Journal of Software-Evolution and Process最新文献

{"title":"Product and service quality risks: A survey about evolution and application in different business domains to facilitate quality engineering","authors":"Alexander Poth","doi":"10.1002/smr.2671","DOIUrl":"10.1002/smr.2671","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Products and services are developed to realize chances on the market. Often, development teams are focusing primarily on the potential chances rather than on the corresponding risks of new products and services. However, it is possible to integrate the product and service quality risks early into the development procedures for a balanced and holistic view. The integration enables systematic mitigation and quality assurance actions to handle the risks. The article analyzes the literature related to quality risk approaches, identifies mature and generally applicable product and service risk approaches, and gives selected approach examples about its methodical evolution and how it can be integrated into the development procedures including soft-skills development such as employee awareness and systematical training within organizations. A case study in the Group IT of the Volkswagen AG is discussed.</p>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"36 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140576953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On the accessibility of the grayscale version of a PoN-enabled use case notation","authors":"Mohamed El-Attar","doi":"10.1002/smr.2667","DOIUrl":"10.1002/smr.2667","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The physics of notations (PoN) is a framework for designing cognitively effective notations. Cognitive effectiveness refers to the ease (speed and accuracy) by which model readers read models. In 2019, a PoN-Enabled notation for use case diagrams was proposed. It has been empirically proven that the cognitive effectiveness of this new notation is superior to the original use case notation. The new notation however relies in part on the use of color. The accessibility of this new design has not been validated for use by the colorblind community, or any users who need to use a grayscale version of the models created. The PoN framework was not designed to explicitly account for the colorblind community or users who can only access grayscale versions of models. Inclusivity should not be an afterthought in software engineering practice or research. To this end, this paper empirically evaluates the cognitive effectiveness of the PoN-enabled use case notation in situations where it is viewed in grayscale.</p>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"36 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140576952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"When rationality meets intuition: A research agenda for software design decision-making","authors":"Carianne Pretorius,&nbsp;Maryam Razavian,&nbsp;Katrin Eling,&nbsp;Fred Langerak","doi":"10.1002/smr.2664","DOIUrl":"10.1002/smr.2664","url":null,"abstract":"<p>As society's reliance on software systems escalates over time, so too does the cost of failure of these systems. Meanwhile, the complexity of software systems, as well as of their designs, is also ever-increasing, influenced by the proliferation of new tools and technologies to address intended societal needs. The traditional response to this complexity in software engineering and software architecture has been to apply rationalistic approaches to software design through methods and tools for capturing design rationale and evaluating various design options against a set of criteria. However, research from other fields demonstrates that intuition may also hold benefits for making complex design decisions. All humans, including software designers, use intuition and rationality in varying combinations. The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive overview of what is known and unknown from existing research regarding the use and performance consequences of using intuition and rationality in software design decision-making. To this end, a systematic literature review has been conducted, with an initial sample of 3909 unique publications and a final sample of 26 primary studies. We present an overview of existing research, based on the literature concerning intuition and rationality use in software design decision-making and propose a research agenda with 14 questions that should encourage researchers to fill identified research gaps. This research agenda emphasizes what should be investigated to be able to develop support for the application of the two cognitive processes in software design decision-making.</p>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"36 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/smr.2664","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140360862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An empirical investigation of the relationship between pattern grime and code smells","authors":"Maha Alharbi,&nbsp;Mohammad Alshayeb","doi":"10.1002/smr.2666","DOIUrl":"10.1002/smr.2666","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Developers are encouraged to adopt good design practices to maintain good software quality during the system's evolution. However, some modifications and changes to the system could cause code smells and pattern grime, which might incur more maintenance effort. As the presence of both code smells and pattern grime is considered a bad sign and raises a flag at code segments that need more careful examination, a potential connection between them may exist. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to (1) empirically investigate the potential relationship between the accumulation of pattern grime and the presence of code smells and (2) evaluate the significance of individual code smells when they appear in a specific pattern grime category. To achieve this goal, we performed an empirical study using six-grime metrics and 10 code smells on five Java open-source projects ranging from 217 to 563 classes. Our statistical results indicate that, in general, the growth of grime is more likely to co-occur with code smells using Spearman's correlation and Odd Ratio test. Specifically, there is a strong positive association between the growth of pattern grime at the class level and the presence of Shotgun Surgery smell according to the result of applying the Apriori algorithm, which gives conviction values equal to 1.66. The findings in this paper are helpful for developers and researchers as the presence of pattern grime could be considered a factor in improving the performance of existing smell detection methods. Furthermore, the link between grime and smells can be exploited as a hint for smell distribution in the system.