Software products have become an integral part of human lives, and therefore need to account for human values such as privacy, fairness, and equality. Ignoring human values in software development leads to biases and violations of human values: racial biases in recidivism assessment and facial recognition software are well-known examples of such issues. One of the most critical steps in software development is Software Release Planning (SRP), where decisions are made about the presence or absence of the requirements (features) in the software. Such decisions are primarily guided by the economic value of the requirements, ignoring their impacts on a broader range of human values. That may result in ignoring (selecting) requirements that positively (negatively) impact human values, increasing the risk of value breaches in the software. To address this, we have proposed an Integer Programming approach to considering human values in software release planning. In this regard, an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model has been proposed, that explicitly accounts for human values in finding an "optimal" subset of the requirements. The ILP model exploits the algebraic structure of fuzzy graphs to capture dependencies and conflicts among the values of the requirements.
Context: In regulated domains like automotive, release planning is a complex process. The agreement between traditional product development processes for hardware as well as mechanic systems and agile development approaches for software development is a major challenge. Especially the creation and synchronization of a release plan is challenging. Objective: The aim of this work is to present identified stakeholders of a release plan as an appropriate approach to create transparency in release planning in the automotive domain. Method: Action research to elaborate relevant stakeholders for rele…
Considering user preferences is a determining factor in optimizing the value of a software release. This is due to the fact that user preferences for software features specify the values of those features and consequently determine the value of the release. Certain features of a software however, may encourage or discourage users to prefer (select or use) other features. As such, value of a software feature could be positively or negatively influenced by other features. Such influences are known as Value-related Feature (Requirement) Dependencies. Value-related dependencies need to be consider…
Software testing process consists of activities that implemented after it is planned and including to document related testing activities. Test processes must be applied necessarily for able to clearly see the quality of software, the degree of reliability, whether it is ready for delivery, the degree of effectiveness and remains of how much testing. One of the most important phase of these processes is test planning activities. Test planning activities directly affects the project's success in software projects. In this study, software testing process, and test planning activities carried out…
Software Release Planning (SRP) is to find, for the software, a subset of the requirements with the highest value while respecting the budget. The value of a requirement however may, to various degrees, depend on selecting or ignoring other requirements. However, existing SRP models ignore either Value-Related Dependencies altogether or the strengths of those dependencies even if they consider them. This paper presents an Integer Programming model for software release planning, which considers the variances of strengths of positive and negative value-related dependencies among software require…
Nowadays, quickly evolving and delivering software through a continuous delivery process is a competitive advantage and a way to keep software updated in response to the frequent changes in customers' requirements. However, the faster the software release cycle, the more challenging to track software evolution. In this paper, we propose Releasy, a tool that aims at supporting projects that use continuous delivery by generating and reporting their release provenance. The provenance generated by Releasy allows graphical visualization of the software evolution and supports queries to discover imp…
Maximizing satisfaction from offering features as part of the upcoming release(s) is different from minimizing dissatisfaction gained from not offering features. This asymmetric behavior has never been utilized for product release planning. We study Asymmetric Release Planning (ARP) by accommodating asymmetric feature evaluation. We formulated and solved ARP as a bi-criteria optimization problem. In its essence, it is the search for optimized trade-offs between maximum stakeholder satisfaction and minimum dissatisfaction. Different techniques including a continuous variant of Kano analysis are…
Empirical evidence regarding the connection between group development (maturity) and the success of software development teams is lacking. The purpose of this research is to gain a qualitative and quantitative understanding of how velocity and planning effectiveness of software teams connect to a group development model. The Group Development Questionnaire was given to 19 software developers from 4 work groups to assess their group development maturity. The work groups' responses to the survey were checked for correlation with development velocity and planning effectiveness. Semistructured int…
The Object-Oriented (OO) software system evolves over the time to meet the new requirements. Based on the initial release of software, the continuous modification of software code leads to software evolution. Software needs to evolve over the time to meet the new user's requirements. Software companies often develop variant software of the original one depends on customers' needs. The main hypothesis of this paper states that the software when it evolves over the time, its code continues to grow, change and become more complex. This paper proposes an automatic approach (Iris) to examine the pr…
Distributions of open source software packages dedicated to specific programming languages facilitate software development by allowing software projects to depend on the functionality provided by such reusable packages. The health of a software project can be affected by the maturity of the packages on which it depends. The version numbers of the used package releases provide an indication of their maturity. Packages with a 0.y.z version number are commonly assumed to be under initial development, suggesting that they are likely to be less stable, and depending on them may be considered as les…
This paper presents Tartarian, a tool that supports maintenance of software with long-running, multi-release branches in distributed version control systems. When new maintenance code, such as bug fixes and code improvement, is committed into a branch, it is likely that such code can be applied or reused with some other branches. To do so, a developer may manually identify a commit and cherry pick it. Tartarian can support this activity by providing commit hashtags, which the developer uses as metadata to specify their intentions when committing the code. With these tags, Tartarian uses depend…
This article describes the goals and objectives of developing a software complex for planning the treatment of dentoalveolar anomalies, the architecture of the software complex as interacting components for treatment planning, as well as the principle of using algorithms using convolutional neural networks within the software complex for a component that solves the problem of decoding a teleradiographic image.
