Motivation: The question of what combination of attributes drives the adoption of a particular software technology is critical to developers. It determines both those technologies that receive wide support from the community and those which may be abandoned, thus rendering developers' investments worthless. Aim and Context: We model software technology adoption by developers and provide insights on specific technology attributes that are associated with better visibility among alternative technologies. Approach: We leverage social contagion theory and statistical modeling to identify, define, and test empirically measures that are likely to affect software adoption. More specifically, we leverage a large collection of open source version control repositories to construct a software dependency chain for a specific set of R language source-code files. We formulate logistic regression models, to investigate the combination of technological attributes that drive adoption among competing data frame implementations in the R language: tidy and data.table. We quantify key project attributes that might affect adoption and also characteristics of developers making the selection. Results: We find that a quick response to raised issues, a larger number of overall deployments, and a larger number of high-quality StackExchange questions are associated with higher adoption. Decision makers tend to adopt the technology that is closer to them in the technical dependency network and in author collaborations networks while meeting their performance needs. Future work: We hope that our methodology encompassing social contagion that captures both rational and irrational preferences and the elucidation of key measures from large collections of version control data provides a general path toward increasing visibility, driving better informed decisions, and producing more sustainable and widely adopted software
The vast majority of the long tail of scientific software, the myriads of tools that implement the many analysis and visualization methods for different scientific fields, is highly specialized, purpose-built for a research project, and has to rely on community uptake and reuse for its continued development and maintenance. Although uptake cannot be controlled over even guaranteed, some of the key factors that influence whether new users or developers decide to adopt an existing tool or start a new one are about how easy or difficult it is to use or enhance a tool for a purpose for which it wa…
Python is a popular, widely used, and general-purpose programming language. In spite of its ever-growing community, researchers have not performed much analysis on Python's topics, trends, and technologies which provides insights for developers about Python community trends and main issues. In this article, we examine the main topics related to this language being discussed by developers on one of the most popular Q\&A websites, Stack Overflow, as well as temporal trends through mining 2461876 posts. To be more useful for the software engineers, we study what Python provides as the alternative…
The selection of software technologies is an important but complex task. We consider developers of JavaScript (JS) applications, for whom the assessment of JS libraries has become difficult and time-consuming due to the growing number of technology options available. A common strategy is to browse software repositories via search engines (e.g., NPM, or Google), although it brings some problems. First, given a technology need, the engines might return a long list of results, which often causes information overload issues. Second, the results should be ranked according to criteria of interest fo…
We describe an intelligent assistant based on mining existing software repositories to help the developer interactively create checkable specifications of code. To be most useful we apply this at the subsystem level, that is chunks of code of 1000-10000 lines that can be standalone or integrated into an existing application to provide additional functionality or capabilities. The resultant specifications include both a syntactic description of what should be written and a semantic specification of what it should do, initially in the form of test cases. The generated specification is designed t…
With numerous specialised technologies available to industry, it has become increasingly frequent for computer systems to be composed of heterogeneous components built over, and using, different technologies and languages. While this enables developers to use the appropriate technologies for specific contexts, it becomes more challenging to ensure the correctness of the overall system. In this paper we propose a framework to enable extensible technology agnostic runtime verification and we present an extension of polyLarva, a runtime-verification tool able to handle the monitoring of heterogen…
Scrum is one of the most used frameworks for agile software development because of its potential improvements in productivity, quality, and client satisfaction. Academia has also focussed on teaching Scrum practices to prepare students to face common software engineering challenges and facilitate their insertion in professional contexts. Furthermore, advances in learning technologies currently offer many virtual learning environments to enhance learning in many ways. Their capability to consider the individual learner preferences has led a shift to more personalised training approaches, requir…
Machine Learning approaches are good in solving problems that have less information. In most cases, the software domain problems characterize as a process of learning that depend on the various circumstances and changes accordingly. A predictive model is constructed by using machine learning approaches and classified them into defective and non-defective modules. Machine learning techniques help developers to retrieve useful information after the classification and enable them to analyse data from different perspectives. Machine learning techniques are proven to be useful in terms of software …
Web-based application developers face a dizzying array of platforms, languages, frameworks and technical artifacts to choose from. We survey, classify, and compare technologies supporting Web application development. The classification is based on (1) foundational technologies; (2)integration with other information sources; and (3) dynamic content generation. We further survey and classify software engineering techniques and tools that have been adopted from traditional programming into Web programming. We conclude that, although the infrastructure problems of the Web have largely been solved,…
Software development is a complex activity which depends on diverse technologies and people's expertise. The approaches to developing software highly depend on these different characteristics, which are the context developers are subject to. This context contains massive knowledge, and not capturing it means knowledge is continuously lost. Although extensively researched, context in software development is still not explicit, nor proposed into a broader view of the context needed by software developers and tools. Therefore, developers' productivity is affected, as the ability to reuse this ric…
