Software engineering under deadline pressure

Search-based software engineering (SBSE) consists of the application of metaheuristic search techniques—such as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, hill climbing, and tabu search—to software engineering problems. This idea is based on the observation that some software engineering activities can be thought of as optimization problems, and on the fact that techniques providing exact solutions are, very often, unable to adequately scale to large, real-world software engineering problems. Define fitness functions to guide an automated search for solutions, rather than attempting to construct solutions from scratch by hand. SBSE moves the engineer up the abstraction chain, from the tedious and expensive role of detailed solution construction, to the potentially more productive and more cost-effective area of fitness function design. This approach has been repeatedly demonstrated to have successful applications across the software engineering life cycle from requirements and project planning to maintenance and testing. This special issue focuses on applications of search SBSE to the maintenance phase of the life cycle. After software testing 2, software maintenance is the most widely studied application area for SBSE research. Work on SBSE applications to problems in software maintenance can be traced back to the pioneering work of the Mancoridis et al. 3, which led to the development of the Bunch tool for software re-modularization 4. In the past five years there has been a significant increase in SBSE applications to software maintenance and evolution. Search-based techniques have been applied to post-development code improvement problems, such as object-oriented refactoring 5, 6, and imperative language slicing and transformation 7. Other applications are related to software engineering economics and project management problems, such as release planning 8-12, effort, and cost estimation 13-16, and project staffing and planning 17-20. Last, but not the least, SBSE has been applied to deal with service-oriented architectures, for example for services QoS-aware composition 21, service-level agreement negotiation 22, and testing 23. A complete overview of SBSE with a discussion of future research trends can be found in the recent International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) ‘Future of Software Engineering’ paper 24. This issue of the Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice features three outstanding papers, dealing with different aspects of software maintenance and evolution: release planning and staffing, re-factoring, and component substitution. The paper ‘Optimized Staffing for Product Releases—Focused Search and its Application at Chartwell Technologies’ by Puneet Kapur, An Ngo-The, Günther Ruhe, and Andrew Smith presents an approach for optimizing the staffing for product releases. The problem they solve can be viewed as part of the more general release planning problem, which assigns features to releases such that technical, resource, risk, and budget constraints are met. In particular, the genetic search-based approach the authors propose aims at assigning human resources to software development tasks, taking them from a pool of developers having different levels of skills. The applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated with an industrial case study. The paper ‘Search-Based Refactoring: an Empirical Study’ by Mark O'Keffe and Mel Ó Cinnéide presents an approach to automatically re-factor, using search-based techniques, object-oriented systems that undergo repeated addition of functionality. Such addition can, very often, deteriorate the quality of the system's underlying design. Their re-factoring is guided by the QMOOD quality model 25, and the paper compares different optimization techniques, such as Genetic Algorithms, Simulated Annealing, and Multiple Ascent Hill-Climbing. The results of experiments carried out on five software systems suggest that the latter technique outperforms the others. The paper ‘Search-based Many-to-one Component Substitution’ by Nicolas Desnos, Marianne Huchard, Guy Tremblay, Christelle Urtado, and Sylvain Vauttier presents a search-based approach that allows the replacement of an obsolete component with a composition of multiple components. When a component becomes obsolete, the approach searches for a minimal assembly of other components, exposing their functionality by means of ports that preserves the behavior of the original component. The proposed approach has been evaluated on a set of randomly generated components. We hope that readers will enjoy this special issue and find the selected papers insightful and inspiring. We would like to thank all the authors who presented papers for this special issue: there were many good quality papers, but unfortunately we could accept only three of them. Last, but not the least, we would like to thank the reviewers who provided timely, detailed and constructive feedbacks to the authors. Without their precious help this special issue would not have been possible.

Welcome to the first edition of the International Workshop on Test Oracles (TORACLE 2021) to be held virtually on August 24, 2021, co-located with the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2021). Testing is an important activity in software engineering, especially with the growing adoption of software systems in safety-critical domains. Testing research, however, is mostly focused on determining which test inputs to use (e.g., proposing and evaluating test coverage criteria or automatic test generation tools). Regardless of the used coverage criterion, we need to know whether a given program executes correctly on a given input. Indeed, a test execution for which we cannot discriminate between success or failure is fruitless. This corresponds to the so-called ”oracle problem”, the problem of knowing whether a program behaves correctly for a specific input. While the importance of the oracle problem is well understood, only a few alternatives exist to manually deriving test oracles. This makes test oracle automation one of the main bottlenecks for full test automation. Therefore, novel approaches and tools are needed to address this important problem.

