A systematic literature review on the semi-automatic configuration of extended product lines

Product line engineering has become essential in mass customisation given its ability to reduce production costs and time to market, and to improve product quality and customer satisfaction. In product line literature, mass customisation is known as product configuration. Currently, there are multiple heterogeneous contributions in the product line configuration domain. However, a secondary study that shows an overview of the progress, trends, and gaps faced by researchers in this domain is still missing. In this context, we provide a comprehensive systematic literature review to discover which approaches exist to support the configuration process of extended product lines and how these approaches perform in practice. Extend product lines consider non-functional properties in the product line modelling. We compare and classify a total of 66 primary studies from 2000 to 2016. Mainly, we give an in-depth view of techniques used by each work, how these techniques are evaluated and their main shortcomings. As main results, our review identified (i) the need to improve the quality of the evaluation of existing approaches, (ii) a lack of hybrid solutions to support multiple configuration constraints, and (iii) a need to improve scalability and performance conditions

Breaking Bad? Semantic versioning and impact of breaking changes in Maven Central

ust like any software, libraries evolve to incorporate new features, bug fixes, security patches, and refactorings. However, when a library evolves, it may break the contract previously established with its clients by introducing Breaking Changes (BCs) in its API. These changes might trigger compile-time, link-time, or run-time errors in client code. As a result, clients may hesitate to upgrade their dependencies, raising security concerns and making future upgrades even more difficult.Understanding how libraries evolve helps client developers to know which changes to expect and where to expect them, and library developers to understand how they might impact their clients. In the most extensive study to date, Raemaekers et al. investigate to what extent developers of Java libraries hosted on the Maven Central Repository (MCR) follow semantic versioning conventions to signal the introduction of BCs and how these changes impact client projects. Their results suggest that BCs are widespread without regard for semantic versioning, with a significant impact on this http URL this paper, we conduct an external and differentiated replication study of their work. We identify and address some limitations of the original protocol and expand the analysis to a new corpus spanning seven more years of the MCR. We also present a novel static analysis tool for Java bytecode, Maracas, which provides us with: (i) the set of all BCs between two versions of a library; and (ii) the set of locations in client code impacted by individual BCs. Our key findings, derived from the analysis of 119, 879 library upgrades and 293, 817 clients, contrast with the original study and show that 83.4% of these upgrades do comply with semantic versioning. Furthermore, we observe that the tendency to comply with semantic versioning has significantly increased over time. Finally, we find that most BCs affect code that is not used by any client, and that only 7.9% of all clients are affected by BCs. These findings should help (i) library developers to understand and anticipate the impact of their changes; (ii) libra

Autoantibodies against type I IFNs in patients with life-threatening COVID-19

Interindividual clinical variability in the course of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection is vast. We report that at least 101 of 987 patients with life-threatening coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pneumonia had neutralizing immunoglobulin G (IgG) autoantibodies (auto-Abs) against interferon-w (IFN-w) (13 patients), against the 13 types of IFN-a (36), or against both (52) at the onset of critical disease; a few also had auto-Abs against the other three type I IFNs. The auto-Abs neutralize the ability of the corresponding type I IFNs to block SARS-CoV-2 infection in vitro. These auto-Abs were not found in 663 individuals with asymptomatic or mild SARS-CoV-2 infection and were present in only 4 of 1227 healthy individuals. Patients with auto-Abs were aged 25 to 87 years and 95 of the 101 were men. A B cell autoimmune phenocopy of inborn errors of type I IFN immunity accounts for life-threatening COVID-19 pneumonia in at least 2.6% of women and 12.5% of men

usethesource/rascal-eclipse: 0.23.0

Eclipse IMP based IDE for the Rascal meta-programming language. See rascal project for Wiki, Issues and such