App stores like Google Play and Apple AppStore have over 3 million apps covering nearly every kind of software and service. Billions of users regularly download, use, and review these apps. Recent studies have shown that reviews written by the users represent a rich source of information for the app vendors and the developers, as they include information about bugs, ideas for new features, or documentation of released features. The majority of the reviews, however, is rather non-informative just praising the app and repeating to the star ratings in words. This paper introduces several probabilistic techniques to classify app reviews into four types: bug reports, feature requests, user experiences, and text ratings. For this, we use review metadata such as the star rating and the tense, as well as, text classification, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis techniques. We conducted a series of experiments to compare the accuracy of the techniques and compared them with simple string matching. We found that metadata alone results in a poor classification accuracy. When combined with simple text classification and natural language preprocessing of the text--particularly with bigrams and lemmatization--the classification precision for all review types got up to 88---92 % and the recall up to 90---99 %. Multiple binary classifiers outperformed single multiclass classifiers. Our results inspired the design of a review analytics tool, which should help app vendors and developers deal with the large amount of reviews, filter critical reviews, and assign them to the appropriate stakeholders. We describe the tool main features and summarize nine interviews with practitioners on how review analytics tools including ours could be used in practice.

On the Automatic Classification of App Reviews.

BIM compatibility and its differentiation with interoperability challenges as an innovation factor

The growing complexity of production systems requires appropriate control architectures that allow flexible adaptation during their runtime. Although cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) provide the means to cope with complexity and flexibility, the migration with existing control systems is still a challenge. The term CPPS denotes a mechatronic system (physical world) coupled with software entities and digital information (cyber part), both enabling the smart factory concept for the Industry 4.0 (I4.0) paradigm. In this regard, design patterns could help developers to build their software with common solutions for manufacturing control derived from experiences. We provide a description and comparison of the already existing multi-agent systems (MAS) design patterns, which were collected and classified by introducing two classification criteria to support MAS developers. The applicability of these criteria is shown in the case of specific example architectures from the lower and higher control levels. The authors, together with experts from the German Agent Systems committee FA 5.15, gathered more than twenty MAS patterns, evaluated, and compared four selected patterns with the presented criteria and terminology. The main contribution is a CPPS architecture that fulfills requirements related to the era of smart factories, as well as the Reference Architectural Model I4.0 (RAMI 4.0). The conclusions indicate that agent-based patterns greatly benefit the CPPS design. In addition, it is shown that manufacturing based on MAS is a good way to address complex requests of the CPPS development.

/pdf/cyber-physical-production-systems-architecture-based-on-25ljb5e4rh.pdf

Cyber-physical production systems architecture based on multi-agent’s design pattern—comparison of selected approaches mapping four agent patterns

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Software Measurement, IWSM-Mensura 2007, held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in November 2007. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers deal with aspects of software measurement like function-points measurement, effort and cost estimates, prediction, industrial experiences in software measurement, planning and implementing measurement, measurement-based software process improvement, best practices in software measurement, usability and user interaction measurement, measurement of open source projects, teaching and learning software measurement as well as new trends and ontologies for software measurement.

Software Process and Product Measurement: International Conference, IWSM-Mensura 2007, Palma de Mallorca, Spain, November 5-8, 2007. Revised Papers

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through the Adapt@Cloud Project under Grant TIN2017-84550-R.

/pdf/an-update-on-effort-estimation-in-agile-software-development-zzig29jayk.pdf

An Update on Effort Estimation in Agile Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review

As the complexity of software increases, the choice of the appropriate software architecture becomes a critical task. This paper provides a guideline for selecting the appropriate software architecture based on pertinent ISO 25010 quality characteristics. The guideline was established through an analytical survey of 113 papers published from 2010 to 2014. Through this survey, we first identified a set of commonly used software architectures in the software engineering literature. Secondly, we applied the Formal Concept Analysis technique to classify each one of these architectures according to ISO 25010 quality characteristics. Finally, we identified the relationships among ISO 25010 quality characteristics, which in turn helped us to develop a guideline on how to select the appropriate software architecture with respect to ISO 25010 quality characteristics. In order to make sure about the validation of the proposed guideline, a survey with industrial experts is in progress. Data were collected from two companies working in the software development field (ST2i and Telnet).

