paper, we propose a hybrid approach combining software engineering, control theory, and AI to design for software self-adaptation. Our solution proposes a hierarchical and dynamic system manager with performance tuning. Due to the gap between high-level requirements specification and the internal knob behavior of the managed system, a hierarchically composed components architecture seek the separation of concerns towards a dynamic solution. Therefore, a two-layered adaptive manager was designed to satisfy the software requirements with parameters optimization through regression analysis and evolutionary meta-heuristic. The optimization relies on the collection and processing of performance, effectiveness, and robustness metrics w.r.t control theoretical metrics at the offline and online stages. We evaluate our work with a prototype of the Body Sensor Network (BSN) in the healthcare domain, which is largely used as a demonstrator by the community. The BSN was implemented under the Robot Operating System (ROS) architecture, and concerns about the system dependability are taken as adaptation goals. Our results reinforce the necessity of performing well on such a safety-critical domain and contribute with substantial evidence on how hybrid approaches that combine control and AI-based techniques for engineering self-adaptive systems can provide effective adaptation

Considerations about quality in model-driven engineering

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11219-016-9350-6The virtue of quality is not itself a subject; it depends on a subject. In the software engineering field, quality means good software products that meet customer expectations, constraints, and requirements. Despite the numerous approaches, methods, descriptive models, and tools, that have been developed, a level of consensus has been reached by software practitioners. However, in the model-driven engineering (MDE) field, which has emerged from software engineering paradigms, quality continues to be a great challenge since the subject is not fully defined. The use of models alone is not enough to manage all of the quality issues at the modeling language level. In this work, we present the current state and some relevant considerations regarding quality in MDE, by identifying current categories in quality conception and by highlighting quality issues in real applications of the model-driven initiatives. We identified 16 categories in the definition of quality in MDE. From this identification, by applying an adaptive sampling approach, we discovered the five most influential authors for the works that propose definitions of quality. These include (in order): the OMG standards (e.g., MDA, UML, MOF, OCL, SysML), the ISO standards for software quality models (e.g., 9126 and 25,000), Krogstie, Lindland, and Moody. We also discovered families of works about quality, i.e., works that belong to the same author or topic. Seventy-three works were found with evidence of the mismatch between the academic/research field of quality evaluation of modeling languages and actual MDE practice in industry. We demonstrate that this field does not currently solve quality issues reported in industrial scenarios. The evidence of the mismatch was grouped in eight categories, four for academic/research evidence and four for industrial reports. These categories were detected based on the scope proposed in each one of the academic/research works and from the questions and issues raised by real practitioners. We then proposed a scenario to illustrate quality issues in a real information system project in which multiple modeling languages were used. For the evaluation of the quality of this MDE scenario, we chose one of the most cited and influential quality frameworks; it was detected from the information obtained in the identification of the categories about quality definition for MDE. We demonstrated that the selected framework falls short in addressing the quality issues. Finally, based on the findings, we derive eight challenges for quality evaluation in MDE projects that current quality initiatives do not address sufficiently.F.G, would like to thank COLCIENCIAS (Colombia) for funding this work through the Colciencias Grant call 512-2010. This work has been supported by the Gene-ralitat Valenciana Project IDEO (PROMETEOII/2014/039), the European Commission FP7 Project CaaS (611351), and ERDF structural funds.Giraldo-Velásquez, FD.; España Cubillo, S.; Pastor López, O.; Giraldo, WJ. (2016). Considerations about quality in model-driven engineering. Software Quality Journal. 1-66. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-016-9350-6S166(1985). Iso information processing—documentation symbols and conventions for data, program and system flowcharts, program network charts and system resources charts. ISO 5807:1985(E) (pp. 1–25).(2011). Iso/iec/ieee systems and software engineering – architecture description. 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Model-driven engineering: a survey supported by the unified conceptual model. Computer Languages Systems and Structures, 43, 139–155.Da Silva Teixeira, D.G.M., Quirino, G.K., Gailly, F., De Almeida Falbo, R., Guizzardi, G., & Perini Barcellos, M. (2016). PoN-S: a Systematic Approach for Applying the Physics of Notation (PoN), (pp. 432–447). Cham: Springer International Publishing.Davies, I., Green, P., Rosemann, M., Indulska, M., & Gallo, S. (2006). How do practitioners use conceptual modeling in practice? Data and Knowledge Engineering, 58(3), 358 – 380. Including the special issue : {ER} 2004ER 2004.Davies, J., Milward, D., Wang, C.-W., & Welch, J. (2015). Formal model-driven engineering of critical information systems. Science of Computer Programming, 103(0), 88 – 113. Selected papers from the First International Workshop on Formal Techniques for Safety-Critical Systems (FTSCS 2012).De Oca, I.M.-M., Snoeck, M., Reijers, H.A., & Rodríguez-Morffi, A. (2015). A systematic literature review of studies on business process modeling quality. Information and Software Technology, 58, 187–205.DenHaan, J. (2009). 8 reasons why model driven development is dangerous @ONLINE.DenHaan, J. (2010). Model driven engineering vs the commando pattern @ONLINE.DenHaan, J. (2011a). Why aren’t we all doing model driven development yet @ONLINE.DenHaan, J. (2011b). Why there is no future model driven development @ONLINE.Di Ruscio, D., Iovino, L., & Pierantonio, A. (2013). Managing the coupled evolution of metamodels and textual concrete syntax specifications. cited By (since 1996)0.Dijkman, R.M., Dumas, M., & Ouyang, C. (2008). Semantics and analysis of business process models in {BPMN}. Information and Software Technology, 50(12), 1281–1294.Domínguez-Mayo, F.J., Escalona, M.J., Mejías, M., Ramos, I., & Fernández, L. (2011). A framework for the quality evaluation of mdwe methodologies and information technology infrastructures. 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In 2014 IEEE Eighth International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS) (pp. 1–12).Giraldo, F.D., España, S., & Pastor, O. (2016). Evidences of the mismatch between industry and academy on modelling language quality evaluation. arXiv: 1606.02025 .González, C., & Cabot, J. (2014). Formal verification of static software models in mde: a systematic review. Information and Software Technology, 56(8), 821–838. cited By (since 1996)0.González, C.A., Büttner, F., Clarisó, R., & Cabot, J. (2012). Emftocsp: a tool for the lightweight verification of emf models. pages 44–50. Affiliation: cole des Mines de Nantes, INRIA, LINA, Nantes, France; Affiliation: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. Cited By (since 1996):1.Gorschek, T., Tempero, E., & Angelis, L. (2014). On the use of software design models in software development practice: an empirical investigation. Journal of Systems and Software, 95(0), 176– 193.Goulão, M., Amaral, V., & Mernik, M. (2016). Quality in model-driven engineering: a tertiary study. Software Quality Journal, 1–33.Grobshtein, Y., & Dori, D. (2011). Generating sysml views from an opm model: design and evaluation. Systems Engineering, 14(3), 327–340.Haan, J.d. (2008). 8 reasons why model-driven approaches (will) fail.Harel, D., & Rumpe, B. (2000). Modeling languages: Syntax, semantics and all that stuff, part i: The basic stuff, Israel. Technical report Jerusalem Israel.Harel, D., & Rumpe, B. (2004). Meaningful modeling: what’s the semantics of semantics? Computer, 37(10), 64–72.Hebig, R., & Bendraou, R. (2014). On the need to study the impact of model driven engineering on software processes. In Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Software and System Process, ICSSP 2014 (pp. 164–168). New York: ACM.Heidari, F., & Loucopoulos, P. (2014). Quality evaluation framework (qef): modeling and evaluating quality of business processes. 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How to Ask for Technical Help? Evidence-based Guidelines for Writing Questions on Stack Overflow