Source code review is a core activity in software engineering where a reviewer examines the code with the intention of finding bugs in the program. A lot of research has been carried out in understanding how software engineers perform code comprehension; however contribution of eye tracking traits seems to have not been addressed. This paper outlines a study conducted in an industrial environment of software engineers. It focused on understanding the visual attention of subjects with programming skills and subjects without programming skills and recognize the eye tracking traits required for source code review. The results indicate a significant difference in gaze behaviors of these groups. The key aspects of subjects with programming skills while source code review are required to have certain eye tracking traits like better code coverage, attention span on error lines and comments.

Software Engineering is a knowledge-intensive activity, requiring extensive knowledge of the application domain and of the target software itself. Many Software Engineering costs can be attributed to the ineffectiveness of current techniques for managing this knowledge, and Artificial Intelligence techniques can help alleviate this situation. More than two decades of research have led to many significant theoretical results, but few demonstrations of practical utility. This is due in part to the amount and diversity of knowledge required by Software Engineering activities, and in part to the fact that much of the research has been narrowly focused, missing many issues that are of great practical importance. Important issues that remain to be addressed include the representation and use of domain knowledge and the representation of the design and implementation history of a software system. If solutions to these issues are found, and experiments in practical situations are successful, the implications for the practice of Software Engineering will be profound, and radically different software development paradigms will become possible.

With the tremendous growth in the complexity of software development in the last 1015 years, the management of risks in software engineering activities is becoming an important and non-trivial issue from three perspectives: project, process and product. Therefore, researchers and practitioners are continually trying to find effective risk management approaches. In this paper, we briefly discuss the principles of risk management in software engineering, review some of the process models popular in the software engineering community, and finally discuss some of the important works conducted recently in this area in the last five years. While writing the paper, we have focused mostly on project, and process-based risks and not on product risks.

Enterprise information systems(EIS) focus on dealing with the complex business logic of collecting, filtering, processing, and distributing data for improving productivity and service in our daily life. The successful development of enterprise information system is the labor-intensive activities in software engineering, it requires the sophisticated human efforts for requirements validation, system design, implementation and verification. Our previous work RM2PT can help to achieve a validated requirements model through automatically generating prototypes from requirements models to support incremental and rapid requirements validation. In this paper, we present a tool named RM2EIS to further alleviate the problem of system development by supporting automatically generate the back-end source code of enterprise information system from the validated requirements model, which are achieved by several round requirements validation in RM2PT. We demonstrate that RM2EIS can achieve higher quality code (+8.27%) with less time cost (-61.92%) than the manual development through 9 case studies. Overall, the results were satisfactory. The proposed approach can be further extended and applied for the EIS development in the software industry. The tool can be downloaded at https://rm2pt.com/advs/rm2eis and a demo video casting its features is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Nde-JYezg4.

Defect reports are generated from various testing and development activities in software engineering. Sometimes two reports are submitted that describe the same problem, leading to duplicate reports. These reports are mostly written in structured natural language, and as such, it is hard to compare two reports for similarity with formal methods. In order to identify duplicates, we investigate using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to support the identification. A prototype tool is developed and evaluated in a case study analyzing defect reports at Sony Ericsson mobile communications. The evaluation shows that about 2/3 of the duplicates can possibly be found using the NLP techniques. Different variants of the techniques provide only minor result differences, indicating a robust technology. User testing shows that the overall attitude towards the technique is positive and that it has a growth potential.

Verification and validation are becoming the most important activities in software engineering because of the stronger need to ensure and enhance quality. The system designers need to ensure the conformance of models with the functionalities of a target system and the correctness, safeness and reliability of its operating cycles. Many formal methods have been promoted to support such tasks and Petri nets formalism seems to be one of the most relevant one to evaluate control properties. But it lacks of structuration facilities to allow to handle large scale systems. The aim of this paper is to show that, for some guidelines, Petri nets can be integrated in usual object-oriented software methodologies in order to evaluate such properties. Hence, one can profit from contributions of both object and nets to handle quality in systems in a more satisfactory way.KeywordsObject MethodologyPetri NetsControl PropertiesVerification & Validation

Software development effort estimation is one of the most crucial activities in software engineering. Effort estimation permits managers and software engineers to anticipate, forecast, and precisely quote the schedule, budget and manpower requirements. By accurately estimating the effort; software projects can be saved from under run or over run. In this paper we have summarized and then analyzed the past work of software effort estimation in a systematic way. 10 researches were surveyed and explained briefly that how they are contributing towards solving the effort estimation problem in terms of time, cost or test. It also emphasizes that various effort estimation models have different pros and cons and can be used in different context on basis of different types of historical data. The survey discovered the most popular models used for effort prediction are supervised learning algorithms. The trends identified through this survey can help in exploring the potential research areas.

