Context: In a previous study, we reported on a systematic literature review (SLR), based on a manual search of 13 journals and conferences undertaken in the period 1st January 2004 to 30th June 2007. Objective: The aim of this on-going research is to provide an annotated catalogue of SLRs available to software engineering researchers and practitioners. This study updates our previous study using a broad automated search. Method: We performed a broad automated search to find SLRs published in the time period 1st January 2004 to 30th June 2008. We contrast the number, quality and source of these SLRs with SLRs found in the original study. Results: Our broad search found an additional 35 SLRs corresponding to 33 unique studies. Of these papers, 17 appeared relevant to the undergraduate educational curriculum and 12 appeared of possible interest to practitioners. The number of SLRs being published is increasing. The quality of papers in conferences and workshops has improved as more researchers use SLR guidelines. Conclusion: SLRs appear to have gone past the stage of being used solely by innovators but cannot yet be considered a main stream software engineering research methodology. They are addressing a wide range of topics but still have limitations, such as often failing to assess primary study quality.

https://romisatriawahono.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Kitchenham-Systematic-literature-reviews-in-software-engineering-%E2%80%93-A-tertiary-study-2012.pdf

Systematic literature reviews in software engineering - A tertiary study

Systematic studies of the literature can be done in different ways. In particular, different guidelines propose different first steps in their recommendations, e.g. start with search strings in different databases or start with the reference lists of a starting set of papers. In software engineering, the main recommended first step is using search strings in a number of databases, while in information systems, snowballing has been recommended as the first step. This paper compares the two different search approaches for conducting literature review studies. The comparison is conducted by searching for articles addressing “Agile practices in global software engineering”. The focus of the paper is on evaluating the two different search approaches. Despite the differences in the included papers, the conclusions and the patterns found in both studies are quite similar. The strengths and weaknesses of each first step are discussed separately and in comparison with each other. It is concluded that none of the first steps is outperforming the other, and the choice of guideline to follow, and hence the first step, may be context-specific, i.e. depending on the area of study.

/pdf/systematic-literature-studies-database-searches-vs-backward-3728h49we0.pdf

Systematic literature studies: database searches vs. backward snowballing

The π-Calculus: A theory of mobile processes by Davide Sangiorgi and David Walker Formal methods have formed the foundation of Computer Science since its inception. Although, initially these formal methods dealt with processes and systems on an individual basis, the paradigm has shifted with the dawn of the age of computer networks. When dealing with systems with interconnected, communicating, dependent, cooperative, and competitive components, the older outlook of analyzing and developing singular systems—and the tools that went with it—were hardly suitable. This led to the development of theories and tools that would support the new paradigm. On the tools end, the development has been widespread and satisfactory: programming languages, development frameworks, databases, and even end-user software products such as word processors, have gained network-awareness. However on the theoretical end, the development has been far less satisfactory. The major work was done by Robin Milner, Joachim Parrow, and David Walker who developed the formalism known as π-calculus in 1989. π-calculus is a process calculus that treats communication between its components as the basic form of computation. It has been quite successful as a foundation of several other calculi in the field and as Milner puts it, it has become common to express ideas about interactions and mobility in variants of the calculus. Introduction The current book serves as a comprehensive reference to π-calculus. Besides Milner's own book on the subject, this is the only other book-length publication on the topic. In many ways, it is much more comprehensive than Milner's: a much wider area of topics are dealt with and in more detail as well. Contents The book is split into seven part. The first part presents the basic theory of π-calculus. However, basic does not mean concise: every topic is discussed in great detail. The section on bisimulation is particularly intensive and provides several insights about the motivation for the theory. Part two discusses several variants of the original calculus. By varying several characteristics of the calculus, such as whether a process can communicate with more than processes at a time, we can obtain these variants. A number of interesting properties of the language are studied by the other when discussing these variants. As can be understood from the title, the calculus' contribution to analyzing mobile processes is a major topic, and it is dealt with extensively starting from part three. The basics are introduced by the way of a sophisticated typing system whose application in speciying complex processes is presented in part four. Part five looks at higher-order π-calculus in which composed systems are considered as first-class citizens. Part six is one of the best in the book and discusses the relation between π-calculus and lambda-calculus, which is an older and more basic calculus. Finally part seven shows how π-calculus can be employed in studying practical, modern software engineering concepts such as object-oriented programming. Impressions One of my disappointments with this book is in how often the reader is left perplexed with some of the theoretical developments, specially in part three. π-calculus is a complicated topic, even for the graduate student audience to which this book is directed, and the author would have done much better by reducing the number of topics and instead focusing on more lucid and detailed explanations. There are several experimental digressions throughout the book, which although interesting, take away from some of the momentum of sequential study. For example, topics such as comparison and encoding of one language to another could be easily moved to a separate section in order to make the content more suitable for self-study. Another issue is the little effort towards making the connection from the theoretical to the practical. The main reason why formal methods have not been adopted in mainstream software development pracitces is that often it is unclear to developers how formalisms can contribute towards the software engineering process. The book would have served its purpose much better if it had spent part of eah chapter discussing the practical application of that chapter's content. For example, congruence checking and bisimulation can be incredbily exciting topics for programmers to learn if they can see practical applications of such powerful techniques. Beyond the above criticism, the book is absolutely indispensible to students and researchers in the field of formal methods. Currently it serves as the primary reference for anyone who wishes to learn the various aspects of π-calculus in detail. Raheel Ahmad

