Maintaining Requirements Using Web Usage Data

AbstractThe use of the World Wide Web has had a huge growth and there is a greater variety of web applications with an increasing importance in society and in supporting the development to all kinds of business. Often, most of websites are providing support services that must be maintained and improved over time. This maintenance and upgrade can be difficult because frequently the requirements are no longer actual and/or often not even exist documented. Websites are increasingly monitoring usage data, and this type of information is increasingly abundant. Analyzing the usage of the websites can help identify improvements and help to maintain the website and its software requirements. This paper presents REQAnalytics, a recommender system that collects the information about the usage of a website, processes it and generates recommendations to the requirements specification of the website. This research work also presents an experimental evaluation of a case study based on an online newspaper website. The results showed that REQAnalytics can produce reports in a language closer to the business, identify most and less used functionalities, requirements that can be split in two or more requirements and give support to the maintenance of requirements of the website being analyzed

Sequence mining for automatic generation of software tests from GUI event traces

In today’s software industry, systems are constantly changing. To maintain their quality and to prevent failures at controlled costs is a challenge. One way to foster quality is through thorough and systematic testing. Therefore, the definition of adequate tests is crucial for saving time, cost and effort. This paper presents a framework that generates software test cases automatically based on user interaction data. We propose a data-driven software test generation solution that combines the use of frequent sequence mining and Markov chain modeling. We assess the quality of the generated test cases by empirically evaluating their coverage with respect to observed user interactions and code. We also measure the plausibility of the distribution of the events in the generated test sets using the Kullback-Leibler divergence.This work is financed by the Northern Regional Operational Program, Portugal 2020 and the European Union, through the European Regional Development Fund (https://www.rtcom.pt/wordpress/rute-randtech-update-and-test-environment/). Also, this work is financed by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within project UIDB/50014/2020

Experiences on teaching alloy with an automated assessment platform

This paper presents Alloy4Fun, a web application that enables online editing and sharing of Alloy models and instances (including dynamic ones developed with the Electrum extension), to be used mainly in an educational context. By introducing secret paragraphs and commands in the models, Alloy4Fun allows the distribution and automated assessment of simple specification challenges, a mechanism that enables students to learn the language at their own pace. Alloy4Fun stores all versions of shared and analyzed models, as well as derivation trees that depict how they evolved over time: this wealth of information can be mined by researchers or tutors to identify, for example, learning breakdowns in the class or typical mistakes made by Alloy users. Alloy4Fun has been used in formal methods graduate courses for two years and for the latest edition we present results regarding its adoption by the students, as well as preliminary insights regarding the most common bottlenecks when learning Alloy (and Electrum).We would like to thank Daniel Jackson for the helpful comments and suggestions about the design of Alloy4Fun. This work is financed by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within project UIDB/50014/2020. The third and forth authors were financed by the ERDF – European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 Programme and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016826. The second author was also supported by the FCT sabbatical grant with reference SFRH/BSAB/143106/2018

New insights into the genetic etiology of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias

Characterization of the genetic landscape of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementias (ADD) provides a unique opportunity for a better understanding of the associated pathophysiological processes. We performed a two-stage genome-wide association study totaling 111,326 clinically diagnosed/'proxy' AD cases and 677,663 controls. We found 75 risk loci, of which 42 were new at the time of analysis. Pathway enrichment analyses confirmed the involvement of amyloid/tau pathways and highlighted microglia implication. Gene prioritization in the new loci identified 31 genes that were suggestive of new genetically associated processes, including the tumor necrosis factor alpha pathway through the linear ubiquitin chain assembly complex. We also built a new genetic risk score associated with the risk of future AD/dementia or progression from mild cognitive impairment to AD/dementia. The improvement in prediction led to a 1.6- to 1.9-fold increase in AD risk from the lowest to the highest decile, in addition to effects of age and the APOE ε4 allele

ENACTEST project - European Innovation Alliance for Testing Education

The significance of software testing cannot be overstated, as its poor implementation often leads to problematic and faulty software applications. This problem comes from a mismatch in the required industry skills, the learning requirements of students, and the current teaching methodology for testing in higher and vocational education institutes. This project aims to create seamless teaching materials for testing education that is in line with industry standards and learning needs. Considering the diverse socioeconomic environment that will benefit from this project, a consortium of partners ranging from universities to small businesses has been assembled. The project starts with research into sense-making and cognitive models for learning and doing testing. Additionally, a study will be conducted to identify the training and knowledge transfer requirements for testing within the industry. Based on the research findings and study outcomes, teaching capsules for software testing will be developed, taking into account the cognitive models of students and the needs of the industry. After the effectiveness validation of these capsules, these capsules and the instructional material will be available to other researchers and professors to improve testing education.</p

ENACTEST project - European Innovation Alliance for Testing Education

The significance of software testing cannot be overstated, as its poor implementation often leads to problematic and faulty software applications. This problem comes from a mismatch in the required industry skills, the learning requirements of students, and the current teaching methodology for testing in higher and vocational education institutes. This project aims to create seamless teaching materials for testing education that is in line with industry standards and learning needs. Considering the diverse socioeconomic environment that will benefit from this project, a consortium of partners ranging from universities to small businesses has been assembled. The project starts with research into sense-making and cognitive models for learning and doing testing. Additionally, a study will be conducted to identify the training and knowledge transfer requirements for testing within the industry. Based on the research findings and study outcomes, teaching capsules for software testing will be developed, taking into account the cognitive models of students and the needs of the industry. After the effectiveness validation of these capsules, these capsules and the instructional material will be available to other researchers and professors to improve testing education.</p