Behaviour driven development: A systematic mapping study

When developing a Learning Management System (LMS) using Scrum, we noticed that it was quite often necessary to redefine some system behaviour scenarios, due to ambiguities in the requirement specifications, or due to misinterpretations of stories reported by the Product Owners (POs). The definition of test suites was also cumbersome, resulting in test suites that were incomplete or did not at all comply with the system requirements. Based on this experience and to deal with these problems, in this paper, we propose the ScrumOntoBDD approach to agile software development, which combines Scrum, ontologies and Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD). This approach is centred on the concepts and techniques of Scrum and BDD and focuses on the planning and analysis phases of the software life cycle, since the BDD tools currently provide little support to these phases, while most of the problems during the LMS development were found exactly there. We claim that our approach improves the software development practices in this respect. Furthermore, ScrumOntoBDD employs ontologies in order to reduce ambiguities intrinsic to the use of a natural language as a BDD ubiquitous language. In this paper, we illustrate and systematically evaluate our approach, showing that it is beneficial since it improves the communication between members of an agile development team.

An airplane is composed by many complexes and embedded systems. During the integration testing phase, the design office produces requirements of the targeted system, and the test center produces concrete test procedures to be executed on a test bench. In this context, integration tests are mostly written in natural language and manually executed step by step by a tester. In order to formalize integration tests procedures dedicated to each system with domain specific languages approved by testers, and in order to automatize integration tests, we have introduced agile practices in the integration testing phase. We have chosen a Behavior Driven Development (BDD) approach to orchestrate Domain Specific Test Languages produced for the ACOVAS FUI project.

Being successful and competitive on the market means that companies have to adapt to the demands of their customers. Personalised products are increasingly becoming a matter of course for consumers, which leads to a reduction in the number of similar orders for manufacturing companies. To satisfy these requirements, new information and communication technologies are needed in industrial manufacturing. Industry 4.0 aims to address these challenges. However, many approaches are not yet implemented or mature, so there is a need for further research in this field. For this reason, a comprehensive and systematic mapping study was conducted to structure and categorize the current state of research in the field of self-describing and self-organizing manufacturing. The literature considered was published between January 2014 and May 2019. The research carried out is based on the guidelines for conducting systematic mapping studies. With regard to the technical implementation of this technology, a number of research questions are carefully defined. Based on these questions, data from different levels of information are extracted and analyzed for the considered papers. The study results show in which areas more work is required and where there are future research perspectives. Furthermore, this study can help to better understand the field of research and the research gaps identified.

Web mashups are a new generation of applications based on the composition of ready-to-use, heterogeneous components. They are gaining momentum thanks to their lightweight composition approach, which represents a new opportunity for companies to leverage on past investments in SOA, Web services, and public APIs. Although several studies are emerging in order to address mashup development, no systematic mapping studies have been reported on how quality issues are being addressed. This paper reports a systematic mapping study on which and how the quality of Web mashups has been addressed and how the product quality-aware approaches have been defined and validated. The aim of this study is to provide a background in which to appropriately develop future research activities. A total of 38 research papers have been included from an initial set of 187 papers. Our results provided some findings regarding how the most relevant product quality characteristics have been addressed in different artifacts and stages of the development process. They have also been useful to detect some research gaps, such as the need of more controlled experiments and more quality-aware mashup development proposals for other characteristics which being important for the Web domain have been neglected such as Usability and Reliability.KeywordsWeb MashupsProduct QualitySystematic Mapping Study

Despite the importance of software qualities, they are not well understood, especially in the context of the interrelationships between qualities. A number of systematic mapping studies have been conducted prior to 2015 to summarize the literature on the topic and to identify research gaps. To provide a better understanding of the current state of the art, we conducted a systematic mapping study on relevant studies from 2015 to 2019 through a database search and a subsequent snowballing approach. In total, 18 studies were selected as the study subjects wherein we evaluated the types of software quality interrelationships and the qualities that comprise them. Based on our findings, we report on the progress made to address previously identified research gaps.

In this paper we propose to apply domain ontologies in agile software development to reduce the ambiguity caused by using natural language as ubiquitous language to report user stories. To justify and demonstrate our approach, we present a case study that combines Scrum and Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) in the development of an educational support system, which was built to support the activities of the Medicine Programme of Federal University of Sao Carlos (UFSCar) in Brazil. Starting from a reference ontology for the Higher Education domain, we gradually specialized this ontology for this programme. Since we selected the Evaluation Management module of this system for our case study, we applied the Evaluation Process Ontology to that programme, and defined user stories to identify the feature set to be implemented. For evaluation and validation purposes, we assessed the quality of all ontologies used in this work according to structural and functional dimensions.

The design of hardware systems is a challenging and erroneous task where about 70% of the effort in designing these systems is spent on verification. In general, testing and verification are usually tasks that are being applied as a post-process to the implementation. In this paper, we propose a new design flow based on Behavior Driven Development (BDD), an agile technique for the development of software in which acceptance tests written in natural language play a central role and are the starting point in the design flow. We advance the flow such that the specifics that arise when modeling hardware are taken into account. Furthermore, we present a technique that allows for the automatic generalization of test cases to properties that are suitable for formal verification. This allows the designer to apply formal verification techniques based on test cases without specifying properties. We implemented our approach and evaluated the flow for an illustrative example that successfully demonstrates the advantages of the proposed flow.