The Ï-Calculus: A theory of mobile processes

User feedback is imperative in improving software quality. In this paper, we explore the rich set of user feedback available for third party mobile applications as a way to extract new/changed requirements for next versions. A potential problem using this data is its volume and the time commitment involved in extracting new/changed requirements. Our goal is to alleviate part of the process through automatic topic extraction. We process user comments to extract the main topics mentioned as well as some sentences representative of those topics. This information can be useful for requirements engineers to revise the requirements for next releases. Our approach relies on adapting information retrieval techniques including topic modeling and evaluating them on different publicly available data sets. Results show that the automatically extracted topics match the manually extracted ones, while also significantly decreasing the manual effort.

Analysis of user comments: an approach for software requirements evolution

https://www.eng.uwo.ca/electrical/faculty/capretz_l/docs/publications/Shirley-CHB-SLR-v21.pdf

Forty years of research on personality in software engineering: A mapping study

Context: The dependencies between individual requirements have an important influence on software engineering activities e.g., project planning, architecture design, and change impact analysis. Although dozens of requirement dependency types were suggested in the literature from different points of interest, there still lacks an evaluation of the applicability of these dependency types in requirements engineering. Objective: Understanding the effect of these requirement dependencies to software engineering activities is useful but not trivial. In this study, we aimed to first investigate whether the existing dependency types are useful in practise, in particular for change propagation analysis, and then suggest improvements for dependency classification and definition. Method: We conducted a case study that evaluated the usefulness and applicability of two well-known generic dependency models covering 25 dependency types. The case study was conducted in a real-world industry project with three participants who offered different perspectives. Results: Our initial evaluation found that there exist a number of overlapping and/or ambiguous dependency types among the current models; five dependency types are particularly useful in change propagation analysis; and practitioners with different backgrounds possess various viewpoints on change propagation. To improve the state-of-the-art, a new dependency model is proposed to tackle the problems identified from the case study and the related literature. The new model classifies dependencies into intrinsic and additional dependencies on the top level, and suggests nine dependency types with precise definitions as its initial set. Conclusions: Our case study provides insights into requirement dependencies and their effects on change propagation analysis for both research and practise. The resulting new dependency model needs further evaluation and improvement.

