Validation of an analyzability model for quantum software: a family of experiments
University of Castilla-La Mancha（卡斯蒂利亚-拉曼恰大学）；University of Bari Aldo Moro（巴里阿尔多·莫罗大学）
Ana Díaz-Muñoz, José A. Cruz-Lemus, Moisés Rodríguez, Maria Teresa Baldassarre, Mario Piattini
备注：
42 pages, 5 figures, 12 tables. This is the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) of the article published in Empirical Software Engineering (2026). The final published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-026-10825-3
The analyzability of hybrid software, which integrates both classical and quantum components, is a key factor in ensuring its maintainability and industrial adoption. This article presents the empirical validation, through a family of experiments, of the quantum component of a previously proposed hybrid software analyzability model based on the ISO/IEC 25010 standard. The experimental series consists of four studies involving participants with diverse profiles in both academic and professional settings. In these experiments, the model's ability to effectively measure the analyzability of quantum algorithms is assessed, and the relationship between the analyzability levels computed by the model and the participant's perceptions of the complexity of these algorithms is examined. The results indicate that the proposed model effectively distinguishes between quantum software components with varying levels of analyzability and aligns with human perception, reinforcing its validity in quantum computing.
Software reliability is a primary concern in the construction of software, and thus a fundamental component in the definition of software quality. Analyzing software reliability requires a specification of the intended behavior of the software under analysis, and at the source code level, such specifications typically take the form of assertions. Unfortunately, software many times lacks such specifications, or only provides them for scenario-specific behaviors, as assertions accompanying tests. This issue seriously diminishes the analyzability of software with respect to its reliability. In th…
In this paper we describe the usefulness of statistical validation techniques for human factors survey research. We need to investigate a diversity of validity aspects when creating metrics in human factors research, and we argue that the statistical tests used in other fields to get support for reliability and construct validity in surveys, should also be applied to human factors research in software engineering more often. We also show briefly how such methods can be applied (Test-Retest, Cronbach's α, and Exploratory Factor Analysis).
Supporting e-Science in the EGI e-Infrastructure requires extensive and reliable software, for advanced computing use, deployed across over approximately 300 European and worldwide data centers. The Unified Middleware Distribution (UMD) and Cloud Middleware Distribution (CMD) are the channels to deliver the software for the EGI e-Infrastructure consumption. The software is compiled, validated and distributed following the Software Provisioning Process (SWPP), where the Quality Criteria (QC) definition sets the minimum quality requirements for EGI acceptance. The growing number of software comp…
Background: Data errors are a common challenge in machine learning (ML) projects and generally cause significant performance degradation in ML-enabled software systems. To ensure early detection of erroneous data and avoid training ML models using bad data, research and industrial practice suggest incorporating a data validation process and tool in ML system development process. Aim: The study investigates the adoption of a data validation process and tool in industrial ML projects. The data validation process demands significant engineering resources for tool development and maintenance. Thus…
The optimisation of software energy consumption is of growing importance across all scales of modern computing, i.e., from embedded systems to data-centres. Practitioners in the field of Search-Based Software Engineering and Genetic Improvement of Software acknowledge that optimising software energy consumption is difficult due to noisy and expensive fitness evaluations. However, it is apparent from results to date that more progress needs to be made in rigorously validating optimisation results. This problem is pressing because modern computing platforms have highly complex and variable behav…
Many tools have been created for measuring the agility of software teams, thus creating a saturation in the field. Three agile measurement tools were selected in order to validate whether they yield sim-ilar results. The surveys of the tools were given to teams in Company A (N = 30). The questions were grouped into agile practices which were checked for correlation in order to establish convergent validity. In addition, we checked whether the questions identified to be the same among the tools would be given the same replies by the respondents. We could not establish convergent validity since …
Improper Input Validation (IIV) is a software vulnerability that occurs when a system does not safely handle input data. Even though IIV is easy to detect and fix, it still commonly happens in practice. In this paper, we study to what extent developers can detect IIV and investigate underlying reasons. This knowledge is essential to better understand how to support developers in creating secure software systems. We conduct an online experiment with 146 participants, of which 105 report at least three years of professional software development experience. Our results show that the existence of …
Requirements engineering is a discipline of software engineering that is concerned with the identification and handling of user and system requirements. Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering (AORE) extends the existing requirements engineering approaches to cope with the issue of tangling and scattering resulted from crosscutting concerns. Crosscutting concerns are considered as potential aspects and can lead to the phenomena tyranny of the dominant decomposition. Requirements-level aspects are responsible for producing scattered and tangled descriptions of requirements in the requirements …
A code clone is a pair of code fragments, within or between software systems that are similar. Since code clones often negatively impact the maintainability of a software system, several code clone detection techniques and tools have been proposed and studied over the last decade. To detect all possible similar source code patterns in general, the clone detection tools work on the syntax level while lacking user-specific preferences. This often means the clones must be manually inspected before analysis in order to remove those false positives from consideration. This manual clone validation e…
The requirements in automation, digitalization, and fast computations have loaded the IT sector with expectations of highly reliable, efficient, and cost-effective software. Given that the process of testing, verification, and validation of software products consumes 50-75% of the total revenue if the testing process is ineffective, "n" times the expenditure must be invested to mend the havoc caused. A delay in project completion is often attributed to the testing phase because of the numerous cycles of debugging process. The software testing process determines the face of the product released…
This paper presents the components of a newly developed Malaysian SMEs - Software Process Improvement model (MSME-SPI) that can assess SMEs soft-ware development industry in managing and improving their software processes capability. The MSME-SPI is developed in response to practitioner needs that were highlighted in an empirical study with the Malaysian SME software development industry. After the model development, there is a need for independent feedback to show that the model meets its objectives. Consequently, the validation phase is performed by involving a group of software process impr…
Context: Software engineering has a problem in that when we empirically evaluate competing prediction systems we obtain conflicting results. Objective: To reduce the inconsistency amongst validation study results and provide a more formal foundation to interpret results with a particular focus on continuous prediction systems. Method: A new framework is proposed for evaluating competing prediction systems based upon (1) an unbiased statistic, Standardised Accuracy, (2) testing the result likelihood relative to the baseline technique of random 'predictions', that is guessing, and (3) calculatio…
There has been a massive explosion of data generated by customers and retained by companies in the last decade. However, there is a significant mismatch between the increasing volume of data and the lack of automation methods and tools. The lack of best practices in data science programming may lead to software quality degradation, release schedule slippage, and budget overruns. To mitigate these concerns, we would like to bring software engineering best practices into data science. Specifically, we focus on automated data validation in the data preparation phase of the software development li…
FAIR+S: A validation study of a framework for sustainable research data and software
Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg（奥尔登堡卡尔·冯·奥西茨基大学）；OFFIS – Institute for Information Technology（OFFIS信息技术研究所）；Wilhelm Büchner Hochschule（威廉·比希纳应用科学大学）
Agentic Porting, Construction and Initial Verification and Validation of Libraries within the Open Source Unified TRAnsient Multi-Phase Advanced Reactor simulation Kit (Outram Park) Part I: A Software Engineering Log for Thermal Hydraulics