SummaryContext: Software performance is crucial for ensuring the quality of software products. As one of the non‐functional requirements, the few efforts devoted to software performance have often been neglected until a later phase in the software development life cycle (SDLC). The lack of clarity of what software performance research literature is available prevents researchers from understanding what software performance research fields are available. It also creates difficulty for practitioners to adopt state‐of‐the‐art software performance techniques. Software performance research is not as organized as other established research topics such as software testing. Thus, it is essential to conduct a systematic mapping study as a first step to provide an overview of the latest research literature available in software performance. Objective: The objective of this systematic mapping study is to survey and map software performance research literature into suitable categories and to synthesize the literature data for future access and reference. Method: This systematic mapping study conducts a manual examination by querying research literature in noble journals and proceedings in software engineering in the past decade. We examine each paper manually and identify primary studies for further analysis and synthesis according to the pre‐defined inclusion criteria. Lastly, we map the primary studies based on their corresponding classification category. Results: This systematic mapping study provides a state‐of‐the‐art literature mapping in software performance research. We have carefully examined 222 primary studies out of 2000+ research literature. We have identified six software performance research categories and 15 subcategories. We generate the primary study mapping and report five research findings. Conclusions: Unlike established research fields, it is unclear what types of software performance research categories are available to the community. This work takes the systematic mapping study approach to survey and map the latest software performance research literature. The study results provide an overview of the paper distribution and a reference for researchers to navigate research literature on software performance.

Eliciting requirements in their real-world contexts and creating and transforming visual models which can help lead to early designs of software is a challenging and time-consuming step in software engineering processes. In order to support the creation of these models and generate artifacts useful for software designs, we have developed the Problem-to-Design tool (PROD) based on Jackson's Problem Frames approach. The tool has been inspired by the work in the behavior-driven development community, which recommends that testing codes be generated as early as in the requirements engineering phase. The tool provides an open portal where multiple stakeholders can draw their own problem diagrams online, which can be used to generate use case narratives and testing codes for further behavior-driven development.

Digital compliance involves the conversion of natural language regulatory rules into computer code to support regulated entities’ compliance processes. Literal and decontextualised digitisation approaches lead to incomplete and ineffective compliance solutions, increasing legal and reputational risks. There is a need for more sophisticated approaches to digital compliance that grapple with the complexity of open-textured regulatory provisions, diverse types of regulatory guidance, entity-specific compliance requirements and computational challenges. To address this gap, this article develops and applies a new connected mindset approach for constructing digital compliance that combines and extends insights from literature on regulatory mindsets and compliance construction, and computer science literature on behaviour-driven development. Overall, our analysis underscores the value of constructing digital compliance in a way that incorporates legal, regulatory, computational and entity-specific compliance requirements to design more connected and contextualised digital compliance infrastructures.

Context: Software projects are common inputs in Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) studies, although they are often selected with ad-hoc strategies that reduce the generalizability of the results. An alternative is the usage of available datasets of software projects, which should be current and follow explicit rules for ensuring their validity over time. Goal: In this context, it is important to assess the general state of software datasets in terms of purpose, last update, project characterization, source code metrics, and tools to extract source-code-related artifacts. Method: We conducted a systematic mapping study retrieving software datasets used in ESE studies published from January 2013 to December 2021. Results: We selected 74 datasets created mainly for software defects, software estimation, and software maintainability studies. The majority of these datasets (64%) explicitly stated the characteristics to select the projects, and the most common programming languages were Java and C. Conclusions: Our study identified scarce efforts to keep datasets updated over time and also provides recommendations to support their construction and consumption for ESE studies.

Without careful methodological guidance, case studies in software engineering are difficult to plan, design and execute. While there are a number of broad guidelines for case study research, there are none that specifically address the needs of a software engineer undertaking multiple case studies in an industrial setting. Through a synthesis of existing best practices in case study research, we provide a set of comprehensive guidelines for conducting multiple case studies in software engineering research. Our guidelines can assist software engineering researchers with all stages of multiple case study research, although in this paper we concentrate on the early phases, such as focusing the case study and detailed plan design. To date, three exploratory research projects found our guidelines very useful. We illustrate our guidelines with examples from one of these projects.

Paradigms for experimentation and empirical studies in software engineering

Software engineering principles: A systematic mapping study and a quantitative literature review

Context Aware Mobile Learning (CAML) provides a learning experience tailored to educational needs and the particular circumstance of the learner. CAML has become an active area of research. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of research conducted on CAML through counting and classifying contributions. The applied method is a systematic mapping study using eight major publication databases. Initially, 115 studies were retrieved after assessing against the selection criteria 90 studies were selected. The results provide useful insight into the current state of research, the geographical distribution of papers, venues of publication, and types of studies published. The results were useful to position future research activities.