Journal of Systems and Software最新文献

{"title":"PMTT: Parallel multi-scale temporal convolution network and transformer for predicting the time to aging failure of software systems","authors":"Kai Jia ,&nbsp;Xiao Yu ,&nbsp;Chen Zhang ,&nbsp;Wenzhi Xie ,&nbsp;Dongdong Zhao ,&nbsp;Jianwen Xiang","doi":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112167","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112167","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Software aging is one of the significant factors affecting the reliability and availability of long-running software systems, such as Android, Cloud systems, etc. The time to aging failure (TTAF) prediction for software systems plays a crucial role in proactive rejuvenation scheduling through machine learning or statistical analysis techniques, due to its ability to determine when to perform rejuvenation to mitigate the aging effects. However, software aging characterization is relatively complicated, and only fitting the variations for a single aging indicator cannot grasp the comprehensive degradation process across different case systems; moreover, since software systems often exhibit long and short-term inherent degradation characteristics, existing prediction models possess a poor ability for modeling both global and local information simultaneously. To tackle the above problems, a novel TTAF prediction framework based on the parallel multi-scale temporal convolution network and transformer (named PMTT) is proposed, by mapping various system running indicators reflecting the software aging to TTAF. PMTT possesses the following distinctive characteristics. First, a local feature extraction module that contains multiple channel TCNs with different scales is developed to extract inherent local information from the raw input. Second, in a parallel manner, a global feature extraction module integrating transformer blocks is built to extract global information representation synchronously using the self-attention mechanism. Afterward, high-level global–local features extracted from different channels are fused, and TTAF is estimated through two fully connected regression layers using the fused features. The proposed PMTT has been compared to seven competitors using run-to-failure data collected from Android and OpenStack systems. The experiments have demonstrated the superiority of PMTT, showing an average improvement of 11.2%, 9.0%, and 9.3% in performance across three evaluation metrics compared with the optimal baseline model.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51099,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Systems and Software","volume":"217 ","pages":"Article 112167"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141953836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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":"Enhancing understanding and addressing gender bias in IT/SE job advertisements","authors":"Tanjila Kanij ,&nbsp;John Grundy ,&nbsp;Jennifer McIntosh","doi":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112169","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112169","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The majority of Information Technology (IT)/Software Engineering (SE) professionals are male. A potential reason for the low number of female IT/SE professionals might be that the roles and the way they are advertised are biased towards male candidates. The aim of this research is to collect information about the present state of practice of gender inclusiveness within IT/SE job advertisements and how, if needed, we might improve this. We conducted a survey of hiring managers and IT/SE professionals (who are employed in IT/SE roles). The survey collected their general views on gender bias within job advertisements. According to their opinions, job advertisements are often biased towards male candidates. Based on the review and suggestions from our participants we developed a set of recommendations to help hiring managers design more gender inclusive SE job advertisements. This will be a first step toward developing a gender balanced SE workforce.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51099,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Systems and Software","volume":"217 ","pages":"Article 112169"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164121224002140/pdfft?md5=e7917c321c5541079279777d4b82ec09&pid=1-s2.0-S0164121224002140-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141984700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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":"Exploring the trade-off between computational power and energy efficiency: An analysis of the evolution of quantum computing and its relation to classical computing","authors":"Elena Desdentado ,&nbsp;Coral Calero ,&nbsp;Ma Ángeles Moraga ,&nbsp;Manuel Serrano ,&nbsp;Félix García","doi":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112165","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112165","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Quantum computing is considered a revolutionary technology due to its ability to solve computational problems that are beyond the capabilities of classical computers. However, quantum computing requires great amounts of energy to run. Therefore, a factor in deciding whether to use quantum computing should be not only the complexity of the problem to be solved, but also the energy required to solve it. This paper presents an empirical study developed with the aim of comparing classical and quantum computing in terms of energy efficiency to determine whether the increased power of quantum computers is offset by their higher energy consumption. To achieve this, a variety of problems with different levels of complexity were tested on both types of computers. Specifically, we used the IBM Quantum computers with a maximum of 5 qubits and an Intel i7, as a classical computer. In addition to this we have also analysed the evolution of the quantum computers, performing measurements on three time periods. Our empirical study showed that there is a variability of results obtained in the three time periods and that quantum computing is not recommended for low-complexity problems, given its high energy consumption, particularly when compared to traditional computing.