Model-Driven Development of Mobile Applications Allowing Role-Driven Variants

Enterprises today face many challenges related to lack of interoperability. Enterprise applications and software systems need to be interoperable in order to achieve seamless business across organisational boundaries and thus achieve virtual networked organisations. IEEE defines interoperability as “the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged”. MDA is the OMG instantiation of an approach to software development kown as Model Driven Engineering (MDE) or Model Driven Development (MDD). MDD focuses on Models as the primary artefacts in the development process, with Transformations as the primary operation on models, used to map information from one model to another. There is presently an important paradigm shift in the field of software engineering that may have important consequences on the way information systems are built and maintained. Model-driven development (MDD), and in particular OMG's Model-Driven Architecture ® (MDA®), is emerging as the state of practice for developing modern enterprise applications and software systems. The MDD paradigm improves the way of addressing and solving interoperability issues compared to earlier non-modelling approaches. However, developing correct and useful models is not an easy task. We believe that there is a need for an interoperability framework that provides guidance on how MDD should be applied to address interoperability. A key to the success of MDD is the development of ontologies supporting the mapping from one model to another, either at the same level of abstraction or at different levels. Various approaches have been proposed and tested, starting from common ontologies, shared by all the models, to local ontologies, specific to each software. We propose here to discuss the applicability of MDD to the urban civil engineering (UCE) field. This should help to establish the requirements for ontologies to be applied for interoperability of systems commonly used in this domain. In the first section of this paper, we briefly introduce some key principles of the MDA approach and the role of ontologies in model transformation approaches. The following section describes the Model Driven Development (MDD) interoperability framework. The last part presents a way of applying the MDA techniques to urban civil engineering projects, with the objective of testing the feasibility and relevancy of the approach to this domain.

Systematic reviews are crucial for various stakeholders since they allow them to make evidence-based decisions without being overwhelmed by a large volume of research. Systematic reviews are increasingly popular in the software engineering field. The abstract is one of the most important systematic review’s components since it usually reflects the content of the review. It may be the only part of the review that most of the readers will read when needing to form an opinion on a given topic. Besides, the content of an abstract is usually the main information readers use to decide if they want to access the full content of the review or not. Since an abstract usually summarizes a review, readers may therefore mostly rely on that abstract to judge the quality of the review as well as its methodological rigor. However, abstracts are sometimes poorly written and may therefore give a misleading and even harmful picture of the reviews’ contents. To assess abstracts, we propose a measure that allows quantifying the systematicity of reviews’ abstracts i.e., the extent to which these abstracts exhibit good reporting quality. Experiments on 151 reviews published in the software engineering (SE) field showed that these reviews’ abstracts exhibit a suboptimal systematicity.

Programming as if people mattered: friendly programs, software engineering and other noble delusions: N S Borenstein Princeton University Press (1991) $29.95 ISBN 0-691-08752-0 (CL)

Currently, a growing interest is being caused by mobile cloud applications. Improvements related to the portability of these applications among different platforms and different service providers are a critical need. Model Driven Development (MDD) constitutes one of the alternatives to address the portability problem. This work presents a systematic mapping study that analyzes different proposals that apply MDD to the development of mobile cloud applications and that, at the same time, consider the improvement of the portability of these applications. Even though we have identified just a few studies related to our subject of interest, the validation experiences that are presented in them, encourage the adoption of MDD to address the portability problem. However, further validation experiences that consider more complex cases in industrial environments will be required to justify the benefits of MDD in a substantial manner.

To solve the problem that it is difficult to calculate system coupling in the field of systems science and software engineering, this article discussed quantitative analysis of system coupling. It is difficult to calculate system coupling in the field of system science and software engineering. Consequently, this paper discussed quantitative analysis of system coupling to solve this problem. According to the dependencies between the entities in a system, this paper proposed two mathematical models to measure system coupling based on entropy and judgment matrix. With these two models, it is possible to measure the coupling of each entity in the system and provide a basis for reducing the system coupling. Finally, this paper verified the validity and utility of the proposed models via a case of data warehouse structure.