</p>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"36 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140196261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Richen: Automated enrichment of Git documentation with usage examples and scenarios","authors":"Chaochao Shen,&nbsp;Wenhua Yang,&nbsp;Haitao Jia,&nbsp;Minxue Pan,&nbsp;Yu Zhou","doi":"10.1002/smr.2662","DOIUrl":"10.1002/smr.2662","url":null,"abstract":"<p>As the predominant modern version control system, Git has become an indispensable tool for both commercial and open-source software projects. It substantially improves software development effectiveness and efficiency through its distributed version control system, fostering seamless collaboration among teams and across locations. However, research has found that many developers have doubts about using Git commands, while the official Git documentation is rather scanty, that is, lacking sufficient explanations and examples. To help developers learn and use Git commands, we propose the first approach (Richen) for enriching Git documentation with usage examples and scenarios by leveraging crowd knowledge from Stack Overflow. Richen retrieves Git-related posts from Stack Overflow, extracts relevant Q&amp;A pairs, and selects representative command usages, including usage examples and scenarios, for different Git commands. Experimental results have shown that Richen can extract informative and concise command usages for Git commands. Compared with alternative methods adapted from API usage mining, the command usages obtained by Richen have significant advantages in terms of relevance, readability, and usability. Furthermore, we have shown through an empirical study that the command usages extracted by Richen can better help developers complete Git command-related tasks.</p>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"36 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140152248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"ReInstancer: An automatic refactoring approach for Instanceof pattern matching","authors":"Yang Zhang,&nbsp;Shuai Hong","doi":"10.1002/smr.2661","DOIUrl":"10.1002/smr.2661","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The <i>instanceof</i> pattern matching can improve the code quality and readability by removing the redundant typecasting and simplifying the design in different scenarios. However, existing works do not provide sufficient support for refactoring <i>instanceof</i> pattern matching. This paper first identifies several cases that cannot be well handled by existing IDEs. Based on these observations, we propose a novel approach called <i>ReInstancer</i> to refactor <i>instanceof</i> pattern matching automatically. <i>ReInstancer</i> conducts program analysis for multi-branch statements to obtain pattern variables. After analyzing these patterns, the multi-branch statements are optimized and finally refactored into <i>switch</i> statements or expressions. <i>ReInstancer</i> is evaluated by 20 real-world projects with more than 7,700 <i>instanceof</i> pattern matching. The experimental results demonstrate that a total of 3,558 <i>instanceof</i> expressions and 228 multi-branch statements are refactored within 10.8 s on average for each project. <i>ReInstancer</i> improves the code quality by reducing redundant typecasting, demonstrating its effectiveness.</p>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"36 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140124595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction to the special issue: “Software Quality for Modern Systems”","authors":"Guglielmo De Angelis,&nbsp;Hyunsook Do,&nbsp;Bao N. Nguyen","doi":"10.1002/smr.2663","DOIUrl":"10.1002/smr.2663","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;It is with a great pleasure that we, as the Guest Editors, can finally present the Special Issue on “Software Quality for Modern Systems” for the &lt;i&gt;Journal of Software: Evolution and Process&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Software pervasiveness in modern systems strongly affects both industry and digital society. As a notable recent example, the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is continuously leading to emerging needs and expectations from both software producers and consumers. At the same time, infrastructures, software components, and applications aim to hide their increasing complexity in order to appear more human-centric. However, the potential risk from design errors, poor integration, and time-consuming engineering phases can result in unreliable solutions that can barely meet their intended objectives. In this context, software engineering processes keep demanding for the investigation of novel and further refined approaches to software quality assurance (SQA).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Software testing automation is a discipline that has produced noteworthy research in the last decades. The search for solutions to automatically test any concept of software is critical, and it encompasses several areas. These include generating test cases, test oracles, and test doubles (e.g., dummies, stubs, mocks, and fakes); defining test selection and prioritization criteria; engineering infrastructures governing; and optimizing the execution of testing sessions locally or remotely in the cloud.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this sense, we launched this special issue in order to explore current research methods, empirical evaluations, or industrial case studies involving software test automation for modern software systems such as AI solutions or applications, mobile applications, adaptive systems, or distributed and cloud platforms. Accordingly, we crafted a dedicated call for papers, inviting both the research and industrial communities to submit research papers in test automation focusing on improving various software quality attributes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Special Issue has been originally conceived within the context of the 3rd International Conference on Automation of Software Test (AST 2022). The authors of the best papers accepted at AST 2022 have been invited to submit an extended version of their previous work. In addition, the editors have decided to keep the submissions open for any other contributions aligned with the objectives of the Special Issue.