Reading computer program code and documentation written by others is, we are told, one of the best ways to learn the art of writing intelligible and maintainable code and documentation. The software resurrection exercise, introduced in this paper, requires a motivated learner to compile and test a historical release (e.g. 20 years old) version of a well maintained and widely adopted open source software on a modern hardware and software platform. This exercise concludes by writing a critique based on issues encountered while compiling and testing a historical software release on a hardware and…
Software comes in releases. An implausible change to software is something that has never been changed in prior releases. When planning how to reduce defects, it is better to use plausible changes, i.e., changes with some precedence in the prior releases. To demonstrate these points, this paper compares several defect reduction planning tools. LIME is a local sensitivity analysis tool that can report the fewest changes needed to alter the classification of some code module (e.g., from "defective" to "non-defective"). TimeLIME is a new tool, introduced in this paper, that improves LIME by restr…
The release note is an essential software artifact of open-source software that documents crucial information about changes, such as new features and bug fixes. With the help of release notes, both developers and users could have a general understanding of the latest version without browsing the source code. However, it is a daunting and time-consuming job for developers to produce release notes. Although prior studies have provided some automatic approaches, they generate release notes mainly by extracting information from code changes. This will result in language-specific and not being gene…
This empirical paper examines the adoption of PHP releases in the the contemporary world wide web. Motivated by continuous software engineering practices and software traceability improvements for release engineering, the empirical analysis is based on big data collected by web crawling. According to the empirical results based on discrete time-homogeneous Markov chain (DTMC) analysis, (i)~adoption of PHP releases has been relatively uniform across the domains observed, (ii) which tend to also adopt either old or new PHP releases relatively infrequently. Although there are outliers, (iii) down…
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Institute of Architecture of Application Systems, University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学应用系统架构研究所）
Artificial Intelligence (AI) planning is a flourishing research and development discipline that provides powerful tools for searching a course of action that achieves some user goal. While these planning tools show excellent performance on benchmark planning problems, they represent challenging software systems when it comes to their use and integration in real-world applications. In fact, even in-depth understanding of their internal mechanisms does not guarantee that one can successfully set up, use and manipulate existing planning tools. We contribute toward alleviating this situation by pr…
Software release development process, that we refer to as "release trajectory", involves development activities that are usually sorted in different categories, such as incorporating new features, improving software, or fixing bugs, and associated to "issues". Release trajectory management is a difficult and crucial task. Managers must be aware of every aspect of the development process for managing the software-related issues. Issue Tracking Systems (ITS) play a central role in supporting the management of release trajectory. These systems, which support reporting and tracking issues of diffe…
In the last few years it has been seen that many software vendors have started delivering projects incrementally with very short release cycles. Best examples of success of this approach has been Ubuntu Operating system that has a 6 months release cycle and popular web browsers such as Google Chrome, Opera, Mozilla Firefox. However there is very little knowledge available to the project managers to validate the chosen release cycle length. We propose a decision support system that helps to validate and estimate release cycle length in the early development phase by assuming that release cycle …
The current generation of software analytics tools are mostly prediction algorithms (e.g. support vector machines, naive bayes, logistic regression, etc). While prediction is useful, after prediction comes planning about what actions to take in order to improve quality. This research seeks methods that generate demonstrably useful guidance on "what to do" within the context of a specific software project. Specifically, we propose XTREE (for within-project planning) and BELLTREE (for cross-project planning) to generating plans that can improve software quality. Each such plan has the property t…
Release management is one of the most important software processes and is a set of processes that includes the compilation, configuration, and management of software versions in different environments. In recent years, changes in processes, technologies, and tools and changes in practices and understanding have paved the way for more effective, efficient, sustainable, reusable models and methods in this field. The purpose of this study is to examine the DevOps idea to produce a flow, highlight their benefits, and investigate with a model how these philosophies, which are two of the most import…