Alerted by our previous research as well as media reports and discussions in online forums about ageism in the software industry, we set out to study the public discourse around age and software development. With a focus on the USA, we analyzed popular online articles and related discussions on Hacker News through the lens of (perceived) employability issues and potential mitigation strategies. Besides rather controversial strategies such as disguising age-related aspects in résumés or undergoing plastic surgeries to appear young, we highlight the importance of keeping up-to-date, specializing…
Software Engineering (SE) experiments are traditionally analyzed with statistical tests (e.g., t-tests, ANOVAs, etc.) that assume equally spread data across treatments (i.e., the homogeneity of variances assumption). Differences across treatments' variances in SE are not seen as an opportunity to gain insights on technology performance, but instead, as a hindrance to analyze the data. We have studied the role of variance in mature experimental disciplines such as medicine. We illustrate the extent to which variance may inform on technology performance by means of simulation. We analyze a real-…
An increase in diverse technology stacks and third-party library usage has led developers to inevitably switch technologies. To assist these developers, maintainers have started to release their libraries to multiple technologies, i.e., a cross-ecosystem library. Our goal is to explore the extent to which these cross-ecosystem libraries are intertwined between ecosystems. We perform a large-scale empirical study of 1.1 million libraries from five different software ecosystems, i.e., PyPI for Python, CRAN for R, Maven for Java, RubyGems for Ruby, and NPM for JavaScript to identify 4,146 GitHub …
Using libraries in applications has helped developers reduce the costs of reinventing already existing code. However, an increase in diverse technology stacks and third-party library usage has led developers to inevitably switch technologies and search for similar libraries implemented in the new technology. To assist with searching for these replacement libraries, maintainers have started to release their libraries to multiple ecosystems. Our goal is to explore the extent to which these libraries are intertwined between ecosystems. We perform a large-scale empirical study of 1.1 million libra…
The context of the reported research is the documentation of software technologies such as object/relational mappers, web-application frameworks, or code generators. We assume that documentation should model a macroscopic view on usage scenarios of technologies in terms of involved artifacts, leveraged software languages, data flows, conformance relationships, and others. In previous work, we referred to such documentation also as 'linguistic architecture'. The corresponding models may also be referred to as 'megamodels' while adopting this term from the technological space of modeling/model-d…
Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of service-oriented computing technologies. The boom of Web services increases software developers' selection burden in developing new service-based systems such as mashups. Timely recommending appropriate component services for developers to build new mashups has become a fundamental problem in service-oriented software engineering. Existing service recommendation approaches are mainly designed for mashup development in the single-round scenario. It is hard for them to effectively update recommendation results according to developers' requirem…
Software systems evolve over their lifetime. Changing conditions, such as requirements or customer requests make it inevitable for developers to perform adjustments to the underlying code base. Especially in the context of open source software where everybody can contribute, requirements can change over time and new user groups may be addressed. In particular, research software is often not structured with a maintainable and extensible architecture. In combination with obsolescent technologies, this is a challenging task for new developers, especially, when students are involved. In this paper…
Supporting the Adoption of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies through Requirements Engineering
Blekinge Institute of Technology（布莱金厄理工学院）；fortiss GmbH（fortiss有限公司）；Google（谷歌）；MAYA Data Privacy Limited（MAYA数据隐私有限公司）；adidas AG（阿迪达斯股份公司）；JAGGAER LLC（JAGGAER有限责任公司）
Over the last few years, the arena of mobile application development has expanded considerably beyond the balance of the worldś software markets. With the growing number of mobile software companies, and the mounting sophistication of smartphones\' technology, developers have been building several categories of applications on dissimilar platforms. However, developers confront several challenges through the implementation of mobile application projects. In particular, there is a lack of consolidated systems that are competent to provide developers with personalised services promptly and effici…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
COVID-19 has had a profound impact on the lives of all human beings. Emerging technologies have made significant contributions to the fight against the pandemic. An extensive review of the application of technology will help facilitate future research and technology development to provide better solutions for future pandemics. In contrast to the extensive surveys of academic communities that have already been conducted, this study explores the IT community of practice. Using GitHub as the study target, we analyzed the main functionalities of the projects submitted during the pandemic. This stu…
Quantum computing is no longer only a scientific interest but is rapidly becoming an industrially available technology that can potentially overcome the limits of classical computation. Over the last years, all major companies have provided frameworks and programming languages that allow developers to create their quantum applications. This shift has led to the definition of a new discipline called quantum software engineering, which is demanded to define novel methods for engineering large-scale quantum applications. While the research community is successfully embracing this call, we notice …
With smartphone technologies enhanced way of interacting with the world around us, it has also been paving the way for easier access to our private and personal information. This has been amplified by the existence of numerous embedded sensors utilized by millions of apps to users. While mobile apps have positively transformed many aspects of our lives with new functionalities, many of these applications are taking advantage of vast amounts of data, privacy apps, a form of Privacy Enhancing Technology can be an effective privacy management tool for smartphones. To protect against vulnerabiliti…
FZI Research Center for Information Technology（FZI信息技术研究中心）；fortiss GmbH（福蒂斯有限公司）；Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA)（弗劳恩霍夫制造工程与自动化研究所（IPA））
This paper presents a novel ontology-driven software engineering approach for the development of industrial robotics control software. It introduces the ReApp architecture that synthesizes model-driven engineering with semantic technologies to facilitate the development and reuse of ROS-based components and applications. In ReApp, we show how different ontological classification systems for hardware, software, and capabilities help developers in discovering suitable software components for their tasks and in applying them correctly. The proposed model-driven tooling enables developers to work …