In software engineering, the programmer depends on precise descriptions of the system to be built. To get these descriptions, analysts condense the knowledge about the domain from observations and discussions with the users, the people that will eventually work with the software. The users have to communicate their knowledge about the domain and express their needs. With TBPM we have shown that it is possible for end users to express themselves by means of process models. We now transfer these findings to other fields in software engineering. We investigated in the discipline of requirements engineering, especially in the context of agile software development approaches. From practitioners we learned that during the first iterations, code tends to be thrown away completely since the initial requirements gathering phase is intentionally kept lean. We therefore introduced the concept of need-finding iterations and tackle this problem in our research. We develop a holistic workshop methodology to kick off agile software development projects in which a shared understanding among stakeholders is to be fostered. Discussions that would arise after a software prototype has been implemented are encouraged to be conducted at an earlier stage by making use of an adequate modeling solution. We propose story prototypes which essentially enrich user stories with control flow information and thereby are enhanced to show the big picture rather than just individual aspects of the system to be built. In such a kickoff workshop we encourage a detailed need-finding together with the customer by means of shared model building.

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the proceedings of the workshop held as part of SPLASH 2014! This year's Workshop continues the tradition of allowing both graduate and undergraduate students to present their ongoing work and get productive feedback on their latest results. Workshop Overview Mobile application usage and development is experiencing exponential growth. According to Gartner, by 2016 more than 300 billion applications will be downloaded annually. The mobile domain presents new challenges to software engineering. Mobile platforms are rapidly changing, including diverse capabilities as GPS, sensors, and input modes. Applications must be omni-channel and work on all platforms. Activated on mobile platforms, modern applications must be elastic and scale on demand according to the hardware abilities. Applications often need to support and use third-party services. Therefore, during development, security and authorization processes for the dataflow must be applied. Bring your own device (BYOD) policies bring new security data leaks challenges. Developing such applications requires suitable practices and tools e.g., architecture techniques that relate to the complexity at hand; improved refactoring tools for hybrid applications using dynamic languages and polyglot development and applications; and testing techniques for applications that run on different devices. This workshop aims at establishing a community of researchers and practitioners to share their work and lead further research in the mobile software engineering. The workshop has several goals. First, we want to develop relationships to create a vibrant research community in the area of mobile software development. Second, we want to identify the most important research problems for mobile software development. Our program includes: Distinguished keynote by Dr. Daniel M. Yellin the Vice President, IBM Mobile Platform Development, and an IBM Distinguished EngineerInvited talksMarco Pistoia and Omer Trip Integrating Security, Analytics and Application Management into the Mobile Development LifecycleNikolai Tillmann Rapidly Prototyping Apps for Mobile Cloud-Connected DevicesLucas Brutschy, Pietro Ferrara and Mueller Peter. Static Analysis for Independent App DevelopersPanel: "How Mobile Affects Business Processes? : The Research Perspective"Activity: "Killer Apps for Mobile Opportunity and ChallengesResearch papers Mobile software engineering presents new challenges and directions. Among others, we observe the following five areas of interest: Management of the mobile applications. This refers to the technical capabilities to create, deploy, and manage a suite of applications for multiple heterogeneous devices (e.g., iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows) that connect securely to enterprise back-end servers.Hybrid applications versus native applications. A native application is an application designed to run in a specific environment written in a specific language. A hybrid mobile application, however, is developed using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript activated by a native wrapper. Building native applications requires comprehensive knowledge in the specific environment, such as Objective C (iOS), Java (Android), and C# (Windows mobile and BlackBerry). However, hybrid applications based on web technologies require more common knowledge.User experience. Applications must be developed that provide different user experiences depending on the target environment. For example, an iOS application provides a different user experience than an Android application, even though the functionality of the application must be the same.Battery life. How can developers write software that uses up as little battery life as possible?Migrations to mobile. As more users access and use mobile-based tools, developers need to enable and support migration from legacy software such as web applications to mobile.Mobile security. Mobile devices have strong networking capabilities. Hence security of ersonal information and businesses data become very important. Employees use their smartphones to access sensitive information. The operating system of those devices collects sensitive data that may be visible to third-party applications. Hence vulnerabilities from both the web browser and operating system must be considered. Moreover, the development of mobile applications includes the following aspects that extend existing software engineering practices: Software characteristics. 1) Software is distributed on several platforms that link between them over the network. For example, one part of an application could be on mobile phones browsers, another part might be on the cloud, and both of them are reading data from some legacy systems. 2) Mobile applications need to be elastic and scale on demand according to their environments' abilities. Functionalities need to be easily removed, added, or moved to or from the cloud. 3) Many hardware platforms exist for an application and the platforms are rapidly changing, including flexible capabilities such as GPS, sensors, and input modes. Development, however, should be for all platforms.Architecture. Mobile application development also includes several architectural challenges, such as how to support omni-channel communications and how to support new application data updates from the server, e.g., notifications about new mail or software updates. Applications must be able to easily communicate with new systems. Traditional solutions enable software to be easily designed and modified to communicate with new environments. However, the environments with which applications need to communicate are rapidly changing. As a result, traditional solutions do not fit modern software and we cannot modify applications using traditional architectural approaches to support all channels.Testing. Another aspect of mobile application development concerns software testing. How can applications be tested on arbitrary and unknown hardware? And how can we develop test-driven software without being able to run the test itself?

