Rapid quality assurance with Requirements Smells

ContextUse cases have been widely accepted and acknowledged as a specification tool for specifying the functional requirements of a software system. Many variations of use cases exist which tries to address the issues such as their completeness, degree of formalism, automated information extraction, usability, and pertinence. ObjectiveThe aim of this systematic review is to examine the existing literature for the evolution of the use cases, their applications, quality assessments, open issues, and the future directions. MethodWe perform keyword-based extensive search to identify the relevant studies related to use case specifications research reported in journal articles, conference papers, workshop papers, bulletins and book chapters. ResultsThe specified search process resulted 119 papers, which were published between 1992 and February 2014. This included, 54 journal articles, 42 conference papers, 2 ACM/IEEE bulletins, 12 book chapters, 6 workshop papers and 3 white papers. We found that as many as twenty use case templates have been proposed and applied for various software specification problems ranging from informal descriptions with paragraph-style text to more formal keyword-oriented templates. ConclusionUse cases have been evolved from initial plain, semi-formal textual descriptions to a more formal template structure facilitating automated information extraction in various software development life cycle activities such as requirement documentation, requirement analysis, requirement validation, domain modeling, test case generation, planning and estimation, and maintenance. The issues that remain to be sorted out are (1) the right degree of formalism, (2) the efficient change management, (3) the industrial relevance, and (4) assessment of the quality of the specification. Additionally, its synergy with other software models that are used in the development processes is an issue that needs to be addressed.

A systematic literature review of use case specifications research

Customer-Centered Products – Creating Successful Products through Smart Requirements Management

Context: Advancements in machine learning (ML) lead to a shift from the traditional view of software development, where algorithms are hard-coded by humans, to ML systems materialized through learning from data. Therefore, we need to revisit our ways of developing software systems and consider the particularities required by these new types of systems. Objective: The purpose of this study is to systematically identify, analyze, summarize, and synthesize the current state of software engineering (SE) research for engineering ML systems. Method: I performed a systematic literature review (SLR). I systematically selected a pool of 141 studies from SE venues and then conducted a quantitative and qualitative analysis using the data extracted from these studies. Results: The non-deterministic nature of ML systems complicates all SE aspects of engineering ML systems. Despite increasing interest from 2018 onwards, the results reveal that none of the SE aspects have a mature set of tools and techniques. Testing is by far the most popular area among researchers. Even for testing ML systems, engineers have only some tool prototypes and solution proposals with weak experimental proof. Many of the challenges of ML systems engineering were identified through surveys and interviews. Researchers should conduct experiments and case studies, ideally in industrial environments, to further understand these challenges and propose solutions. Conclusion: The results may benefit (1) practitioners in foreseeing the challenges of ML systems engineering; (2) researchers and academicians in identifying potential research questions; and (3) educators in designing or updating SE courses to cover ML systems engineering.

A Software Engineering Perspective on Engineering Machine Learning Systems: State of the Art and Challenges

This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2015, held in Helsinki, Finland, in May 2015.While agile development has already become mainstream in industry, this field is still constantly evolving and continues to spur an enormous interest both in industry and academia. The XP conference series has always played, and continues to play, an important role in connecting the academic and practitioner communities, providing a forum for both formal and informal sharing and development of ideas, experiences, and opinions.The theme of XP 2015 "Delivering Value: Moving from Cyclic to Continuous Value Delivery" reflects the modern trend towards organizations that are simultaneously very efficient and flexible in software development and delivery.The 15 full and 7 short papers accepted for XP 2015 were selected from 44 submissions. All of the submitted papers went through a rigorous peer-review process. Additionally, 11 experience reports were selected from 45 proposals, and in each case the authors were shepherded by an experienced researcher.

Agile Processes, in Software Engineering, and Extreme Programming: 16th International Conference, XP 2015, Helsinki, Finland, May 25-29, 2015

In our recent academic experiments, an existence of positive test bias, that is lack of negative test cases, was identified when a test driven development approach was used. At the same time, when ...