A guideline for software architecture selection based on ISO 25010 quality related characteristics

To help developing continuous improvement in Information and Communication Technology, new software are required with functionality and characteristics different from the traditional one. Thus, measurement procedures need to be tailored to this new computing context. In fact, the software functional size is one of the important cost drivers of software development projects. An accurate measurement needs a detailed definition of software requirements and may require an important measurement effort. However, this is not always available. Thus, well defined measurement procedures requiring little effort and providing approximate or rapid measurement results are needed. The COSMIC Functional Size Measurement (FSM) method has knew a great success compared to other methods since it addresses different types of software including "business application", "mobile apps", etc. Moreover, it has been successfully used with UML diagrams for different objectives. In this paper, a Use Case based measurement procedure is proposed in order to estimate the functional size of mobile and web applications using COSMIC FSM method. The proposed procedure helps both beginners and experienced measurer in applying COSMIC and avoiding measurement errors. It is based on a set of measurement formulas tested and validated through the case study "Restaurant Management System".

A rapid measurement procedure for sizing web and mobile applications based on COSMIC FSM method

UML is a widely used modeling language that offers a set of complementary diagram types used to describe a system according to different views, such as the functional view, the dynamic view and the static view. This multi-view modeling can induce inconsistencies between UML diagrams. This paper presents a COSMIC-based approach for analyzing and checking the consistency between the activity diagram and the component diagram. First, it elaborates a set of procedures for the COSMIC Functional Size Measurement of each diagram. Secondly, it proposes a set of heuristics, based on the semantic relations between these two diagrams, to assist developers in predicting the range of the FSM values of the component diagram from those of the activity diagram. The set of measurement procedures and heuristics are illustrated through the "Rice cooker" case study.

Analyzing UML Activity and Component Diagrams - An Approach based on COSMIC Functional Size Measurement

UML has been established as a de facto standard for modeling software. It offers a set of complementary diagram types used to document functional, dynamic and static views of a system. UML diagrams diversification and their multi-view representation can cause inconsistencies among the diagram types used to model the system during the different development phases. This paper presents an automated COSMIC-based approach for checking the consistency between the activity and component diagrams. First, it defines measurement procedures to determine the functional size of both diagrams. Secondly, it proposes a set of heuristics to ensure the consistency in terms of COSMICFSM. Third, it presents a tool for measuring the functional size of these diagrams, and then checking their consistency.

Automated COSMIC-Based Analysis and Consistency Verification of UML Activity and Component Diagrams

When performing functional requirements analysis, software developers need to understand the application domain to fulfil organizational needs. This is essential for making trade-off decisions and achieving the success of the software development project. An application domain is dealt within the modelling phase of the business process lifecycle. Assuming that functional changes are inevitable, we propose to use the standard COSMIC to evaluate these changes and provide indicators of change status in the business domain. Expressing functional changes in terms of COSMIC Function Point units can be helpful in identifying changes leading to potential impact on the business process's functional size. In addition, we propose a top-down decomposition approach to specify requirements and analyse change impact on BPMN models at different

Mariem Haoues

Papers

A guideline for software architecture selection based on ISO 25010 quality related characteristics

A rapid measurement procedure for sizing web and mobile applications based on COSMIC FSM method

Analyzing UML Activity and Component Diagrams - An Approach based on COSMIC Functional Size Measurement

Automated COSMIC-Based Analysis and Consistency Verification of UML Activity and Component Diagrams

Analyzing Functional Changes in BPMN Models using COSMIC.