On behalf of the entire Organizing Committee it is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 8th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, an internationally renowned forum for researchers, practitioners, and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences, and challenges in the field of software engineering. Every second year FSE is jointly organized with ESEC on the Old Continent of Europe. This year's host city is Szeged in the South of Hungary. Szeged, which has always been referred to as the city of sunshine, is simply beautiful and has an atmosphere that no other city has in Hungary. Its sights, like the Votive church, the Synagogue, the Hero's Arch, and the University of Szeged all give a distinct character to the town. From September until late June, the local cafés, restaurants, shops, and streets are all noisy from the lively bustle of university students and the whole town is turned into a nest of youthful spirit. Let us invite you to be part of this unique atmosphere and enjoy your stay during the ESEC/FSE 2011 Conference. This year's program promises to be very exciting. The research track call for papers attracted 203 papers from all continents. After extensive virtual and physical discussions, the Program Committee accepted 34 papers covering a large veriety of software engineering topics -- ranging from mining software archives and empirical studies over program analysis and testing to collaboration, models, and requirements. Three papers received an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award; they are marked in the table of contents. With this ESEC/FSE, we especially wanted to encourage authors to provide artifacts -- tools or data sets that would help others to build on earlier work. A third of the authors of accepted papers submitted artifacts, judged and assessed by an Artifact Evaluation Board. Authors were enthusiastic about participating and eager to improve their packages, further motivated by a 1,000 US$ Best Artifact Award from Microsoft Research. Overall, seven artifacts were found to meet or exceed expectations, and thus are especially recommended by the Board as a base for future research; you will find them marked in the table of contents. The whole-day industrial track is another newly added element of the ESEC/FSE program with the purpose to facilitate an open exchange of ideas between academic researchers and practitioners in industry. ESEC/FSE 2011 will also feature Technical Briefings, an all-day event for communicating the state of topics related to software engineering. This year's conference also offers a comprehensive student program, including the Doctoral Symposium, the Technical Briefings and the PhD Working Groups (PWGs). PWGs are offered for PhD students and other young (pre-doc) researchers with the aim of providing them with the opportunity to meet prominent senior researchers in certain software engineering fields and work with them throughout the conference week.

With the constant development of computer technology and the increasing complexity of software, the issues of efficient generation of program code are becoming more and more important. The use of modern models and methods of artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the process of creating program code is one of the promising areas of research in the field of software engineering. With the advent and development of neural networks and deep learning, the possibilities for automating the process of creating program code have expanded significantly. In addition, the growing complexity of software and the increased requirements for its quality and performance emphasize the relevance of researching the possibilities of using modern AI methods to generate program code. The purpose of the work is to analyze the quality of application of AI models in the generation of program code intended for the development of complex software systems by students of the “Software Engineering” training direction. In the course of the study, the subject area related to the application of the capabilities of modern AI models to generate program code was studied. Various approaches and technologies of AI were considered, as well as their use in the training of future software engineers. The study included the organization of queries to the ChatGPT-4o, Copilot, Google-gemini-1.5-pro, and YandexGPT models and subsequent comparative analysis of the software codes generated by these models. For sending and subsequent processing of requests, an automated client-server application was developed, which was used in the study of the potential of AI models for generating program code. The results obtained can be useful for teachers and students of the direction of training “Software Engineering”, as well as for software developers using AI models to automate programming processes and improve the quality of professional training.

The idea of using ontologies in the field of software engineering is not new. For more than 10 years, the Software Engineering community arouse great interest for this tool of semantic web, so to improve; their performance in production time and realisation complexity on the one hand, and software reliability and quality on the other hand. The standard ISO / IEC 24744, also known as the SEMDM (Software Engineering – Meta-model for Development Methodologies), provides in a global perspective, a conceptual framework to define any method of software development, through the integration of all methodological aspects related to the followed procedures, as well as, products, people and tools involved in the conception of a software product. The purpose of this article is to create domain ontology for ISO / IEC 24744 using an MDA process. This ontology will serve as semantic reference in order to assist for a better interoperability between the different users of the standard (human, software or machine).

