Evaluation of a Proposed Set of Usability Heuristics

The innovations proposed by the mobile phone market have grown steadily in recent years, along with the increasing complexity of the hardware, operating systems and applications available in this market. These changes bring new usability-related challenges that need to be considered during the application development process, as new forms of user-application interaction increasingly require behavioral adaptation. In this situation, usability is an important issue, which depends on usability factors such as the User, their characteristics and skills, the Task he intends to achieve and also the Context of Use in which the user and the application are inserted. The components of this set are detailed in a set of heuristics previous proposed that was evaluated through two heuristic evaluations, which allowed to incorporate improvements to the proposal. Furthermore, a set of 13 usability heuristics and 183 sub-heuristics were proposed, which, through heuristic evaluations, better results were evidenced. The proposal makes it easier for experts to find a greater number of usability problems, mostly of greater severity, compared to the proposal of Inostroza et al. As possible future work, further evaluations may be carried out to evaluate the proposal to include more experts in the field, as well as to use the set of heuristics in a larger number of applications of different categories

An Analysis of Measurement and Metrics Tools: A Systematic Literature Review

Measurement is an important field in Software Engineering, since it allows for organizations to obtain trustworthy estimates regarding deadlines, cost, and quality for the development of their software projects. Many tools are available for the calculation and storage of metrics and therefore, choosing the best tool can be a hard task. Faced with such a problem, this study carries out an analysis of the measurement tools presented in literature. The methodology chosen for the task was the systematic literature review. The results of the systematic review present the metric tools chosen in literature, their functionalities, and the main metrics used by these tools. The primary contribution of this article is a list with the metrics used by each of these tools, and their respective classification, according to their use in academia as well as in the software industry

Methods and metrics for estimating and planning agile software projects

Trabalho financiado pelo Edital DPI / DPG - UnB n° 02/2018 (Apoio à Publicação de Artigos em Anais de Eventos, resultantes de Pesquisa Científica, Tecnológica e de Inovação de servidores do Quadro da Universidade de Brasília).The nature of agile software projects is different from software projects that use traditional methodologies. Therefore, using traditional techniques of estimates of effort, time and cost can produce imprecise estimates. Several estimation techniques have been proposed by several authors and developers in recent years. This work performs a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of current estimates practices in the development of agile software and the most used size metrics as inputs for these estimates, collecting and documenting them for a future comparison of their accuracy. With the realization of SLR, it was identified that Story Point and Point of Function are the most used metrics in agile projects as the basis for estimating size, time, effort, productivity and cost. Based on these two-size metrics, it was performed a case study with the estimation of effort, time and cost for an agile project of a software factory, where the actual development values were compared with the estimates made to analyze which provided the estimates that most closely approximated the actual values that were estimated

Management Tool for Software Factory Contracts for a Brazilian Public Agency

Contracting Information Technology (IT) services has become common practice in the Public Federal Administration (APF). It allows the APF to focus its resources on the primary activities, allowing a better execution of the planning, coordination, supervision and control tasks. One of the challenges is the interdisciplinarity involved in managing contracts, from the characteristics of the object – financial and legal aspects – to human relationship aspects. The objective of this work is to use the case study and research-action techniques and specify a tool for software development and maintenance contracts management, according to agile principles, to support the management of software factory contracts between a Brazilian Public Federal Agency and its suppliers, in line with the specifications of the contracting notices. The tool specification is in the development stage. Bibliographical and documental research activities, as well as object diagnostics, have been accomplished. From the experience, it is possible to glimpse the specification of a contract management tool aligned with the legislation, the agency contracts, and the software development and maintenance processes defined in the agile methodology

A Modeling Strategy for the Verification of Context-Oriented Chatbot Conversational Flows via Model Checking

Verification of chatbot conversational flows is paramount to capturing and understanding chatbot behavior and predicting problems that would cause the entire flow to be restructured from scratch. The literature on chatbot testing is scarce, and the few works that approach this subject do not focus on verifying the communication sequences in tandem with the functional requirements of the conversational flow itself. However, covering all possible conversational flows of context-oriented chatbots through testing is not feasible in practice given the many ramifications that should be covered by test cases. Alternatively, model checking provides a model-based verification in a mathematically precise and unambiguous manner. Moreover, it can anticipate design flaws early in the software design phase that could lead to incompleteness, ambiguities, and inconsistencies. We postulate that finding design flaws in chatbot conversational flows via model checking early in the design phase may overcome quite a few verification gaps that are not feasible via current testing techniques for context-oriented chatbot conversational flows. Therefore, in this work, we propose a modeling strategy to design and verify chatbot conversational flows via the Uppaal model checking tool. Our strategy is materialized in the form of templates and a mapping of chatbot elements into Uppaal elements. To evaluate this strategy, we invited a few chatbot developers with different levels of expertise. The feedback from the participants revealed that the strategy is a great ally in the phases of conversational prototyping and design, as well as helping to refine requirements and revealing branching logic that can be reused in the implementation phase