Context:The extent of post-release use of software affects the number of faults, thus biasing quality metrics and adversely affecting associated decisions. The proprietary nature of usage data limited deeper exploration of this subject in the past. Objective: To determine how software faults and software use are related and how an accurate quality measure can be designed. Method: New users, usage intensity, usage frequency, exceptions, and release date and duration measured for complex proprietary mobile applications for Android and iOS. Utilized Bayesian Network and Random Forest models to ex…
A software release note is one of the essential documents in the software development life cycle. The software release contains a set of information, e.g., bug fixes and security fixes. Release notes are used in different phases, e.g., requirement engineering, software testing and release management. Different types of practitioners (e.g., project managers and clients) get benefited from the release notes to understand the overview of the latest release. As a result, several studies have been done about release notes production and usage in practice. However, two significant problems (e.g., du…
Organizations that develop software have recognized that software process models are particularly useful for maintaining a high standard of quality. In the last decade, simulations of software processes were used in several settings and environments. This paper gives a short overview of the benefits of software process simulation and describes the development of a discrete-event model, a technique rarely used before in that field. The model introduced in this paper captures the behavior of a detailed code inspection process. It aims at reducing the risks inherent in implementing inspection pro…
Release notes (RNs) summarize main changes between two consecutive software versions and serve as a central source of information when users upgrade software. While producing high quality RNs can be hard and poses a variety of challenges to developers, a comprehensive empirical understanding of these challenges is still lacking. In this paper, we bridge this knowledge gap by manually analyzing 1,731 latest GitHub issues to build a comprehensive taxonomy of RN issues with four dimensions: Content, Presentation, Accessibility, and Production. Among these issues, nearly half (48.47%) of them focu…
We advocate for a paradigm shift in supporting free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) ecosystem maintenance, from focusing on individual projects to monitoring a whole organic system of the entire FLOSS ecosystem, which we call software meta-maintenance. We discuss challenges of building a global source code management system, a global issue management system, and FLOSS human capital index, based on the blockchain technologies.
Managing large-scale software products is a complex software engineering task. The automation of the software development, release and distribution process is most beneficial in the large collaborations, where the big number of developers, multiple platforms and distributed environment are typical factors. This paper describes Build and Output Analyzer framework and its components that have been developed in CMS to facilitate software maintenance and improve software quality. The system allows to generate, control and analyze various types of automated software builds and tests, such as regula…
On the one hand, ACME is a language designed in the late 90s as an interchange format for software architectures. The need for recon guration at runtime has led to extend the language with speci c support in Plastik. On the other hand, PDDL is a predicative language for the description of planning problems. It has been designed in the AI community for the International Planning Competition of the ICAPS conferences. Several related works have already proposed to encode software architectures into PDDL. Existing planning algorithms can then be used in order to generate automatically a plan that …
Software project management is an interpolation of project planning, project monitoring and project termination. The substratal goals of planning are to scout for the future, to diagnose the attributes that are essentially done for the consummation of the project successfully, animate the scheduling and allocate resources for the attributes. Software cost estimation is a vital role in preeminent software project decisions such as resource allocation and bidding. This paper articulates the conventional overview of software cost estimation modus operandi available. The cost, effort estimates of …
For each software project a plan is developed, according to a documented procedure, that covers the software activities and commitments. The requirements allocated to software form the basis for the software development plan. Estimates for critical computer resources are documented, reviewed, and agreed to. All affected groups and individuals understand the estimates and plans and commit to support them. Senior management reviews the estimates and plans before external commitments are made. Software risks associated with the cost, resources, schedule, and technical aspects of the project are i…