This article reviews the integration of machine learning (ML) techniques into Software Engineering (SE) across various phases of the software development life cycle (SDLC). The purpose is to investigate the applications of ML in SE, analyze its methodologies, present findings, and draw conclusions regarding its impact. The study categorized ML applications in SE and assessed the performance of various ML algorithms. Authors identified ML applications in SDLC phases, including requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance. ML algorithms, such as supervised and unsupervised learning, are employed for tasks like software requirement identification, design pattern recognition, code generation, and automated testing. In summary, we find that ML-based techniques are experiencing a substantial surge in adoption within the field of software engineering. Nevertheless, it is evident that substantial endeavors are needed to establish thorough comparisons and synergies among these approaches, perform meaningful evaluations grounded in detailed real-world implementations that are applicable to industrial software development. Therefore, our key takeaway is the necessity for a shift in focus towards reproducible research, prioritizing this over isolated novel concepts. Failure to do so may result in the limited practical implementation of these promising applications.

Mobile systems and mobile applications have gained a lot of attention both in research and industry over the last years. The market share of mobile devices is constantly growing. More and more, users expect their mobile devices to provide functionality similar to the one they know from their desktop computers, but also to provide additional, mobile device specific functionality, like location based services. However, software development for mobile devices is still cumbersome and a methodology geared towards supporting the development of such mobile applications is still lacking. While there is broad agreement that developing for mobile devices is more difficult than traditional software engineering, we lack a precise understanding that goes beyond anecdotic evidence of why this is the case and how the situation can be ameliorated. We do not precisely know where and how the development of mobile application differs from “normal” software development and where new methodologies are needed. Aspects that need to be addressed in this context are, among others, the questions of software architectures for mobile applications, approaches to the software design for mobile applications and how the consequences of being mobile, e. g., changing location, changing context, changing connectivity, heterogeneous software and platforms influence the software development process and what design approaches do reflect the specialties of mobile applications and systems appropriately. While this special issue cannot provide a definite or complete answer to these questions, it does provide answers to some important aspects. In the following, we will first try to get a more thorough understanding of some of the main differences between mobile and classical application development and will then discuss how the papers contained in this special issue address these differences.

With the rapid development of science and technology, database programming technology has become more mature and perfect, and it has been widely used in the field of computer software engineering, laying a good foundation for the development of computer software engineering and the whole society. Based on this, this paper briefly introduces the database file generation process in computer software engineering, and then summarizes the database programming technology in computer software engineering. Based on this, it analyzes the importance of database programming technology in computer software engineering, discusses the application points of database programming technology in computer software engineering, and provides support for better application of database programming technology.

Software engineering environments have a history of about two decades. Early environments provided support for small fragments of the software process (usually focusing on programming-in-the small). Then there was a trend towards support for more complete software processes (from early phases like requirements analysis and design down to testing and configuration management). Ten years ago the notion of process-centered software engineering environments initiated a new field in software engineering: software process research. The key idea is to use a model of a software process as input parameter for a software engineering environment. The environment is supposed to “behave” in accordance to the process model. Some aspects of this vision became true, others turned out to be of little practicability. In this article, we discuss the history of software engineering environments with a particular focus on process-centered software engineering environments (PCSEEs). We discuss the notion of distributed software processes (as one of the most substantial current trends in software process research) and we motivate the notion of a software process middleware which serves as basis of real-world software processes spread over various sites. In addition, we discuss some other trends in the software process research arena.

An essential objective of software system development is to find and fix defects before schedule delivery that would be expected below numerous circumstances. During software development, software engineers’ activities can result in software faults, causing disappointment in the future. Thus, the prediction of software defects within the initial stages has become an important interest in the field of software engineering. Many software defect prediction methods proposed in the last two decades. Mahalanobis-Taguchi System (MTS) is a multivariate statistical technique commonly used for feature selection and binary classification problems. In this article, the MTS is used for feature selection and defect prediction. This article compares several machine learning techniques on NASA data sets. The results show that MTS perform best with 100% accuracy, precision, recall, F-measure and 0% MAE, RMSE errors.