Context: The success of Stack Overflow and other community-based question-and-answer (Q&A) sites depends mainly on the will of their members to answer others' questions. In fact, when formulating requests on Q&A sites, we are not simply seeking for information. Instead, we are also asking for other people's help and feedback. Understanding the dynamics of the participation in Q&A communities is essential to improve the value of crowdsourced knowledge. Objective: In this paper, we investigate how information seekers can increase the chance of eliciting a successful answer to their questions on Stack Overflow by focusing on the following actionable factors: affect, presentation quality, and time. Method: We develop a conceptual framework of factors potentially influencing the success of questions in Stack Overflow. We quantitatively analyze a set of over 87K questions from the official Stack Overflow dump to assess the impact of actionable factors on the success of technical requests. The information seeker reputation is included as a control factor. Furthermore, to understand the role played by affective states in the success of questions, we qualitatively analyze questions containing positive and negative emotions. Finally, a survey is conducted to understand how Stack Overflow users perceive the guideline suggestions for writing questions. Results: We found that regardless of user reputation, successful questions are short, contain code snippets, and do not abuse with uppercase characters. As regards affect, successful questions adopt a neutral emotional style. Conclusion: We provide evidence-based guidelines for writing effective questions on Stack Overflow that software engineers can follow to increase the chance of getting technical help. As for the role of affect, we empirically confirmed community guidelines that suggest avoiding rudeness in question writing.Comment: Preprint, to appear in Information and Software Technolog