Causal-based networks supporting process improvement

Most graduates of baccalaureate computing programs (at least in the United States) take jobs in the computing profession immediately upon graduation. These jobs generally involve software development or maintenance activities, and therefore demand certain software engineering skills and knowledge.It appears, however, that typical undergraduate computing programs are at present inadequately preparing their students in the area of software engineering. This was in evidence at the 1991 International Conference on Software Engineering, in comments made at plenary sessions and in a special workshop on directions in software engineering education. It is also evidenced by recent attempts to encourage development of software engineering programs at the undergraduate level, separate from those in computer science or computer engineering.The purpose of this panel is to explore the following question: “What software engineering knowledge and skills should be required in a typical baccalaureate computing program, assuming the program is preparing its graduates for immediate entry into the computing profession?” In addressing this question, the panel will consider the recent report of the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Curriculum Task Force, proposed software engineering curricula for undergraduates, and accreditation criteria.

In general, decomposition methods can facilitate the process of solving sophisticated and heterogonous problems in the area of software development and engineering. These approaches are assisting to decompose problems based on different disciplines, characteristics and functionalities that is results into increasing the computational efficiency (e.g. parallel processing/computing) and accelerate the software changing process, software modifications and error tracking. Essentially, these approaches contribute to the degree of modularity to decompose a complex problem into different sub-problems and to focus on local objectives. There are different approaches that are used to decompose a problem into the smaller ones by keeping/improving the accuracy and efficiency in software engineering. Three major decomposition approaches that have been used in software engineering are decomposition based on aspects, objects and views. Each of these has their own characteristics and limitation. This research paper aims to address some of these important issues regarding to the decomposition approaches that are used in the software engineering discipline. In the next step, a new decomposition paradigm called multi-level decomposition will be introduced and a proper vision in terms of the key characteristics, differences and analogies between this decomposition method and others will be addressed. At the end, an example problem will be decomposed based upon the presented approach to show the potential capability of the approach.

This white paper argues that formal methods need to be better rooted in higher education curricula for computer science and software engineering programmes of study. To this end, it advocates improved teaching of formal methods; systematic highlighting of formal methods within existing, ‘classical’ computer science courses; and the inclusion of a compulsory formal methods course in computer science and software engineering curricula. These recommendations are based on the observations that formal methods are an essential and cost-effective means to increase software quality; however computer science and software engineering programmes typically fail to provide adequate training in formal methods; and thus there is a lack of computer science graduates who are qualified to apply formal methods in industry. This white paper is the result of a collective effort by authors and participants of the 1st International Workshop on Formal Methods – Fun for Everybody which was held in Bergen, Norway, 2–3 December 2019. As such, it represents insights based on learning and teaching computer science and software engineering (with or without formal methods) at various universities across Europe.

Putting Requirements and Quality at the Core of Global Service Delivery: Current Efforts and Future Plans at Pace University

The state of research based on Essence is a Systematic Mapping Study. The Essence is a great revolution in the field of Software Engineering and gaining more popularity as it brings Researchers and Practitioners on common ground. The term Common Ground refers to the methods and practices which are common for both industry and academia. The purpose of this study is to find out what kind of research is being reported in the literature which involves Essence. Through our analysis of the study we find out the gaps and clusters using maps of Essence on SWEBOK, Research Methodologies, Lists of Areas Using Essence (Tags), Country Wise Category and, Kernel Elements using in different categories. This study will help out the researchers to get the overall view of work done in different Software Engineering areas Using Essence and which areas are still lacking. This research also helps us to find the existing problems which can be overcome in the future.