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Special Issue attracted the interest of researchers from all over the world: mostly from Europe, but also from Asia, Australia, Middle East, North Africa, and North America. The Special Issue received 7 scientific papers during the submission period between August and December 2022. Among these, 4 submissions were finally accepted for publication, and an article is an extended version of a work presented at AST 2022. In the following, we report a brief resume of the accepted papers, but we also invite the reader to consul","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"36 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/smr.2663","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140074740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Application programming interface recommendation for smart contract using deep learning from augmented code representation","authors":"Jie Cai,&nbsp;Qian Cai,&nbsp;Bin Li,&nbsp;Jiale Zhang,&nbsp;Xiaobing Sun","doi":"10.1002/smr.2658","DOIUrl":"10.1002/smr.2658","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Application programming interface (API) recommendation plays a crucial role in facilitating smart contract development by providing developers with a ranked list of candidate APIs for specific recommendation points. Deep learning-based approaches have shown promising results in this field. However, existing approaches mainly rely on token sequences or abstract syntax trees (ASTs) for learning recommendation point-related features, which may overlook the essential knowledge implied in the relations between or within statements and may include task-irrelevant components during feature learning. To address these limitations, we propose a novel code graph called pruned and augmented AST (pa-AST). Our approach enhances the AST by incorporating additional knowledge derived from the control and data flow relations between and within statements in the smart contract code. Through this augmentation, the pa-AST can better represent the semantic features of the code. Furthermore, we conduct AST pruning to eliminate task-irrelevant components based on the identified flow relations. This step helps mitigate the interference caused by these irrelevant parts during the model feature learning process. Additionally, we extract the API sequence surrounding the recommendation point to provide supplementary knowledge for the model learning. The experimental results demonstrate our proposed approach achieving an average mean reciprocal rank (MRR) of 68.02%, outperforming the baselines' performance. Furthermore, through ablation experiments, we explore the effectiveness of our proposed code representation approach. The results indicate that combining pa-AST with the API sequence yields improved performance compared with using them individually. Moreover, our AST augmentation and pruning techniques significantly contribute to the overall results.</p>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"36 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140026312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"MFLion-DMN: Mayfly Lion-optimized deep maxout network for prediction of software development effort","authors":"Swapna R.,&nbsp;Niranjan Polala","doi":"10.1002/smr.2659","DOIUrl":"10.1002/smr.2659","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The precise evaluation of predicting software development effort is a serious process in software engineering. The underestimates require more time, which seems to be the negotiation of complete efficient design and complete software testing. Thus, this paper devises a novel model for inspecting the effort taken for the design of software. The Mayfly Lion Optimization (MFLion) algorithm is devised, which ensembles the Mayfly Algorithm (MA) with the Lion Optimization Algorithm (LOA) for precise estimation. The deep maxout network (DMN) is adapted wherein the different weights are produced out of which the most suitable is infused considering the MFLion during model training. The optimal features are selected using recursive feature elimination (RFE) wherein the best features are selected and the remaining irrelevant features are eliminated from the list. The proposed MFLion obtained better performance with the smallest mean magnitude of relative error (MMRE) of 5.909 and the smallest root mean square error (RMSE) of 75.505, respectively. Each technique is produced using a separate database generated using the Promise software engineering repository. The outcomes produced from the assessment of the accuracies of models suggested that the MFLion-DMN is a substitute to forecast software effort, which is extensively devised in engineering platforms.</p>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"36 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140007057","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Assessing BizDevOps maturity using international standards: Case studies and lessons learned","authors":"Eduardo Sanjurjo,&nbsp;Oscar Pedreira,&nbsp;Félix García,&nbsp;Mario Piattini","doi":"10.1002/smr.2646","DOIUrl":"10.1002/smr.2646","url":null,"abstract":"<p>DevOps has emerged as a practical approach to the interaction between development and operations. This approach has been extended to the interaction with business functions, generating the term BizDevOps. Although many proposals and tools support BizDevOps from a technical viewpoint, there has been no significant improvement in management aspects, such as evaluating the practices and processes involved in the area. This paper presents two case studies on the assessment of BizDevOps practices using MMBDO (Maturity Model for BizDevOps), a maturity model for BizDevOps based on international ICT standards. The case studies were conducted in two organizations with different profiles: a large multinational ICT company with a unit specialized in providing DevOps to the rest of the company and a small software development company that implements DevOps practices as part of its development system. The evidence we obtained in the case studies supports the adequacy of MMBDO for assessing the maturity of BizDevOps in real companies. Also, the combination of the two case studies supports the adequacy of the model for being used in companies with different sizes and levels of maturity. MMBDO is an adequate proposal for assessing the maturity of BizDevOps in software organizations and a suitable tool for process improvement.</p>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"36 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139977747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}