Effects of Negative Testing on TDD: An Industrial Experiment

In this report, we present a summary and a few reflections of a one day workshop on Software Engineering Education held on February 22, 2012 at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India collocated with the 5th India Software Engineering Conference. We identify a gap and believe there is a need for creating an annual discussion forum that serves the need of having a regular workshop for software engineering education in India and also benefit the global software engineering education community by sharing the workshop insights and results by a publication process. The workshop consists of two keynotes, one from academia and one from industry, two subgroups discussions and presentations by the subgroups on their discussions. Three systematic techniques, invitation of position statements, set up of a Google group and an online survey, were employed before the workshop to estimate number of participants, subgroups and size of each subgroup for effective discussions. Twenty participants attended the workshop. The keynotes were on Using Collaborative Learning and Divergent Thinking to Teach Software Engineering and on Software Engineering Competency Development Model. Three topics were selected for subgroups discussions by the participants: use of various methods, such as learning while playing and project-based software engineering, over Power Point lecture, requirements and needs of undergraduate software engineering degree program from the perspective of Indian software industry and curriculum content, coverage, and impact of software engineering courses. The workshop was a successful endeavor and the response in terms of the contributions by participants is a clear indicator and confirmation of the need of having a focused discussion forum for brainstorming on software engineering education in India

A report on software engineering education workshop

Use-cases perform an important role in capturing and analys-ing software requirements in the IT industry. A number of guidelines have been proposed in the literature on how to write use-cases. Structural defects can occur when use-cases are written without following such guidelines. We develop a taxonomy of structural defects and analyse a sample of 360 industrial use-cases to understand the nature of defects in them. Our sample comes from both client-based projects and in-house projects. The results show that, compared to a sample of theoretical use-cases that follow Cockburn's guidelines, industrial use-cases on the average exhibit defects such as complex structures, lack of customer focus and missing actors. Given the shortage of analysis of real industry samples, our results make a significant contribution towards the understanding of the strengths and weaknesses in industrial use-cases in terms of structural defects. The results will be useful for industry practitioners in adopting use-case modelling standards to reduce the defects as well as for software engineering researchers to explore the reasons for such differences between the theory and the practice in use-case modelling.

An empirical study of structural defects in industrial use-cases

Conducting empirical studies in industry always presents a major challenge for many researchers. Being a graduate student does not make things any easier. Often due to the lack of experience, credibility or just very limited networking, graduate students do not receive many opportunities to directly collaborate with industry and experiment their theoretical models in a realistic environment. On the other hand, empirical research conducted in an academic settings is often criticised for using students as subjects and working with a small sample size, thus creating major validity threat of the published results. In this paper we are presenting an experience report from an industrial empirical study conducted at Infosys Ltd., India with the support of their global internship program for graduate students, InStep. Focus of the paper is to present several challenges arisen before, during, and after the study, requiring an immediate attention in order to have a successful experiment completion. We also discuss and elaborate the data analysis results and its implication to our current research activities.

Industrial study on test driven development: challenges and experience

Challenges of implementing successful research collaborations between industry and academia in software engineering are varied and many. Differing timelines, metrics, expectations, and perceptions of these two communities are some common obstacles, which need be analyzed and discussed, to discover synergies and strengthen collaborations between researchers and practitioners. In this report, we present insights from the 6th International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Industrial Practice held at the International Conference on Software Engineering 2019. Specifically, one particular topic dominated the discussion - the resurgence of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms in software engineering research and industry practice, and its implications for the collaboration between these two communities. We present takeaways from keynote talks on this subject, insights from paper presentations, and findings from the discussion session.

Rakesh Shukla

Papers

Effects of Negative Testing on TDD: An Industrial Experiment

A report on software engineering education workshop

An empirical study of structural defects in industrial use-cases

Industrial study on test driven development: challenges and experience

Implications of Resurgence in Artificial Intelligence for Research Collaborations in Software Engineering