Investigating dependencies in software requirements for change propagation analysis

Context Bug localization, namely, to locate suspicious snippets from source code files for developers to fix the bug, is crucial for software quality assurance and software maintenance. Effective bug localization technique is desirable for software developers to reduce the effort involved in bug resolution. State-of-the-art bug localization techniques concentrate on file-level coarse-grained localization by lexical matching bug reports and source code files. However, this would bring about a heavy burden for developers to locate feasible code snippets to make change with the goal of fixing the bug. Objective This paper proposes a novel approach called FineLocator to method-level fine-grained bug localization by using semantic similarity, temporal proximity and call dependency for method expansion. Method Firstly, the bug reports and the methods of source code are represented by numeric vectors using word embedding (word2vec) and the TF-IDF method. Secondly, we propose three query expansion scores as semantic similarity score, temporal proximity score and call dependency score to address the representation sparseness problem caused by the short lengths of methods in the source code. Then, the representation of a method with short length is augmented by elements of its neighboring methods with query expansion. Thirdly, when a new bug report is incoming, FineLocator will retrieve the methods in source code by similarity ranking on the bug report and the augmented methods for bug localization. Results We collect bug repositories of ArgoUML, Maven, Kylin, Ant and AspectJ projects to investigate the performance of the proposed FineLocator approach. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed FineLocator approach can improve the performances of method-level bug localization at average by 20%, 21% and 17% measured by Top-N indicator, MAP and MRR respectively, in comparison with state-of-the-art techniques. Conclusion This is the first paper to demonstrate how to make use of method expansion to address the representation sparseness problem for method-level fine-grained bug localization.

FineLocator: A novel approach to method-level fine-grained bug localization by query expansion

Requirement change occurs during the entire software lifecycle,which is not only inevitable but also necessary However, uncontrolled requirementchange will lead to a huge waste of time and effort Most studiesabout the change impact analysis assume changes take place in code, which resultsin the analysis only at the source code level and ignoring the requirementchange is the fundamental cause This paper introduces a Requirement CentricTraceability (RCT) approach to analyze the change impact at the requirementlevel The RCT combines with the requirement interdependency graph and dynamicrequirement traceability to identify the potential impact of requirementchange on the entire system in late phase This approach has been successfullyapplied to a real-life project, and the benefits and lessons learned will also bediscussed

Requirement-centric traceability for change impact analysis: a case study

Requirement volatility is a common and inevitable project risk which has severe consequences on software projects. When requirement change occurs, a project manager wants to analyze its impact so as to better cope with it. As the modification to one requirement can cause changes in its dependent requirements and its dependency relationship, the impact analysis can be very complex. This paper proposes a simulation approach DepRVSim (Requirement Volatility Simulation considering Dependency relationship) to assessing this sort of impact. We abstract the general patterns of the influence mechanism, which may trigger modification in its dependency relationship and bring changes in other requirements through dependency. DepRVSim can generate such information as the probability distribution of effort deviation and schedule deviation. As a proof-of-concept, the applicability of DepRVSim is demonstrated with an illustrative case study of a real software project. Results indicate that DepRVSim is able to provide experimental evidence for decision making when requirement changes.

A simulation approach for impact analysis of requirement volatility considering dependency change

Background: Software systems must evolve in order to adapt in a timely fashion to the rapid changes of stakeholder needs, technologies, business environment and society regulations. Numerous studies have shown that cost, schedule or defect density of a software project may escalate as the requirements evolve. Requirements evolution management has become one important topic in requirements engineering research. Aim: To depict a holistic state-of-the-art of requirement evolution management. Method: We undertook a systematic review on requirements evolution management. Results: 125 relevant studies were identified and reviewed. This paper reports the preliminary results from this review: (1) the terminology and definition of requirements evolution; (2) fourteen key activities in requirements evolution management; (3) twenty-eight metrics of requirements evolution for three measurement goals. Conclusions: Requirements evolution is a process of continuous change of requirements in a certain direction. Most existing studies focus on how to deal with evolution after it happens. In the future, more research attention on exploring the evolution laws and predicting evolution is encouraged.

Juan Li

Papers

Investigating dependencies in software requirements for change propagation analysis

FineLocator: A novel approach to method-level fine-grained bug localization by query expansion

Requirement-centric traceability for change impact analysis: a case study

A simulation approach for impact analysis of requirement volatility considering dependency change

Preliminary results of a systematic review on requirements evolution