Guide for Artificial Intelligence Ethical Requirements Elicitation - RE4AI Ethical Guide

Development and use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based systems are growing at a fast pace in our society, simultaneously ethical concerns are arising from them. Addressing AI ethics is a continual issue and has provoked much debate among researchers. The aim of this work is to provide a Guide for Artificial Intelligence Ethical Requirements Elicitation (RE4AI Ethical Guide). The Design Science Research methodology was adopted in order to understand the problem, develop a prototype and evaluate it through a survey. The proposed Guide, composed of 26 cards along 11 ethical principles, is both useful and practical and can help in the elicitation of ethical requirements for AI in the context of agile development. Our preliminary results reveal that the Guide contributes to bridging the gap between high-level and abstract principles and practice by assisting developers and Product Owners to elicit ethical requirements and implement ethics in AI

Ethical Perspectives in AI: A Two-folded Exploratory Study From Literature and Active Development Projects

Background: Interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) based systems has been gaining traction at a fast pace, both for software development teams and for society as a whole. This increased interest has lead to the employment of AI techniques such as Machine Learning and Deep Learning for diverse purposes, like medicine and surveillance systems, and such uses have raised the awareness about the ethical implications of the usage of AI systems. Aims: With this work we aim to obtain an overview of the current state of the literature and software projects on tools, methods and techniques used in practical AI ethics. Method: We have conducted an exploratory study in both a scientific database and a software projects repository in order to understand their current state on techniques, methods and tools used for implementing AI ethics. Results: A total of 182 abstracts were retrieved and five classes were devised from the analysis in Scopus, 1) AI in Agile and Business for Requirement Engineering (RE) (22.8%), 2) RE in Theoretical Context (14.8%), 3) Quality Requirements (22.6%), 4) Proceedings and Conferences (22%), 5) AI in Requirements Engineering (17.8%). Furthermore, out of 589 projects from GitHub, we found 21 tools for implementing AI ethics. Highlighted publicly available tools found to assist the implementation of AI ethics are InterpretML, Deon and TransparentAI. Conclusions: The combined energy of both explored sources fosters an enhanced debate and stimulates progress towards AI ethics in practice

Perceptions of ICT practitioners regarding software privacy

During software development activities, it is important for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) practitioners to know and understand practices and guidelines regarding information privacy, as software requirements must comply with data privacy laws and members of development teams should know current legislation related to the protection of personal data. In order to gain a better understanding on how industry ICT practitioners perceive the practical relevance of software privacy and privacy requirements and how these professionals are implementing data privacy concepts, we conducted a survey with ICT practitioners from software development organizations to get an overview of how these professionals are implementing data privacy concepts during software design. We performed a systematic literature review to identify related works with software privacy and privacy requirements and what methodologies and techniques are used to specify them. In addition, we conducted a survey with ICT practitioners from different organizations. Findings revealed that ICT practitioners lack a comprehensive knowledge of software privacy and privacy requirements and the Brazilian General Data Protection Law (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais, LGPD, in Portuguese), nor they are able to work with the laws and guidelines governing data privacy. Organizations are demanded to define an approach to contextualize ICT practitioners with the importance of knowledge of software privacy and privacy requirements, as well as to address them during software development, since LGPD must change the way teams work, as a number of features and controls regarding consent, documentation, and privacy accountability will be required

Google Summer of Code Gender Diversity: An analysis of the last 4 editions

This work presents a comprehensive research about the participationof men and women in the area of Information and CommunicationsTechnology (ICT) through data extracted from the last foureditions of Google Summer of Code (GSoC). The goal of this workis to find Association Rules between gender characteristics andcoding using the Apriori Algorithm. A total of 61 association ruleswere generated through the aforementioned algorithm, being 22 ofthem found only in the data set with the women, 24 found only withthe men, and 15 applicable to both sets. We can cite as one of themain findings of this work the fact that the representativeness ofwomen in GSoC is decreasing in the last few years. Despite this, therepresentativeness of women in GSoC is above average, accordingto what has been reported in other studies in the literature in whichwomen are underrepresented. When it comes to the most utilizedtechnologies, we have “Python", “Java", “C++", “C" and “JavaScript"in the top. Analyzing technologies, it’s possible to realize that themain utilized technologies for men and women are similar, but, ingeneral, men are more likely linked to programming languages.The most common project topics are: “Event Management", “Web",“Web Development", “Data Science" and “Cloud" in the top. Thiscan represent how diverse the project topics of the database are,but not necessarily has something related to gender