Testing software product lines

Two studies of testing practices for software product lines identify gaps between required techniques and existing approaches in the available literature. This Web extra offers extra details for the main article (specifically, the bibliography for the two studies described)

A Deep Dive on the Impact of COVID-19 in Software Development

Context: COVID-19 pandemic has impacted different business sectors around the world. Objective. This study investigates the impact of COVID-19 on software projects and software development professionals. Method: We conducted a mining software repository study based on 100 GitHub projects developed in Java using ten different metrics. Next, we surveyed 279 software development professionals for better understanding the impact of COVID-19 on daily activities and wellbeing. Results: We identified 12 observations related to productivity, code quality, and wellbeing. Conclusions: Our findings highlight that the impact of COVID-19 is not binary (reduce productivity vs. increase productivity) but rather a spectrum. For many of our observations, substantial proportions of respondents have differing opinions from each other. We believe that more research is needed to uncover specific conditions that cause certain outcomes to be more prevalent

Accounting Models for Cloud Computing: A Mapping Study

<p>SILVA, F. A. P. ; SILVEIRA NETO, P. A. M. ; ASSAD, R. E. ; GARCIA, Vinicius Cardoso ; TRINTA, Fernando Antonio Mota . Accounting Models for Cloud Computing: A Mapping Study. In: International Conference on Grid Computing and Applications (GCA 2012), 2012, Las Vegas. Proceedings of the International Conference on Grid Computing and Applications (GCA 2012), 2012.</p> <p>Abstract. Cloud services change the economics of computing by enabling users to pay only for the capacity that they actually use. In this context, cloud providers have their own accounting models including their billing mechanisms and pricing schemes to achieve this efficient pay-as-you-go model. Thus it is important to study this heterogeneity aiming to map out the existing accounting models to become possible new proposals or future standardizations. Therefore, this paper focuses on mapping accounting models for cloud computing, where a mapping study process was undertaken, and a total of 23 primary studies were considered, which evidenced 5 accounting models, 23 different pricing scheme types and 4 primary studies related to SLA (Service-Level Agreement) composition. Although the significant number of studies found address grid computing it was possible to identify one accounting model which was very complete from different points of view for cloud environments.</p

On the Reliability of Mapping Studies in Software Engineering

Background: Systematic literature reviews and systematic mapping studies are becoming increasingly common in software engineering, and hence it becomes even more important to better understand the reliability of such studies. Objective: This paper presents a study of two systematic mapping studies to evaluate the reliability of mapping studies and point out some challenges related to this type of study in software engineering. Method: The research is based on an in-depth case study of two published mapping studies on software product line testing. Results: We found that despite the fact that the two studies are addressing the same topic, there are quite a number of differences when it comes to papers included and in terms of classification of the papers included in the two mapping studies. Conclusions: From this we conclude that although mapping studies are important, their reliability cannot simply be taken for granted. Based on the findings we also provide four conjectures that further research has to address to make secondary studies (systematic mapping studies and systematic literature reviews) even more valuable to both researchers and practitioners

Twenty-eight years of component-based software engineering

The idea of developing software components was envisioned more than forty years ago. In the past two decades, Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) has emerged as a distinguishable approach in software engineering, and it has attracted the attention of many researchers, which has led to many results being published in the research literature. There is a huge amount of knowledge encapsulated in conferences and journals targeting this area, but a systematic analysis of that knowledge is missing. For this reason, we aim to investigate the state-of-the-art of the CBSE area through a detailed literature review. To do this, 1231 studies dating from 1984 to 2012 were analyzed. Using the available evidence, this paper addresses five dimensions of CBSE: main objectives, research topics, application domains, research intensity and applied research methods. The main objectives found were to increase productivity, save costs and improve quality. The most addressed application domains are homogeneously divided between commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS), distributed and embedded systems. Intensity of research showed a considerable increase in the last fourteen years. In addition to the analysis, this paper also synthesizes the available evidence, identifies open issues and points out areas that call for further research

Software product line scoping and requirements engineering in a small and medium-sized enterprise:an industrial case study

Software Product Line (SPL) engineering has been applied in several domains, especially in large-scale software development. Given the benefits experienced and reported, SPL engineering has increasingly garnered interest from small to medium-sized companies. It is possible to find a wide range of studies reporting on the challenges of running a SPL project in large companies. However, very little reports exist that consider the situation for small to medium-sized enterprises and these studies try develop universal truths for SPL without lessons learned from empirical evidence need to be contextualized. This study is a step towards bridging this gap in contextual evidence by characterizing the weaknesses discovered in the Scoping (SC) and Requirements (RE) disciplines of SPL. Moreover, in this study we conducted a case study in a Small to Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) to justify the use of agile methods when introducing the SPL SC and RE disciplines through the characterization of their bottlenecks. The results of the characterization indicated that ineffective communication and collaboration, long iteration cycles, and the absence of adaptability and flexibility can increase the effort and reduce motivation during project development. These issues can be mitigated by agile methods