In the last decade gamification has become as a useful strategy for make work environments more dynamic, specifically because it supports initiatives associated with the increase of performance characteristics of work teams such as motivation and commitment. In addition, in work areas such as education, gamification has spread as a useful strategy for make the classroom more dynamic. On the other hand, in the area of software engineering, the performance and productivity of the work team have been identified as key success factors, with motivation being an essential factor in achieving this success. Therefore, there is an important growth of gamification strategies in the classroom as alternatives to increase the motivation and commitment of the work teams. However, the existing teaching strategies in software engineering omit certain details about how to structure a possible learning environment, such as the classroom. In this work a methodological structure is proposed to gamify an educational environment of software engineering. The objective of this proposal is to contribute to the decrease of causes of failure of software development projects within which is the lack of motivation and commitment as well as social and human factors that affect processes related to software engineering. An example of activities developed in a course of agility for software process improvement of the Universidad de Medellin is presented. The methodological structure proposed was designed using technological tools and web 2.0 tools that managed to accompany the teaching-learning process taking into account defined gamification principles.

[Background:] Experimentation in Software Engineering plays a central role on sharing and verifying scientific findings. As experiments have increased significantly in Software Engineering area, we observe that most of them fail to provide a way to be repeated, replicated or reproduced, thus jeopardizing or delaying the evolution of the Software Engineering area. [Aims:] In this vision paper, we present and discuss techniques and infrastructure to continuously improve experiments towards repeatability, replicability, and reproducibility. [Method:] We define these techniques and infrastructure based on experiences of our research groups and existing literature. Furthermore, we follow Open Science principles. [Results:] We provide incipient results and foresee a central infrastructure composed of two repositories and two recommendation systems to support techniques for: reporting experiments; developing ontologies for experiments and open educational resources; mining and recommending experiments; specifying data management plans, identifying families of experiments; and teaching and learning experimentation. [Conclusions:] Our techniques and infrastructure will prospectively motivate and benefit Software Engineering evolution by improving the conduction and further reproducibility of experiments.

The C* Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (C3S2E) was established in 2008. C3S2E 2010 is the third annual meeting in the C3S2E conference series and is held in Montréal, Québec, Canada, during May 19-20, 2010. The conference aims to address the need of the academic community in computer science and software engineering. It brings together academics, government and industry professionals to discuss recent progress and challenges in a broad range of areas in the field of computer science and software engineering such as algorithms and theory, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, computer architecture, computer graphics, computer security, computer vision, data mining, databases, image processing, information retrieval, machine learning, as well as software engineering. C3S2E 2010 also serves as a platform for theoreticians and practitioners to exchange their original research ideas on academic or application aspects of computing and engineering of software systems, present their new findings on theoretical or practical aspects of computer science and software engineering, share their experiences on integrating new technologies into products and applications, discuss their work on applying computing and software engineering to real-life situations, describe their development and operations of challenging computing related systems, and identify unsolved challenges. Although it is the third time C3S2E is held, this comprehensive conference has grown from a Canadian conference into an international conference. For C3S2E 2010, we continue to keep our tradition for inviting international experts in various areas of computer science and software engineering to join our team of international program committee. As a result, our Program Committee consists of professionals from different parts of the world including Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Portugal, South Korea, Turkey, UAE, and UK. This committee has done an excellent job in finishing the single-blind review and on-line double-blind debate processes in record time. On average, about 90% of reviews were submitted by the due date and about 3.67 reviews were received for each paper. In terms of submissions, we have attracted many high-quality papers submitted by authors globally. The paper selection process was thorough and competitive. On average, each paper was refereed by at least three reviewers, and about 18% of submissions were accepted as full research papers. This year, we have an intensive program that spans over two days. In addition to research papers and student posters, we also include position papers, which allow authors to give their opinions and vision on exploring new concepts and research directions.

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the application of causal discovery algorithms to factor investing, addressing recent criticisms of correlation‐based models. We create novel causal network representations of the S&P 500 universe and apply them to three investment scenarios. Our findings suggest that causal approaches can complement traditional methods in areas such as stock peer group identification, factor construction, and market timing. While causal networks offer new insights and sometimes outperform correlation‐based methods in terms of risk‐adjusted returns, they do not consistently surpass traditional approaches. The causal method though shows promise in identifying unique market relationships and potential hedging opportunities. However, its practical implementation presents challenges due to computational complexity and interpretation difficulties. Our study demonstrates the potential value of causal discovery in factor investing, while also identifying areas for further research and refinement.

