Software processes improvement (SPI) is a challenging task, as many different stakeholders, project settings, and contexts and goals need to be considered. SPI projects are often operated in a complex and volatile environment and, thus, require a sound management that is resource-intensive requiring many stakeholders to contribute to the process assessment, analysis, design, realisation, and deployment. Although there exist many valuable SPI approaches, none address the needs of both process engineers and project managers. This article presents an Artefact-based Software Process Improvement & Management approach (ArSPI) that closes this gap. ArSPI was developed and tested across several SPI projects in large organisations in Germany and Eastern Europe. The approach further encompasses a template for initiating, performing, and managing SPI projects by defining a set of 5 key artefacts and 24 support artefacts. We present ArSPI and discus results of its validation indicating ArSPI to be a helpful instrument to set up and steer SPI projects.
Empirical software engineering is concerned with the design and analysis of empirical studies that include software products, processes, and resources. Optimization is a form of data analytics in support of human decision-making. Optimization methods are aimed to find the best decision alternatives. Empirical studies serve both as a model and as data input for optimization. In addition, the complexity of the models used for optimization trigger further studies on explaining and validating the results in real-world scenarios. The goal of this chapter is to give an overview of the as-is and of t…
Clinical software has become a significant contribution to support clinical management and intra-hospital processes. In this regard, the success or failure of clinical software is mostly yielded on a suitable requirements elicitation process. Although several techniques and approaches address this process, the complexity of clinical services and the variety of clinicians involved in those services make it challenging to elicit requirements. To address this concern, in our previous work, we have proposed the D&I Framework. This collaborative technique translates clinical priorities into guideli…
Context: Over the past decade Software Engineering research has seen a steady increase in survey-based studies, and there are several guidelines providing support for those willing to carry out surveys. The need for auditing survey research has been raised in the literature. Checklists have been used to assess different types of empirical studies, such as experiments and case studies. Objective: This paper proposes a checklist to support the design and assessment of survey-based research in software engineering grounded in existing guidelines for survey research. We further evaluated the check…
Today, software systems have a significant role in various domains among which are healthcare, entertainment, transport and logistics, and many more. It is only natural that with this increasing dependency on software, the number of software systems increases. Additionally, these systems become more and more complex. All this leads to a rise in the number of software faults also known as bugs. As a result, the ability to locate the source of a bug (e.g. a file or a commit) is vital for the development and maintenance of efficient software solutions. Bug localization refers to the automated pro…
Studying the human factors that impact on software development, and assigning individuals with specific competencies and qualities to particular software roles, have been shown to aid software project performance. For instance, prior evidence suggests that extroverted software project leaders are most successful. Role assignment based on individuals' competencies and behaviors may be especially relevant in distributed software development contexts where teams are often affected by distance, cultural, and personality issues. Project leaders in these environments need to possess high levels of i…
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) is a popular quality assurance technique in software engineering. However, integrating SAST tools into industry-level product development and security assessment poses various technical and managerial challenges. In this work, we reported a longitudinal case study of adopting SAST as a part of a human-driven security assessment for an open-source e-government project. We described how SASTs are selected, evaluated, and combined into a novel approach for software security assessment. The approach was preliminarily evaluated using semi-structured interv…
Several important aspects of software product quality can be evaluated using dynamic metrics that effectively capture and reflect the software's true runtime behavior. While the extent of research in this field is still relatively limited, particularly when compared to research on static metrics, the field is growing, given the inherent advantages of dynamic metrics. The aim of this work is to systematically investigate the body of research on dynamic software metrics to identify issues associated with their selection, design and implementation. Mapping studies are being increasingly used in s…
In any sufficiently complex software system there are experts, having a deeper understanding of parts of the system than others. However, it is not always clear who these experts are and which particular parts of the system they can provide help with. We propose a framework to elicit the expertise of developers and recommend experts by analyzing complexity measures over time. Furthermore, teams can detect those parts of the software for which currently no, or only few experts exist and take preventive actions to keep the collective code knowledge and ownership high. We employed the developed a…
In the era of revolution, the development of softwares are increasing daily. The quality of software impacts the most in software development. To ensure the quality of the software it needs to be reviewed and updated. The effectiveness of the code review is that it ensures the quality of software and makes it updated. Code review is the best process that helps the developers to develop a system errorless. This report contains two different code review papers to be evaluated and find the influences that can affect the code reviewing process. The reader can easily understand the factor of the co…
Requirements elicitation is an important phase of any software project: the errors in requirements are more expensive to fix than the errors introduced at later stages of software life cycle. Nevertheless, many projects do not devote sufficient time to requirements. Automated requirements generation can improve the quality of software projects. In this article we have accomplished the first step of the research on this topic: we have applied the vanilla sentence autoencoder to the sentence generation task and evaluated its performance. The generated sentences are not plausible English and cont…
Context. Systematic Reviews (SRs) are means for collecting and synthesizing evidence from the identification and analysis of relevant studies from multiple sources. To this aim, they use a well-defined methodology meant to mitigate the risks of biases and ensure repeatability for later updates. SRs, however, involve significant effort. Goal. The goal of this paper is to introduce a novel methodology that reduces the amount of manual tedious tasks involved in SRs while taking advantage of the value provided by human expertise. Method. Starting from current methodologies for SRs, we replaced the…
Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；University of Tehran（德黑兰大学）
NLP-based models have been increasingly incorporated to address SE problems. These models are either employed in the SE domain with little to no change, or they are greatly tailored to source code and its unique characteristics. Many of these approaches are considered to be outperforming or complementing existing solutions. However, an important question arises here: "Are these models evaluated fairly and consistently in the SE community?". To answer this question, we reviewed how NLP-based models for SE problems are being evaluated by researchers. The findings indicate that currently there is…
Effectiveness of LLM-based Software Diversity for Reliability Improvement -- an Empirical Study
University of Coimbra, CISUC/LASI（科英布拉大学，CISUC/LASI）；Centre for Software Reliability（软件可靠性中心）；Department of Informatics Engineering（信息工程系）；Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）；City St George’s, University of London（伦敦城市圣乔治大学）
Software development effort estimation is considered a fundamental task for software development life cycle as well as for managing project cost, time and quality. Therefore, accurate estimation is a substantial factor in projects success and reducing the risks. In recent years, software effort estimation has received a considerable amount of attention from researchers and became a challenge for software industry. In the last two decades, many researchers and practitioners proposed statistical and machine learning-based models for software effort estimation. In this work, Firefly Algorithm is …