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51099,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Systems and Software","volume":"217 ","pages":"Article 112165"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164121224002103/pdfft?md5=f1e454a84fdd497790282cfb0938fc07&pid=1-s2.0-S0164121224002103-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142006814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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":"EvaluateXAI: A framework to evaluate the reliability and consistency of rule-based XAI techniques for software analytics tasks","authors":"Md. Abdul Awal,&nbsp;Chanchal K. Roy","doi":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112159","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112159","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The advancement of machine learning (ML) models has led to the development of ML-based approaches to improve numerous software engineering tasks in software maintenance and evolution. Nevertheless, research indicates that despite their potential successes, ML models may not be employed in real-world scenarios because they often remain a black box to practitioners, lacking explainability in their reasoning. Recently, various rule-based model-agnostic Explainable AI (XAI) techniques, such as PyExplainer and LIME, have been employed to explain the predictions of ML models in software analytics tasks. In this paper, we assess the ability of these techniques, particularly the state-of-the-art PyExplainer and LIME, to generate reliable and consistent explanations for ML models across various software analytics tasks, including Just-in-Time (JIT) defect prediction, clone detection, and the classification of useful code review comments. Our manual investigations find inconsistencies and anomalies in the explanations generated by these techniques. Therefore, we design a novel framework: Evaluation of Explainable AI (<em>EvaluateXAI</em>), along with granular-level evaluation metrics, to automatically assess the effectiveness of rule-based XAI techniques in generating reliable and consistent explanations for ML models in software analytics tasks. After conducting in-depth experiments involving seven state-of-the-art ML models trained on five datasets and six evaluation metrics, we find that none of the evaluation metrics reached 100%, indicating the unreliability of the explanations generated by XAI techniques. Additionally, PyExplainer and LIME failed to provide consistent explanations for 86.11% and 77.78% of the experimental combinations, respectively. Therefore, our experimental findings emphasize the necessity for further research in XAI to produce reliable and consistent explanations for ML models in software analytics tasks.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51099,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Systems and Software","volume":"217 ","pages":"Article 112159"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141848583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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":"Understanding participation and corporatization in service of diversity in free/libre and open source software development projects","authors":"Olivia B. Newton ,&nbsp;Stephen M. Fiore","doi":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112163","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112163","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Issues associated with a lack of diversity and inclusivity persist in the domain of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) development and in software development generally. Researchers have suggested that the corporatization of FLOSS affords opportunities for creating an inclusive workforce. To understand the potential for firms to increase diversity, we conducted a mixed-methods study of diversity and corporate engagement in FLOSS projects. We integrate the results of a qualitative survey and a big data analysis to understand developer perceptions of corporate engagement and its association with gender and geographic diversity. In the qualitative component, we collected responses from 64 FLOSS contributors to elicit their perspectives on corporate engagement. In the quantitative component, we analyzed GitHub data from 38 projects and 9,990 contributors to investigate differences in participation and diversity based on corporate engagement. We find that contributors vary across dimensions that can inform diversity interventions: stances toward corporations and orientation towards individual/collective benefits. Our results suggest that corporate engagement may limit a project's contributor base and geographic diversity. Yet, organizations subsidizing FLOSS have opportunities to increase access to projects which would benefit diversity. This research serves to identify individual and organizational factors which may harm and help diversity initiatives.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51099,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Systems and Software","volume":"217 ","pages":"Article 112163"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141842825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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":"Reliable proactive adaptation via prediction fusion and extended stochastic model predictive control","authors":"Zhengyin Chen ,&nbsp;Jialong Li ,&nbsp;Nianyu Li ,&nbsp;Wenpin Jiao","doi":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112166","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112166","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Proactive self-adaptation has emerged as a vital approach in recent years, aiming to preemptively address potential goal violations or performance degradation, thus improving the system’s reliability. However, this approach encounters specific challenges in prediction and decision-making, including issues such as erroneous predictions and adaptation latency. Addressing these issues, our study presents an innovative framework that leverages evidence theory to improve prediction accuracy and employs stochastic model predictive control (SMPC) for devising reliable adaptation strategies. We further refine the decision-making process by incorporating a latency-aware system model and a novel utility model inspired by the technical debt metaphor into the SMPC. Our framework’s effectiveness is validated through experiments conducted on a cyber–physical system exemplar DARTSim, demonstrating notable improvements in prediction accuracy and system reliability within dynamic environments.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51099,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Systems and Software","volume":"217 ","pages":"Article 112166"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141840996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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":"Real-Time rejuvenation scheduling for cloud systems with virtualized software spares","authors":"Joshua R. Carberry,&nbsp;John Rahme,&nbsp;Haiping Xu","doi":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112168","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112168","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>With the increasing popularity of cloud services, there is a growing demand for high reliability and availability of cloud computing. As viable solutions, virtualized software spares and rejuvenation scheduling have been used to maintain highly reliable software platforms and combat Mandelbugs in cloud systems. However, developing real-time rejuvenation schedules for software components with dynamic reliability models has been a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach that integrates preventive and automatic failover strategies to mitigate the harmful effects of Mandelbugs. The approach allows selecting reliability models based on the state of virtualized software components, performing reliability calculations for Software SPare (SSP) gates with up to two virtual hot spares, and scheduling software rejuvenation in real time for cloud systems. Furthermore, the use of Dynamic Fault Tree (DFT) analysis supports the compositional modeling of complex and interconnected systems, alleviating the problem of state-space explosion. Finally, we present a case study of a cloud system with virtualized software spares to demonstrate how rejuvenation schedules can be generated and updated in real time.