We welcome you to the Twenty-Eighth International Conference on Software Engineering and Shanghai, China. This is the first instance of the ICSE conference series to be held in China, and it is an exciting time and place for ICSE 2006. The conference brings researchers, educators, practitioners and students together to present, exchange ideas and engage in discussions about the recent and exciting innovations and research in software engineering. Exciting sessions on practical experience, educational issues, and doctoral and new faculty symposia have been organized. The conference also includes a wide variety of tutorial, workshops and demonstration offerings. Finally, since research and markets in our host country China are continuously growing, ICSE includes a separate Far East Track for discussions on the contributions and challenges of our Chinese colleagues. We trust that this mix will provide interesting and stimulating offerings to all members of our growing community. The technical program committee is pleased to present this conference proceeding that contains the research papers of the technical program for ICSE 2006. The technical program for this conference focuses on new and innovative software engineering contributions in theory, formal methods, system building and empirical studies. The papers represent an alluring array of topics, including software design, architecture, reuse, testing, analysis, processes and formal methods. Because of the growing number of paper submission and the resulting large program committees in the past, we instituted a new two-phase reviewing process this year. Our program committee had 36 members. In the first phase, each submitted paper was reviewed by 3 reviewers: 2 from the program committee and an external reviewer from the software engineering community. We had 265 external reviewers who contributed 370 reviews for this phase. Those papers receiving the best reviews were considered in the second phase. A total of 99 papers entered the second phase. Each of these papers was reviewed by another program committee member. Thus, each accepted paper had a total of 4 reviews (3 reviews from pc members and 1 review from an external reviewer). Each rejected paper had at least 3 reviews. The pc members reviewed 24-25 papers in the two phases, a reasonable number. We feel that this system worked very well. The program committee met for two days in December, 2005 in Frankfurt, Germany. By the end of the meeting, a consensus emerged for the 36 papers in this proceedings (9% of the total submissions). There were many high quality submissions that could not be accommodated in the program; hopefully a revised version will be published elsewhere. In addition to the papers, we organized four invited sessions. One invited session focuses on empirical studies, an increasingly important component of software engineering research and practice. We also have an invited panel that addresses the value and practice of formal methods. Since software engineering techniques are growing in importance in challenging safety critical domains, we included two invited sessions: one on software engineering for automotive engineering and the other on software engineering for assisted living. We are very pleased that a notably diverse and outstanding group of three leaders of the software engineering community have agreed to present keynote speeches. The opening day keynote will be presented by Prof. Yang Fuqing, from Peking University, a woman who has been at the very forefront of the software engineering communities of research and practice in China for decades. Her perspectives on the past and future of software engineering in China will be complemented by a keynote on similar themes presented on the second day. This second keynote will be delivered by Prof. Barry Boehm, from the University of Southern California, USA. His talk will review the history of software engineering research and practice in the West over the past decades, and project it forward into the 21st century. Finally, the keynote speaker on the third day, Mr. Reinhold Achatz, from Siemens Corp., will present a complementary view of software engineering research and practice, as viewed from the perspective of one of the great multinational corporations, based in Europe. We are truly excited at the prospect that these three keynotes will provide a searching multidimensional view of our community at this time of historic convergence of communities. The continued success and high quality of the ICSE conference series would not be possible without the help and support of the software engineering community. First, we would like to gratefully acknowledge and thank all of the authors who submitted papers. We especially thank the program committee members for their efforts and commitments in reviewing the papers and securing reviews from external reviewers. They put in an extraordinary amount of their time to provide thoughtful and knowledgeable reviews. The exceptionally strong technical program represented by the papers in this proceeding could not be possible without their efforts.

