How to characterize the health of an Open Source Software project? A snowball literature review of an emerging practice

Motivation: Society's dependence on Open Source Software (OSS) and the communities that maintain the OSS is ever-growing. So are the potential risks of, e.g., vulnerabilities being introduced in projects not actively maintained. By assessing an OSS project's capability to stay viable and maintained over time without interruption or weakening, i.e., the OSS health, users can consider the risk implied by using the OSS as is, and if necessary, decide whether to help improve the health or choose another option. However, such assessment is complex as OSS health covers a wide range of sub-topics, and existing support is limited. Aim: We aim to create an overview of characteristics that affect the health of an OSS project and enable the assessment thereof. Method: We conduct a snowball literature review based on a start set of 9 papers, and identify 146 relevant papers over two iterations of forward and backward snowballing. Health characteristics are elicited and coded using structured and axial coding into a framework structure. Results: The final framework consists of 104 health characteristics divided among 15 themes. Characteristics address the socio-technical spectrum of the community of actors maintaining the OSS project, the software and other deliverables being maintained, and the orchestration facilitating the maintenance. Characteristics are further divided based on the level of abstraction they address, i.e., the OSS project-level specifically, or the project's overarching ecosystem of related OSS projects. Conclusion: The framework provides an overview of the wide span of health characteristics that may need to be considered when evaluating OSS health and can serve as a foundation both for research and practice.Comment: Accepted for publication at Open Source Systems (OSS) Conference 202

Integrating Human Factors and Semantic Mark-ups in Adaptive Interactive Systems

This paper focuses on incorporating individual differences in cognitive processing and semantic mark-ups in the context of adaptive interactive systems. In particular, a semantic Web-based adaptation framework is proposed that enables Web content providers to enrich content and functionality of Web environments with semantic mark-ups. The Web content is created using a Web authoring tool and is further processed and reconstructed by an adaptation mechanism based on cognitive factors of users. Main aim of this work is to investigate the added value of personalising content and functionality of Web environments based on the unique cognitive characteristics of users. Accordingly, a user study has been conducted that entailed a psychometric-based survey for extracting the users' cognitive characteristics, combined with a real usage scenario of an existing commercial Web environment that was enriched with semantic mark-ups and personalised based on different adaptation effects. The paper provides interesting insights in the design and development of adaptive interactive systems based on cognitive factors and semantic mark-ups

PaaSword: A Data Privacy and Context-aware Security Framework for Developing Secure Cloud Applications - Technical and Scientific Contributions

Most industries worldwide have entered a period of reaping the benefits and opportunities cloud offers. At the same time, many efforts are made to address engineering challenges for the secure development of cloud systems and software.With the majority of software engineering projects today relying on the cloud, the task to structure end-to-end secure-by-design cloud systems becomes challenging but at the same time mandatory. The PaaSword project has been commissioned to address security and data privacy in a holistic way by proposing a context-aware security-by-design framework to support software developers in constructing secure applications for the cloud. This chapter presents an overview of the PaaSword project results, including the scientific achievements as well as the description of the technical solution. The benefits offered by the framework are validated through two pilot implementations and conclusions are drawn based on the future research challenges which are discussed in a research agenda

Case Survey Studies in Software Engineering Research

Background: Given the social aspects of Software Engineering (SE), in the last twenty years, researchers from the field started using research methods common in social sciences such as case study, ethnography, and grounded theory. More recently, case survey, another imported research method, has seen its increasing use in SE studies. It is based on existing case studies reported in the literature and intends to harness the generalizability of survey and the depth of case study. However, little is known on how case survey has been applied in SE research, let alone guidelines on how to employ it properly. Aims: This article aims to provide a better understanding of how case survey has been applied in Software Engineering research. Method: To address this knowledge gap, we performed a systematic mapping study and analyzed 12 Software Engineering studies that used the case survey method. Results: Our findings show that these studies presented a heterogeneous understanding of the approach ranging from secondary studies to primary inquiries focused on a large number of instances of a research phenomenon. They have not applied the case survey method consistently as defined in the seminal methodological papers. Conclusions: We conclude that a set of clearly defined guidelines are needed on how to use case survey in SE research, to ensure the quality of the studies employing this approach and to provide a set of clearly defined criteria to evaluate such work.Comment: Accepted for presentation at ACM / IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM) (ESEM '20

Integrating Human Factors and Semantic Mark-ups in Adaptive Interactive Systems

This paper focuses on incorporating individual differences in cognitive processing and semantic markups in the context of adaptive interactive systems. In particular, a semantic Web-based adaptation framework is proposed that enables Web authors to enrich content and functionality of Web environments with semantic markups, which are further processed and reconstructed by an adaptation mechanism based on cognitive factors of users. Main aim of this work is to investigate the added value of personalizing content and functionality of Web environments based on the unique cognitive characteristics of users. Accordingly, a user study has been conducted that entailed a psychometric-based survey for extracting users’ cognitive characteristics, combined with a real usage scenario of an existing commercial Web environment that was enriched with semantic markups and was personalized through different adaptation effects. The initial results obtained provide interesting insights in the design and deployment of adaptive interactive systems based on cognitive factors and semantic markups

Embracing cognitive factors and fuzzy logic in adaptive interactive systems

The increased demand of services on the Web to satisfy the diverse characteristics of users have resulted in a plethora of applications that aim to provide personalized services based on the heterogeneous needs and preferences of users. With the aim to enhance and support the personalization process of Web applications, an innovative adaptation framework is proposed embracing cognitive factors of users which serve as the user model, and Computational Intelligence techniques that decide on the adaptation effects of Web applications for providing a personalized user experience. The user model is based on a series of psychometric measures which capture particular cognitive factors of users, and the adaptation mechanism includes the utilization of Artificial Neural Networks and Fuzzy Logic for exploiting the benefits of intelligent classification and partial truth in the adaptation process. The proposed method has been evaluated with a user study that has revealed a main effect of cognitive factors of users on the adaptation of Web content and functionality since users were more efficient and effective in completing tasks in the adapted than the non-adapted version of the same environment

Believing is Seeing: Confirmation Bias Studies in Software Engineering

Confirmation bias is the human tendency to search for, collect, interpret, analyse, or recall information in a way that confirms one’s prior beliefs or preferences. In this paper, we review previous research and demonstrate confirmation bias and its effect in two software engineering contexts. The first study documents that managers bias their interpretation of randomly generated project data towards confirmation of their preferred contract type. The second study reports from an analysis of the results of 35 published comparisons of regression and analogybased cost estimation models. Twenty of these comparisons evaluate the performance of a self-developed analogy-based estimation model relative to a regression-based model and may be biased towards finding evidence confirming a better accuracy of their own model. A statistical meta-analysis of all 35 comparisons showed that the analogy-based models were more accurate than the regression-based models, whereas removing the 20 comparisons where the researchers evaluated their own models gave the opposite result. Our results support the idea that it is important to consider the presence and degree of confirmation bias when collecting information about topics where there are prior preferences, beliefs, or vested interests to avoid misleading conclusions