Layered software architecture contains several intra-layer and inter-layer dependencies. Each layer depends on shared components making it difficult to release a code change, bug fix or feature without exhaustive testing and having to build the entire software code base. This paper proposed self-contained, cross-cutting pipeline architecture (SCPA) that is independent of existing layers. We chose 2 open source projects and 3 internal intern projects that used n-tier architecture and applied the SCPA to release subsequent feature additions and any bug fixes. The SCPA decreased the release time …
Distributed software development is more difficult than co-located software development. One of the main reasons is that communication is more difficult in distributed settings. Defined processes and artifacts help, but cannot cover all information needs. Not communicating important project information, decisions and rationales can result in duplicate or extra work, delays or even project failure. Planning and managing a distributed project from an information flow perspective helps to facilitate available communication channels right from the start - beyond the documents and artifacts which a…
Planning is concerned with the automated solution of action sequencing problems described in declarative languages giving the action preconditions and effects. One important application area for such technology is the creation of new processes in Business Process Management (BPM), which is essential in an ever more dynamic business environment. A major obstacle for the application of Planning in this area lies in the modeling. Obtaining a suitable model to plan with -- ideally a description in PDDL, the most commonly used planning language -- is often prohibitively complicated and/or costly. O…
Large organizations have diverse product offerings to meet various business needs. To increase revenue, its common these days to offer software products as integrated product suite(s) rather than individual products. Creating and maintaining high quality software products within the integrated product suite requires rigorous product engineering methods. The sheer size of products and dependencies involved tend to raise unidentified defects that may become critical post product upgrades or after every release cycle. It is difficult to track such defects and its widespread across underlying sub-…
Fixing bugs is an important phase in software development and maintenance. In practice, the process of bug fixing may conflict with the release schedule. Such confliction leads to a trade-off between software quality and release schedule, which is known as the technical debt metaphor. In this article, we propose the concept of debt-prone bugs to model the technical debt in software maintenance. We identify three types of debt-prone bugs, namely tag bugs, reopened bugs, and duplicate bugs. A case study on Mozilla is conducted to examine the impact of debt-prone bugs in software products. We inv…
Recently, the awareness of the importance of distributed software development has been growing in the software engineering community. Economic constraints, more and more outsourcing of development activities, and the increasing spatial distribution of companies come along with challenges of how to organize distributed development. In this article, we reason that a common process understanding is mandatory for successful distributed development. Integrated process planning, guidance and enactment are seen as enabling technologies to reach a unique process view. We sketch a synthesis of the soft…
West Virginia University（西弗吉尼亚大学）；Iowa State University（爱荷华州立大学）；West Virginia University Institute of Technology（西弗吉尼亚大学理工学院）
Software fault-proneness prediction is an active research area, with many factors affecting prediction performance extensively studied. However, the impact of the learning approach (i.e., the specifics of the data used for training and the target variable being predicted) on the prediction performance has not been studied, except for one initial work. This paper explores the effects of two learning approaches, useAllPredictAll and usePrePredictPost, on the performance of software fault-proneness prediction, both within-release and across-releases. The empirical results are based on data extrac…
Testing is a core software development activity that has huge potential to make software development more sustainable. In this paper, we discuss how environmental, social, economic, and technical sustainability map onto the activities of test planning, design, execution, and evaluation.
Challenges in spatial planning include adjusting settlement patterns to increasing or shrinking populations; it also includes organizing food delivery in rural and peripheral environments. Discourse typically starts with an open problem and the search for a holistic and innovative solution. Software will often be needed to implement the innovation. Spatial planning problems are characterized by large and heterogeneous groups of stakeholders, such as municipalities, companies, interest groups, citizens, women and men, young people and children. Current techniques for participation are slow, lab…
Selecting the appropriate requirements to develop in the next release of an open market software product under evolution, is a compulsory step of each software development project. This selection should be done by maximizing stakeholders' satisfaction and minimizing development costs, while keeping constraints. In this work we investigate what is the requirements interactions impact when searching for solutions of the bi-objective Next Release Problem. In one hand, these interactions are explicitly included in two algorithms: a branch and bound algorithm and an estimation of distribution algor…