This tutorial provides an overview of the role of ethnography in Software Engineering research. It describes the use of ethnographic methods as a means to provide an in-depth understanding of the socio-technological realities surrounding everyday software development practice. The knowledge gained can be used to improve processes, methods and tools as well as develop observed industrial practices. The tutorial begins with a brief historical account of ethnography in the fields of Software Engineering, CSCW, Information Systems and other related areas. This sets the stage for a more in-depth discussion of methods for data collection and analysis used in ethnographic studies. It then describes how these methods can be and have been used by software engineering researchers to understand developers' work practices, to inform the development of processes, methods and tools and to evaluate the applicability of current processes, methods and tools. Finally, some practical issues concerning the selection and use of ethnographic methods by software engineers are discussed. Throughout the tutorial, examples from the presenters' experience illustrate the points made.

Nowadays both industry and academic environments are showing a lot of interest in the Software Engineering discipline. Therefore, it is a challenge for universities to provide students with appropriate training in this area, preparing them for their future professional practice. There are many difficulties to provide that training. The outstanding ones are: the Software Engineering area is too broad and class hours are scarce, the discipline requires a high level of abstraction; it is difficult to reproduce real world situations in the classroom to provide a practical learning environment; the number of students per professor is very high (at least in Spain); companies develop software with a maturity level rarely over level 2 of the CMM for Software (again, at least in Spain) as opposed to what is taught at the University. Besides, there are different levels and study plans, making more difficult to structure the contents to teach in each term and degree. In this paper we present a plan for teaching Software Engineering trying to overcome some of the difficulties above.

This paper describes a qualitative participatory research project conducted at the National Advisory Committee on Computing Qualifications Conference in New Zealand (NACCQ2002). Data was gathered at a dynamic poster session. Results obtained indicated that majority of computing academics in the polytechnic community in New Zealand regard themselves as teaching in the core overlapping areas of Software Engineering, Computer Science and Information Systems, regardless of their professional affiliation. Most participants taught subjects that lay within the Information Systems area; very few positioned themselves in the exclusively Computer Science or Software Engineering areas, or in the ove r-lap between Software Engineering and Computer. Results from this research are discussed in the paper.

This survey reviews published materials related to the specific area of Search-Based Software Engineering that concerns software maintenance and, in particular, refactoring. The survey aims to give a comprehensive review of the use of search-based refactoring to maintain software. Fifty different papers have been selected from online databases to analyze and review the use of search-based refactoring in software engineering. The current state of the research is analyzed and patterns in the studies are investigated in order to assess gaps in the area and suggest opportunities for future research. The papers reviewed are tabulated in order to aid researchers in quickly referencing studies. The literature addresses different methods using search-based refactoring for software maintenance, as well as studies that investigate the optimization process and discuss components of the search. There are studies that analyze different software metrics, experiment with multi-objective techniques and propose refactoring tools for use. Analysis of the literature has indicated some opportunities for future research in the area. More experimentation of the techniques in an industrial environment and feedback from software developers is needed to support the approaches. Also, recent work with multi-objective techniques has shown that there are exciting possibilities for future research using these techniques with refactoring. This survey is beneficial as an introduction for any researchers aiming to work in the area of Search-Based Software Engineering with respect to software maintenance and will allow them to gain an understanding of the current landscape of the research and the insights gathered.

necessity of formal methods education has developed from its increasing assimilation into systems development within industry. Organizations responsible for a wide range of applications have found it necessary to find an improved means of intellectual control over their complex system development and that formal methods can meet this need. To this end, the International Survey of Industrial Applications of Formal Methods concluded and recommended: The current educational base in the US is weak in teaching formal methods in the context of software engineering . . . There is a clear need for improved integration of formal methods techniques with other software engineering practices[2]There exists a number of articles in the current literature expressing the belief that the current educational program offered for a computer science degree does not stress the fundamental mathematical and engineering principles that should form the basis of software engineering[3,4,5,6]. theory learned in mathematics and science classes is applied in other engineering classes, but unfortunately has not been applied in software engineering. inability to apply logic in practical circumstances prevents the student from doing the systematic analysis necessary to solve practical problems.For these reasons, it is desirable to include the definition and application of a formal method into the undergraduate curriculum with the goal of increasing the complex problem solving skills of the software engineer. Formal analysis should be introduced early into the undergraduate curriculum to ensure substantial learning, use, and training in formal methods application.