The study of change impact is a fundamental activity in software engineering because it can be used to plan changes, set them up and to predict or detect their effects on the system and try to reduce them. Various methods have been presented in the literature for this sector of maintenance. The objective of this project is to improve the maintenance of Object Oriented (OO) systems and to intervene more specifically in the task of analyzing and predicting the change impact. Among several models of representation, Bayesian Networks (BNs) constitute a particular quantitative approach that can integrate uncertainty in reasoning and offering explanations close to reality. Furthermore, with the BNs, it is also possible to use expert judgments to anticipate the predictions, about the change impact in our case. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic approach to determine the change impact in OO systems. This prediction is given in a form of probability.

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is changing the way we build, operate, and maintain our software-intensive systems. Several projects using MDE practices are reporting significant improvements in quality and performance but, to be able to handle these projects, software engineers need a set of technical and interpersonal skills that are currently not widely available. The MDE postgraduate diploma intends to fill this gap by offering a full-time one year formation onMDE. The course syllabus is designed to teach students how to work at a higher abstraction level by the rigorous use of (software) models as the main artifacts in all software engineering activities. Contents include the conceptual framework of MDE plus all techniques and tools (e.g. for defining modeling languages, models, and model transformations) required to successfully complete software engineering projects following a MDE approach. The organizational impact (and challenges) of adopting MDE are exemplified using real industrial experiences. This article describes the MDE Diploma and the lessons that we learned after completing its first edition.

Human interaction and behavior are at the core of most software engineering (SE) activities. Furthermore, software is created to fulfill human stakeholders' needs and wishes, and the resulting software is ultimately utilized (directly or indirectly) by human users. Today's software is highly intertwined with our lives, and it possesses an increasing ability to act and influence us. Besides the obvious example of self-driving cars and their potential harmfulness, more mundane software such as social networks may introduce bias, break privacy preferences, lead to digital addiction, etc. Additionally, the SE process itself is highly affected by ethical issues, such as diversity and business ethics. This paper introduces ethics-aware SE, a version of SE in which the ethical values of the stakeholders (including developers and users) are captured, analyzed, and reflected in software specifications and in the SE processes.

This chapter describes the research project Companion conducted at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland FHNW and its relationship to the research area Agile Requirements Engineering (ARE). ARE aims to establish requirements engineering practices, which are customized for agile development methodologies such like Scrum, XP, etc. Within the Companion project a Web App was developed to promote mental health of adolescents taking their first steps into working life. The description starts by giving some key information about the project, its context, the development of the Web App and the weaknesses observed during software engineering activities. Next, classical requirements engineering and ARE are compared and specific challenges for ARE based on experiences from the industry are presented. For the challenges in ARE, specific practices have been proposed which are described together with their limitations. This chapter ends with a selection of adequate ARE practices which may increase the performance of software engineering in situations similar to the context of the Companion project.

With the common goal of producing higher quality systems at lower costs,model-driven engineering (MDE) is becoming an integral part of all areas and disciplines related to Software Engineering. Far from the initial role of (UML) models as mere sketches of the structure of software systems, models have become primary artefacts in most software engineering activities, ranging from specification and design to analysis and synthesis of applications, including also deployment, testing, and maintenance of software systems. In addition to models, MDE elements such as domain-specific languages, model transformations, and metamodelling are now part of any MDE practitioner’s toolkit, indispensable for leveraging the potential advantages that MDE brings to the software industry. Although significant advances have happened around MDE during the past 10years, the ever-increasing complexity and cost of developing new kinds of applications, together with the stronger requirements on the systems being developed, impose new challenges on the discipline as well as open areas for dedicated research. With the goal of advancing in the field ofMDE, the “European Conference on Modelling: Foundations and Applications” (ECMFA) started in 2005, first as the “European Conference on Model Driven Architecture—Foundations and Applications” (EC-MDA) and since 2010 using its current name and acronym. ECMFA has become the premier Euro-

The generation of traceability links or traceability matrices is vital to many software engineering activities. It is also person-power intensive, time-consuming, error-prone, and lacks tool support. The activities that require traceability information include, but are not limited to, risk analysis, impact analysis, criticality assessment, test coverage analysis, and verification and validation of software systems. Information Retrieval (IR) techniques have been shown to assist with the automated generation of traceability links by reducing the time it takes to generate the traceability mapping. Researchers have applied techniques such as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), vector space retrieval, and probabilistic IR and have enjoyed some success. This paper concentrates on examining issues not previously widely studied in the context of traceability: the importance of the vocabulary base used for tracing and the evaluation and assessment of traceability mappings and methods using secondary measures. We examine these areas and perform empirical studies to understand the importance of each to the traceability of software engineering artifacts.