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51099,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Systems and Software","volume":"217 ","pages":"Article 112168"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141849132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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":"Uncovering gender gap in academia: A comprehensive analysis within the software engineering community","authors":"Andrea D’Angelo,&nbsp;Giordano d’Aloisio,&nbsp;Francesca Marzi,&nbsp;Antinisca Di Marco,&nbsp;Giovanni Stilo","doi":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112162","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112162","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Gender gap in education has gained considerable attention in recent years, as it carries profound implications for the academic community. However, while the problem has been tackled from a student perspective, research is still lacking from an academic point of view. In this work, our main objective is to address this unexplored area by shedding light on the intricate dynamics of gender gap within the Software Engineering (SE) community. To this aim, we first review how the problem of gender gap in the SE community and in academia has been addressed by the literature so far. Results show that men in SE build more tightly-knit clusters but less global co-authorship relations than women, but the networks do not exhibit homophily. Concerning academic promotions, the Software Engineering community presents a higher bias in promotions to Associate Professors and a smaller bias in promotions to Full Professors than the overall Informatics community.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51099,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Systems and Software","volume":"217 ","pages":"Article 112162"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164121224002073/pdfft?md5=d33e2145bb6b85eb1b5eb943696f66c2&pid=1-s2.0-S0164121224002073-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141843793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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":"Vulnerability detection techniques for smart contracts: A systematic literature review","authors":"Fernando Richter Vidal,&nbsp;Naghmeh Ivaki,&nbsp;Nuno Laranjeiro","doi":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112160","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112160","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The number of applications supported by blockchain smart contracts has been greatly increasing in recent years, with smart contracts now being used across several domains, such as the music industry, finance, and retail, to name a few. Despite being used in business-critical contexts, the number of security vulnerabilities in smart contracts has also been increasing, with many of them being exploited and resulting in huge financial and reputation losses. This is despite the enormous effort that is being placed into the research and development of vulnerability detection tools and techniques, which have also greatly increased in number and type in the last few years. Motivated by the recent increase in both vulnerabilities and vulnerability detection techniques, this paper reviews the latest research in smart contract vulnerability detection, emphasizing the techniques being used, the vulnerabilities targeted, and the characteristics of the dataset used for evaluating the technique. We mapped the vulnerabilities against two common vulnerability classification schemes (DASP and SWC) and performed a consolidated analysis. We identified the current research trends and gaps in each technique and highlighted future research opportunities in the field.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51099,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Systems and Software","volume":"217 ","pages":"Article 112160"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016412122400205X/pdfft?md5=7ccf6630645ebbcb7ae24a70d7a72074&pid=1-s2.0-S016412122400205X-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141845118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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":"Hybrid quantum architecture for smart city security","authors":"Vita Santa Barletta,&nbsp;Danilo Caivano,&nbsp;Mirko De Vincentiis,&nbsp;Anibrata Pal,&nbsp;Michele Scalera","doi":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112161","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112161","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Currently and in the near future, Smart Cities are vital to enhance urban living, address resource challenges, optimize infrastructure, and harness technology for sustainability, efficiency, and improved quality of life in rapidly urbanizing environments. Owing to the high usage of networks, sensors, and connected devices, Smart Cities generate a massive amount of data. Therefore, Smart City security concerns encompass data privacy, Internet-of-Things (IoT) vulnerabilities, cyber threats, and urban infrastructure risks, requiring robust solutions to safeguard digital assets, citizens, and critical services. Some solutions include robust cybersecurity measures, data encryption, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven threat detection, public–private partnerships, standardized security protocols, and community engagement to foster a resilient and secure smart city ecosystem. For example, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) helps in real-time monitoring, threat detection, and incident response by aggregating and analyzing security data. To this end, no integrated systems are operating in this context. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Quantum-Classical Architecture for bolstering Smart City security that exploits Quantum Machine Learning (QML) and SIEM to provide security based on Quantum Artificial Intelligence and patterns/rules. The validity of the hybrid quantum-classical architecture was proven by conducting experiments and a comparison of the QML algorithms with state-of-the-art AI algorithms. We also provide a proof of concept dashboard for the proposed architecture.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51099,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Systems and Software","volume":"217 ","pages":"Article 112161"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164121224002061/pdfft?md5=0b106e78361d2f56c0fb87b0295b780e&pid=1-s2.0-S0164121224002061-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141842390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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}