ENASE 2021 Abstracts

Area 1 - Challenges and Novel Approaches to Systems and Software Engineering (SSE)
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 2 - Systems and Software Engineering (SSE) for Emerging Domains
Short Papers
Area 3 - Systems and Software Quality
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 4 - Theory and Practice of Systems and Applications Development
Full Papers Short Papers

Area 1 - Challenges and Novel Approaches to Systems and Software Engineering (SSE)

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 2
Title:

Applying User Centred Design to Improve the Design of Genomic User Interfaces
Authors:

Alberto G. S., Carlos Iñiguez-Jarrín, Oscar P. Lopez, Daniel Gonzalez-Ibea, Estela Pérez-Román, Carles Borredà, Javier Terol, Victoria Ibanez and Manuel Talón
Abstract: The genomic domain is a complex data environment that has grown exponentially. Several tools have been developed to extract knowledge from this immense amount of data. Knowledge extraction processes depend to a large extent on how easy and intuitive are the user interfaces of the tools that are used by bioinformaticians. However, genomic tools have frequently ignored the design process of their User Interfaces. Consequently, they have important usability problems that complicates knowledge extraction. User Centered Design (UCD) is a design approach that can be used to improve the usability of genomic tools. It consists on putting the user and its real needs at the center of the design process. Improving the usability of these tools will facilitate knowledge extraction. This paper reports the application of the UCD approach to design a tool that improves knowledge extraction processes in a real world-use case. From a general perspective, UCD consists of “user research” and “design solutions”. The first one was carried out by conducting UCD techniques, including user interviews and task analysis. The second one was carried out by applying GenomIUm, a pattern-based method that guides the design process of genomic user interfaces. As a fundamental part in the UCD approach, the generated user interfaces were validated by expert bioinformaticians who reported that the complexity of extracting knowledge from genomic data was reduced. We conclude that UCD techniques together with GenomIUm can be a useful strategy to design more usable user interfaces in the genomic domain.
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Paper Nr: 10
Title:

An Extreme Learning Machine based Approach for Software Effort Estimation
Authors:

Suyash Shukla and Sandeep Kumar
Abstract: Software Effort Estimation (SEE) is the task of accurately estimating the amount of effort required to develop software. A significant amount of research has already been done in the area of SEE utilizing Machine Learning (ML) approaches to handle the inadequacies of conventional and parametric estimation strategies and align with present-day development and management strategies. However, mostly owing to uncertain outcomes and obscure model development techniques, only a few or none of the approaches can be practically used for deployment. This paper aims to improve the process of SEE with the help of ML. So, in this paper, we have proposed an Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) based approach for SEE to tackle the issues mentioned above. This has been accomplished by applying the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) dataset, data pre-processing, and cross-validation. The proposed approach results are compared to other ML approaches (Multi-Layer Perceptron, Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, and Random Forest). From the results, it has been observed that the proposed ELM based approach for SEE is generating smaller error values compared to other models. Further, we used the established approaches as a benchmark and compared the results of the proposed ELM-based approach with them. The results obtained through our analysis are inspiring and express probable enhancement in effort estimation.
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Paper Nr: 17
Title:

Cognitive-Driven Development: Preliminary Results on Software Refactorings
Authors:

Victor C. Pinto, Alberto O. Tavares de Souza, Yuri M. Barboza de Oliveira and Danilo M. Ribeiro
Abstract: Refactoring is a maintenance activity intended to restructure code to improve different quality attributes without changing its observable behavior. However, if this activity is not guided by a clear purpose such as reducing complexity and the coupling between objects, there is a risk that the source code can become worse than the previous version. Developers often lose sight of the business problems being solved and forget the importance of managing complexity. As a result, after refactorings many software parts continue to have low readability levels. Cognitive-Driven Development (CDD) is our recent strategy for reducing cognitive overload during development when improving the code design. This paper provides an experimental study carried out in an industrial context to evaluate refactorings through the use of conventional practices guided by a cognitive constraint for complexity, a principle pointed out by CDD. Eighteen experienced participants took part in this experiment. Different software metrics were employed through static analysis, such as CBO (Coupling between objects), WMC (Weight Method Class), RFC (Response for a Class), LCOM (Lack of Cohesion of Methods) and LOC (Lines of Code). The result suggests that CDD can guide the restructuring process since it is designed to obtain a coherent and balanced separation of concerns.
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Paper Nr: 21
Title:

Experimental Analysis of the Relevance of Features and Effects on Gender Classification Models for Social Media Author Profiling
Authors:

Paloma Piot–Perez-Abadin, Patricia Martin–Rodilla and Javier Parapar
Abstract: Automatic user profiling from social networks has become a popular task due to its commercial applications (targeted advertising, market studies...). Automatic profiling models infer demographic characteristics of social network users from their generated content or interactions. Users’ demographic information is also precious for more social worrying tasks such as automatic early detection of mental disorders. For this type of users’ analysis tasks, it has been shown that the way how they use language is an important indicator which contributes to the effectiveness of the models. Therefore, we also consider that for identifying aspects such as gender, age or user’s origin, it is interesting to consider the use of the language both from psycho-linguistic and semantic features. A good selection of features will be vital for the performance of retrieval, classification, and decision-making software systems. In this paper, we will address gender classification as a part of the automatic profiling task. We show an experimental analysis of the performance of existing gender classification models based on external corpus and baselines for automatic profiling. We analyse in-depth the influence of the linguistic features in the classification accuracy of the model. After that analysis, we have put together a feature set for gender classification models in social networks with an accuracy performance above existing baselines.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 19
Title:

Modeling Methodology for Reconfigurable Distributed Systems using Transformations from GR-UML to GR-TNCES and IEC 61499
Authors:

Soumoud Fkaier, Mohamed Khalgui and Georg Frey
Abstract: As today’s reconfigurable distributed control systems become more and more complex, the modelling of its controlling applications becomes more difficult. The Unified Modelling Language (UML) is considered as a standard language for modelling software and systems. However, UML does not provide formal semantics that allow correctness verification. It also has no semantics to design probabilistic scenarios running under energy and memory constraints. Moreover, despite its numerous assets when used to model Distributed Control Systems (DCS), UML still do not allow the simulation of models in some DCS hardware platforms. To overcome these limitations, we propose in this paper a new UML profile called GR-UML (Generalized Reconfigurable-UML) to model the mentioned features. Then, we introduce a modeling methodology that allows to use GR-UML, formal verification, and models deployment according to the IEC 61499 DCS standard. The paper presents also the rules responsible for automatic transformation of GR-UML to GR-TNCES (a Petri net formalism used for formal verification) and to function blocks (the elementary unit of the IEC 61499 standard). These transformations are implemented in a software tool. The contributions of the paper are proved using an example of microgrid control application example.
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Paper Nr: 58
Title:

Systemic Theory for Software Teams: A Perspective
Authors:

Sergey Masyagin, Giancarlo Succi and Ananga Thapaliya
Abstract: Complex problems involve a concerted effort by the software team and can absorb vital resources, but our understanding of how the software team forms and succeeds has been minimal. It is not possible to explain the relationships between team achievement and scale, concentration, and especially team expertise by confounding elements, such as age group, additional participation from other individuals who are not in the team, or by team structures. This generates a need to understand software teams using systemic theory. This position paper presents the efforts we have undertaken to study the impact of systemic factors on software development teams and how systemic theory can be used to understand software teams. Our approach looks at the effect of psychological and sociological systemic variables on software teams to identify a way to represent software teams as systems.
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Paper Nr: 60
Title:

Investigating Student Insight in Software Engineering Team Projects
Authors:

Simona Motogna, Dan M. Suciu and Arthur-Jozsef Molnar
Abstract: Preparing software engineering students for industry jobs is a difficult task. Employers often ask for a combination of technical and soft skills. In this paper, we describe an exploratory study focused on 47 teams of 3rd year Computer Science students who were each involved in the development of a medium sized software application. We employed open coding on free-text student feedback and focused on key areas of working process, planning, challenges and lessons learned. We evaluated how student perception aligned with feedback received from mentors with industry experience, as well as with the assessment from teaching staff experienced in software engineering. We open-sourced a replication package that allows reusing, repeating or extending our investigation. We showed that the course objectives were reached, that soft skills remain an important component of team projects as well as identified several action points that can further improve education in software engineering.
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Paper Nr: 15
Title:

A Stacking Ensemble-based Approach for Software Effort Estimation
Authors:

Suyash Shukla and Sandeep Kumar
Abstract: Software Effort Estimation (SEE) is the undertaking of precisely assessing the measure of effort needed to create software. A lot of exploration has already done in the field of SEE using Machine Learning (ML) strategies to deal with the deficiencies of traditional and parametric estimation methodologies and line up with present-day advancement. Nonetheless, generally due to questionable results and uncertain model development strategies, just a few or none of the methodologies can be utilized for deployment. This paper intends to enhance the procedure of SEE with the assistance of an ensemble based ML approach. So, in this study, a stacking ensemble-based approach has been proposed for SEE to deal with the previously mentioned issues. To accomplish this task an International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) dataset has been utilized along with some data preparation and cross-validation technique. The outcomes of the proposed approach are compared with Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Generalized Linear Model (GLM) to obtain the best performing model. From the results, it can be concluded that the ensemble model has produced fewer error estimates contrasted than other models. Lastly, we utilize the existing approaches as a benchmark and compared their results with the models utilized in this study.
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Paper Nr: 61
Title:

A Method of Deep Reinforcement Learning for Simulation of Autonomous Vehicle Control
Authors:

Anh T. Huynh, Ba-Tung Nguyen, Hoai-Thu Nguyen, Sang Vu and Hien D. Nguyen
Abstract: Nowadays autonomous driving is expected to revolutionize the transportation sector. Carmakers, researchers, and administrators have been working on this field for years and significant progress has been made. However, the doubts and challenges to overcome are still huge, regarding not only complex technologies but also human awareness, culture, current traffic infrastructure. In terms of technical perspective, the accurate detection of obstacles, avoiding adjacent obstacles, and automatic navigation through the environment are some of the difficult problems. In this paper, an approach for solving those problems is proposed by using of Policy Gradient to control a simulated car via reinforcement learning. The proposed method is worked effectively to train an agent to control the simulated car in Unity ML-agents Highway, which is a simulating environment. This environment is chosen from some criteria of an environment simulating autonomous vehicle. The testing of the proposed method got positive results. Beside the average speed was well, the agent successfully learned the turning operation, progressively gaining the ability to navigate larger sections of the simulated raceway without crashing.
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Paper Nr: 88
Title:

Toward Understanding Personalities Working on Computer: A Preliminary Study Focusing on Collusion/Plagiarism
Authors:

Ayomide Bakare, Sergey Masyagin, Giancarlo Succi and Xavier Vasquez
Abstract: Ample research has been carried out in the area of collusion, plagiarism and e-learning. Collusion is a form of active cheating where two or more parties secretly or illegally cooperate. Collusion is at the root of common knowledge plagiarism. While plagiarism requires two or more entities to compare, collusion can be determined in isolation. It is also possible that collusion does not lead to positive plagiarism checks. It is therefore the aims of this preliminary study to; (i) identify the factors responsible for collusion in e-assessment (ii) determine the prominent factor that is representative of collusion and (iii) through user behaviour including, but not limited to, application switching time, determine collusion. Innometrics software was used to collect data in two compulsory exams (first one written and then oral) taken by the students. Discrepancies in the performance and grades of students in the two exams served as the ground truth in labelling possible collusion. We claim that user computer activities and application processes can help understand user behaviours in e-assessment. It is on this premise that we develop a machine learning model to predict collusion through user behaviour in e-assessment.
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Area 2 - Systems and Software Engineering (SSE) for Emerging Domains

Short Papers
Paper Nr: 5
Title:

A Method for Estimating Potential Knowledge Increase after Updating Ontology Mapping
Authors:

Adrianna Kozierkiewicz, Marcin Pietranik and Karolina Kania
Abstract: In the modern days, users cannot expect that ontologies in their initial states won’t remain static throughout the lifespan of their application, therefore a tool for managing appearing alterations is necessary. In our previous work, we have prepared a solid, formal, and flexible foundation that can be used to express changes that appear while maintained ontologies evolve. This paper contains a description of the process of constructing a method assessing knowledge increase after an ontology alignment update. Our developed measure estimates how ontology evolution influenced the increase of knowledge for two input ontologies. The developed method has been experimentally verified by simulating random ontology evolutions ad the obtained results have been statistically analyzed. Due to the limitation of this paper, we focus only on the concept level.
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Paper Nr: 75
Title:

Preventive Model-based Verification and Repairing for SDN Requests
Authors:

Igor Burdonov, Alexandre Kossachev, Nina Yevtushenko, Jorge López, Natalia Kushik and Djamal Zeghlache
Abstract: Software Defined Networking (SDN) devices (e.g., switches) route traffic according to the configured flow rules, and thus a set of virtual paths gets implemented in the data plane. We propose a novel preventive approach for verifying that no misconfigurations (e.g., infinite loops), can occur given the requested set of paths. Such verification is essential since when configuring a set of data paths, other not requested and undesired paths (including loops) may be unintentionally configured. We show that for some cases the requested set of paths cannot be implemented without adding such undesired behavior, i.e., only a superset of the requested set can be implemented. We present a verification technique for detecting such issues of potential misconfigurations and estimate the complexity of the proposed method. Finally, we propose a technique for debugging and repairing a set of paths in such a way that the corrected set does not induce undesired paths into the data plane, if the latter is possible.
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Area 3 - Systems and Software Quality

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 82
Title:

An Approach to Assess the Performance of Mobile Applications: A Case Study of Multiplatform Development Frameworks
Authors:

Dany Mota and Ricardo Martinho
Abstract: Comparative studies between software multiplatform development frameworks lack a proper approach that can be replicated in future performance assessments. Moreover, there is still a deficit in performance comparison tools. Also, performance comparisons realized between mobile applications developed under these multiplatform frameworks should be done with applications running in Release Mode, which ends up not happening in most studies. The objective of this paper is thus to create a whole comparative process as correct and stable as possible, so that we can use it to safely assess performance of mobile applications developed with these frameworks. As a case study, we compare the well-known Flutter and React Native frameworks, and present the obtained results under the proposed approach. With this work, developers can not only assess both these particular frameworks, but also use the approach for further comparisons.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 12
Title:

Generating Automatic Unit Tests of JavaScript Code from UML Class and Activity Diagrams
Authors:

Agnieszka Malanowska and Adrianna Małkiewicz-Błotniak
Abstract: As testing phase plays a significant role in the software lifecycle, all facilitations that can speed up and automate this process seem to be very useful. One of the biggest group of approaches covers automatic test generation. In this paper, we describe our solution for fully automated unit test generation from UML class and activity diagrams. We have adapted and completely redesigned two algorithms from the literature. The first of them tests conformance of types of attributes and method return values between the class diagram and class implementation. The second one serves as a basis for testing all paths of the activity diagram. As a result, we generate tests in dynamically typed language, JavaScript, in the format required by Jest testing framework. We have implemented this approach in the extensible UML2Test tool, a plug-in to StarUML modeling environment. The tool generates complete executable unit tests from the UML model, so it can be used in conjunction with the test-driven development methodology. Usefulness of our approach and tool was successfully verified on the exemplary system for recruitment support.
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Paper Nr: 31
Title:

Mixin based Adaptation of Design Patterns
Authors:

Virginia Niculescu
Abstract: Design patterns represent important mechanisms in software development, since a design pattern describes the core of the solution for a recurrent problem. This core solution emphasizes the participants with their responsibilities, and their possible relationships and collaborations. In the classical form these solutions are based on inheritance and composition relationships with a favor on composition. Mixins represents another important reuse mechanism that increases the level of flexibility of the resulted structure. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using mixin for design pattern implementation, providing interesting adaptations. This approach represents a complementary realization of the design patterns, that brings the advantages of increased flexibility and statically defined relations between pattern participants.
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Paper Nr: 41
Title:

Facilitating the Compliance of Process Models with Critical System Engineering Standards using Natural Language Processing
Authors:

Faiz U. Muram, Muhammad A. Javed and Samina Kanwal
Abstract: Compliance of process models with relevant standards is mandatory for certifying the critical systems. However, it is often carried out in a manual manner, which is complex and labour-intensive. Previous studies have not considered the automated processing of standard documents for achieving and demonstrating the process compliance. This paper leverages natural language processing for extracting the normative process models embedded in the standard documents. The mapping rules are established for structuring the standard requirements and content elements of process models, such as tasks, roles and work products. They are organized into a process structure by considering the phases, activities and milestones. During the planning phase, the standard requirements, process models and compliance mappings are generated in EPF Composer; it supports the major parts of the OMG’s Software & Systems Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM) 2.0. The reverse compliance of extended or pre-existing process models can be carried out during the execution phase; specifically, the compliance gaps are detected, possible measures for their resolution are provided and missing elements are added after the process engineer approval. The applicability of the proposed methodology is demonstrated for the ECSS-E-ST-40C compliant space system engineering process.
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Paper Nr: 47
Title:

Expert Review of Taxonomy based Testing: A Testing Framework for Medical Device Software
Authors:

Hamsini K. Rajaram, John Loane, Silvana T. MacMahon and Fergal M. Caffery
Abstract: This paper details the expert review of a framework developed to implement a novel testing approach called taxonomy-based testing (TBT) for the medical device software domain. This framework proposes three approaches to implement TBT and has been validated by experts from the software testing industry and the medical device software domain. This paper details the results from the expert review. The expert review focused on validating the three approaches to TBT, the benefits of TBT to medical device software development, the accuracy of mappings of testing techniques from ISTQB and ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-4:2015 to defects from a defect taxonomy, the integration of TBT into the standard test processes, ISTQB and ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-2:2013 and the structure of the framework. The contribution of this paper is to reveal that (i) the framework is implementable in medical device software organisations that follow the IEC 62304:2006+A1:2015 software development process or that use standard test processes, (ii) using a defect taxonomy could standardise the application of experience-based approaches to software testing and (iii) considering potential defects before writing test cases could identify additional defects for test cases.
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Paper Nr: 65
Title:

Using Type Analysis for Dealing with Incompetent Mutants in Mutation Testing of Python Programs
Authors:

Anna Derezińska and Anna Skupinska
Abstract: Mutation testing of dynamically typed languages, such as Python, raises problems in mutant introduction and evaluation of mutant execution results, which may provide to the application of incompetent mutants. Type analysis technique has been proposed to support mutation testing in Python. Based on the static information available in a program and on the type impact analysis, prospects of type errors are detected. The method has been developed in a type analyser, which has been combined with a mutation tool for Python programs. In mutation testing of programs in which many incompetent mutants would be created, the approach could lower the number of such mutants. The final contribution depends on the mutation operators and programming structures used in a mutated program. Preliminary experiments do not confirm the efficiency improvement in terms of time execution.
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Paper Nr: 67
Title:

Improving Web Application Vulnerability Detection Leveraging Ensemble Fuzzing
Authors:

João Caseirito and Ibéria Medeiros
Abstract: The vast majority of online services we use nowadays provide their web application to the users. The correctness of the source code of these applications is crucial to prevent attackers from exploiting its vulnerabilities, leading to severe consequences like the disclosure of sensitive information or the degradation of the availability of the application. Currently, multiple existent solutions analyse and detect vulnerabilities in the source code. Attackers, however, do not usually have access to the source code and must work with the information that is made public. Their goals are clear – exploit vulnerabilities without accessing the code –, and they resort of black-box fuzzing tools to achieve such. In this paper, we propose an ensemble fuzzing approach to check the correctness of the web applications from the point of view of an attacker and, in a posterior phase, analyse the source code to correlate with the collected information. The approach focuses first on the quality of fuzzers’ crawlers and afterwards on fuzzers capabilities of exploiting the results of all crawlers between them, in order to provide better coverage and precision in the detection of web vulnerabilities. Our preliminary results show that the ensemble performs better than fuzzers individually.
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Paper Nr: 83
Title:

Towards a Model-Driven Testing Framework for GUI Test Cases Generation from User Stories
Authors:

Maria F. Granda, Otto Parra and Bryan Alba-Sarango
Abstract: In the software testing stage, it is possible to benefit from combining the requirements with the testing specification activities. On the one hand, the specification of the tests will require less manual effort, since they are defined or generated automatically from the requirements specification. On the other hand, the specification of requirements itself will end up having a higher quality due to the use of a more structured language, reducing typical problems such as ambiguity, inconsistency, and inaccuracy. This research proposes a model-based framework that promotes the practice of generating test cases based on the specification of Agile user stories to validate that the functional requirements are included in the final version of the user interfaces of the developed software. To show the applicability of the approach, a specification of requirements based on user stories, a task model using ConcurTaskTree, and the Sikulix language are used to generate tests at the graphical interface level. The approach includes transformations; such as task models in test scripts. Then, these test scripts are executed by the Sikulix test automation framework.
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Paper Nr: 84
Title:

Automated Repair of Asymmetric Web Pages during Resolution of Mobile Friendly Problems
Authors:

Md. A. Azmain and Kishan K. Ganguly
Abstract: In software development, software usability is an important aspect to ensure the end-user does not strain or encounter problems with the use of a product or website’s user interface. Mobile friendly problem (MFP) causes the low quality of the website visibility and has a potential risk to decrease usability for a mobile user. The existing solutions to mobile friendly problems do not address symmetrical structure of web pages. To address this limitation, we have proposed an automatic repair technique that generates symmetric mobile friendly patches by tuning the symmetric criteria of a web page. The empirical evaluation shows that this approach gets better structure on the basis of symmetry in 90.7% of the evaluated websites. Moreover, A survey based evaluation shows that 88%, out of 54 websites, have been considered as more preferable than the previous version by the users.
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Paper Nr: 13
Title:

Dy-COPECA: A Dynamic Version of MC/DC Analyzer for C Program
Authors:

Sangharatna Godboley and Arpita Dutta
Abstract: RTCA/DO-178B&C standards mandate Modified Condition / Decision Coverage (MC/DC) criterion for level-A category software. In critical safety system applications such as Aircraft or Metro Rail controller systems, etc., testing engineers have to produce the MC/DC report. There are several MC/DC analyzers, which are either automated or partially-automated available. Some of the existing analyzers do not consider the dependencies of Predicates/Decisions on each other. These analyzers process each predicate individually based on MC/DC criterion. They use test cases to identify the total number of atomic conditions present in a decision which influence the output of whole decision. In this paper, we overcome the limitations of some of the existing techniques. We propose an approach, which execute the whole program along with unit test cases at run time to compute MC/DC score. This dynamic mechanism solves the dependency relation between the variables appearing at different predicates and their branch statements in a single run. We have developed Dynamic COverage PErcentage CAlculator (Dy-COPECA) using C and Java language to process C-programs. We have improved the MC/DC by 42.88% through dynamic MC/DC analysis as compared to static analysis for the example C-program.
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Paper Nr: 57
Title:

Attacks Scenarios in a Correlated Anomalies Context: Case of Medical System Database Application
Authors:

Pierrette A. Evina, Faouzi Jaidi, Faten L. Ayachi and Adel Bouhoula
Abstract: In Information Systems (IS) and specifically in databases, both internal and external attacks require a lot of attention. Due to inadequate manipulations in these systems, the access control policy (ACP) which is designed to control and protect resources from non-authorized users, may be subject to diverse alterations in its expression with significant anomalies. In the present paper, we study and establish basic scenarios that are encountered in such circumstances. We discuss other advanced scenarios based on correlation cases between basic ones. We mainly consider three basic concepts: Hidden User, Corrupted User and ACP vulnerability. Our contribution consists in the definition of a vulnerability mask, which makes it possible to calculate all the critical objects and to classify malicious users. This allows fine and reliable configuration of the risk management systems and the audit system as well as an objective and optimized analysis of log files and audit data. We present the architecture of our approach for the detection of anomalies in a correlated risk management context. Our contribution specifically considers groups of anomalies for which occurrences are linked both temporally and spatially.
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Paper Nr: 85
Title:

Understanding the Relationship between Missing Link Community Smell and Fix-inducing Changes
Authors:

Toukir Ahammed, Moumita Asad and Kazi Sakib
Abstract: Missing link smell implies the situation when developers contribute to the same source code without communicating with each other. Existing studies have analyzed the relationship of missing link smells with code smell and developer contribution. However, the relationship between missing link smell and the introduction of bug has not been explored yet. This study investigates how missing link smell is related with Fix-Inducing Change (FIC). For this purpose, Spearman’s rank correlation is measured between the number of smelly commits and FIC commits. The result shows that missing link smell and FIC are positively correlated. Furthermore, it is found that bugs introduced in smelly commits are mostly major type in terms of severity.
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Area 4 - Theory and Practice of Systems and Applications Development

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 4
Title:

A Hybrid Approach to MVC Architectural Layers Analysis
Authors:

Dragoş Dobrean and Laura Dioşan
Abstract: Mobile applications have become one of the most important means of interacting with businesses, getting information, or accessing entertainment and news for the vast majority of the people, especially for the young generations. How those applications are being built, heavily influences their lifecycle, costs, and product roadmap, that is why software architecture plays a very important role as it affects the maintainability and extensibility of those products. We are presenting a novel automatic approach for detecting MVC architectural layers from mobile codebases that combines an unsupervised Machine Learning algorithm and a classic static analysis. Our proposal does not require any prior training stage or datasets since it does not rely on apriori annotated codebases. As another key of novelty, it uses the information obtained from the mobile SDKs for enhancing the detection process. The validation of our proposal is done in eight different sized codebases that operate in various domains and come from either open-source projects as well as closed-source ones. The performance of the detection quality is measured by the accuracy of the system, as we compared to a manually constructed ground truth, achieving an average accuracy of 85% on all the analysed codebases. Our proposal provides a viable hybrid approach for detecting architectural layers from mobile codebases achieving good results by providing the accurate detection of the layers using a deterministic step and great flexibility for being used on other architectural patterns via the non-deterministic step. Furthermore, we consider our approach as being valuable to students or beginners because it could provide insightful information on how the code should be structured and help them to respect architectural guidelines in real-world projects.
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Paper Nr: 11
Title:

Cultural Influences on Requirement Engineering in Designing an LMS Prototype for Emerging Economies: A Papua New Guinea and Pacific Islands’ Case Study
Authors:

Philemon Yalamu, Wendy Doube and Caslon Chua
Abstract: This paper aims to determine from the users’ perspective that cultural factors are important in a software development requirement engineering process. It proposes that culture is an important factor in determining the success or failure of a system. Using the design thinking and human-centered approach, a case study to elicit user requirement and a user experiment were done which gathered data from university participants from Papua New Guinea (PNG) and other Pacific island nations. The gathered data was triangulated with four of the six cultural dimensions and three of the five core Requirement Engineering activities that were influenced. The results reveal 11 cultural factors specific to the indigenous culture of participants which were found to have an influence on RE activities; six were related to Hofstede’s cultural dimensions while five were unclassified, unique to PNG.
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Paper Nr: 14
Title:

Improving the Modelling of Human-centric Aspects of Software Systems: A Case Study of Modelling End User Age in Wirefame Designs
Authors:

Aria Y. Jim, Hyun Shim, Jue Wang, Lionel R. Wijaya, Rongbin Xu, Hourieh Khalajzadeh, John Grundy and Tanjila Kanij
Abstract: Taking into account the diverse human aspects – gender, age, emotions, personality, language, culture, physical and mental challenges, etc – is critical towards achieving more human-centric design of software systems. Human-centric aspects affecting software have long been underestimated or even ignored as a result of the lack of in-depth capture and understanding during development. The use of technology has become the norm and the range of users has increased from just adults to children as well as seniors. Modelling frameworks are methods to represent the way a software system should be defined, and to date, little research has been done on age-related issues within modelling frameworks. In this paper, we investigate how human-centric aspects regarding age can be better modelled by extending these modelling frameworks. We introduce an extension to wireframe-based designs so that they can cater for decisions regarding age within the modelling framework. We have evaluated this modelling extension using multiple questionnaires as well as usability testing by using the extended age-modelling wireframe approach to design a news app. Questionnaires were used to evaluate the requirements of the users and developers for the extended wireframes. Our analysis shows that when using our extended wireframes, developers can cater for different user types and their accessibility needs easily and therefore users can use the prototypes with more ease.
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Paper Nr: 16
Title:

ConfIs: A Tool for Privacy and Security Analysis and Conflict Resolution for Supporting GDPR Compliance through Privacy-by-Design
Authors:

Duaa Alkubaisy, Luca Piras, Mohammed G. Al-Obeidallah, Karl Cox and Haralambos Mouratidis
Abstract: Privacy and security requirements, and their potential conflicts, are increasingly having more and more importance. It is becoming a necessary part to be considered, starting from the very early stages of requirements engineering, and in the entire software engineering cycle, for the design of any software system. In the last few years, this has been even more emphasized and required by the law. A relevant example is the case of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which requires organizations, and their software engineers, to enforce and guarantee privacy-by-design to make their platforms compliant with the regulation. In this context, complex activities related to privacy and security requirements elicitation, analysis, mapping and identification of potential conflicts, and the individuation of their resolution, become crucial. In the literature, there is not available a comprehensive requirement engineering oriented tool for supporting the requirements analyst. In this paper, we propose ConfIs, a tool for supporting the analyst in performing a process covering these phases in a systematic and interactive way. We present ConfIs and its process with a realistic example from DEFeND, an EU project aiming at supporting organizations in achieving GDPR compliance. In this context, we evaluated ConfIs by involving privacy/security requirements experts, which recognized our tool and method as supportive, concerning these complex activities.
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Paper Nr: 37
Title:

Completeness of Knowledge in Models Extracted from Natural Text
Authors:

Viktorija Gribermane and Erika Nazaruka
Abstract: Requirements given in the form of text in natural language are a widely used way of defining requirements for software. Various domain modeling approaches aim to extract domain models from the given natural text with different goals and output models. The article focuses on evaluating 17 approaches for domain model extraction based on the completeness of the extracted knowledge of the resulting target models. Criteria for the evaluation have been defined and a comparison has been given, which highlights the importance of including all three - functional, behavioral and structural information, in order to retain the most complete extracted knowledge.
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Paper Nr: 48
Title:

BloatLibD: Detecting Bloat Libraries in Java Applications
Authors:

Agrim Dewan, Poojith U. Rao, Balwinder Sodhi and Ritu Kapur
Abstract: Third-party libraries (TPLs) provide ready-made implementations of various software functionalities and are frequently used in software development. However, as software development progresses through various iterations, there often remains an unused set of TPLs referenced in the application’s distributable. These unused TPLs become a prominent source of software bloating and are responsible for excessive consumption of resources, such as CPU cycles, memory, and mobile devices’ battery-usage. Thus, the identification of such bloat-TPLs is essential. We present a rapid, storage-efficient, obfuscation-resilient method to detect the bloatTPLs. Our approach’s novel aspects are i) Computing a vector representation of a .class file using a model that we call Jar2Vec. The Jar2Vec model is trained using the Paragraph Vector Algorithm. ii) Before using it for training the Jar2Vec models, a .class file is converted to a normalized form via semantics-preserving transformations. iii) A Bloated Library Detector (BloatLibD) developed and tested with 27 different Jar2Vec models. These models were trained using different parameters and >30000 .class files taken from >100 different Java libraries available at MavenCentral.com. BloatLibD achieves an accuracy of 99% with an F1 score of 0.968 and outperforms the existing tools, viz., LibScout, LiteRadar, and LibD with an accuracy improvement of 74.5%, 30.33%, and 14.1%, respectively. Compared with LibD, BloatLibD achieves a response time improvement of 61.37% and a storage reduction of 87.93%. Our program artifacts are available at https://bit.ly/2WFALXf.
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Paper Nr: 51
Title:

A Direct Formal Semantics for BPMN Time-related Constructs
Authors:

Sara Houhou, Souheib Baarir, Pascal Poizat and Philippe Quéinnec
Abstract: BPMN supports the design of intra-organization workflows and inter-organization collaborations. This rich notation includes elements to deal with models where time is central. However, the expressiveness of the BPMN time-related constructs hampers the definition of a formal semantics including them, and the provision of formal analysis means for timed process models. We propose here a first-order logic semantics for a subset of BPMN that includes its time-related constructs. With reference to related work, we support the specification of datetimes, durations, and cycles, using ISO-8601 formats as specified in the standard. Our approach is tool-supported by a model transformation into the Alloy formal language and its bounded counter-example generator. Our tool and model database are open source and freely available.
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Paper Nr: 87
Title:

Identifying and Resolving Conflicts in Requirements by Stakeholders: A Clustering Approach
Authors:

Ishaya Gambo and Kuldar Taveter
Abstract: Conflicts in requirements are genuine analysis and design problems that require appropriate methods to reconcile different views, goals, and expectations by stakeholders. The research question addressed in this paper is how can conflicts in requirements elicited from different stakeholders be solved to avoid failure of the resulting software-intensive system? We propose a framework for conflict identification and resolution based on expert-based and clustering techniques for conflict resolution. The research method is a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods by employing clustering and expert-based techniques for conflict resolution. The results demonstrate two essential features of conflict resolution in requirements engineering: (i) the ability to cater for a large volume of requirements in a multi-stakeholder setting; and (ii) the ability to effectively make precise decisions for minimizing conflicts between prioritized sets of requirements expressed by the stakeholders. The framework and the interactive system have been validated in analyzing requirements for a pharmacy information system. The contributions of the paper are an expert-based framework for resolving conflicts and an interactive system that empirically proves the adequacy of the framework. The main threat to validity is that the developed framework is yet to be validated in other problem domains.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 23
Title:

P2P Frames: Pattern-based Characterization of Functional Requirements for Peer-to-peer Systems
Authors:

Lirijan Sabani, Roman Wirtz and Maritta Heisel
Abstract: Peer-to-peer systems have become an essential element of computer networks and represent a special category of distributed systems. The strong decentralization as well as the scalability and fault tolerance are only some of the reasons why many companies have adopted this technology. Peer-to-peer systems consist of different subsystems, connected by a network. The decomposition into these subsystems requires a detailed analysis and documentation of functional requirements, which is a challenging task. In previous work, we proposed a method based on Jackson’s problem frames approach that allows for modeling and documenting of functional requirements for distributed systems. To render knowledge about requirements for distributed systems reusable, we developed patterns as an extension for problem frames. However, these patterns (so-called frames) do not capture the specific characteristics of peer-to-peer systems. We thus analyzed typical requirements of peer-to-peer systems and observed several frames specific to peer-to-peer functionalities. We call these frames P2P frames. In this paper, we present frames for bootstrapping, query routing in unstructured networks, and the data transfer process in such systems. We also present our pattern system for requirements engineering, consisting of problem frames and frames for distributed systems, which helps software engineers to select suitable frames.
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Paper Nr: 25
Title:

DesPat: A Modeling Toolset for Designing and Implementing Software Systems using Design Patterns
Authors:

Mert Ozkaya and Mehmet A. Kose
Abstract: Software design patterns are considered as the general solutions to the problems that occur many times in the context of software design. However, applying design patterns at code level is not so easy, as adding/removing pattern elements, combining patterns, and checking software implementation against the pattern rules are not supported with the existing implementation frameworks/tools. Generating code from the high-level pattern-centric models is not so easy either due to the lack of modeling language and tool support. In this paper, we propose a software design toolset called DesPat for applying design patterns abstractly at modeling level. We focus on a subset of design patterns proposed by Gamma et al., which are observed to be highly used in industry - i.e., the factory, composite, facade, observer, singleton, and visitor design patterns. DesPat offers a graphical notation set for each pattern supported that is based on the UML class diagram. DesPat is supported with a modeling editor to create pattern model(s) for software systems, combine different pattern models, and check them for correctness. DesPat further generates Java code from the pattern models. We illustrated DesPat with a set of real-world applications and evaluated DesPat via a set of final-year CS undergraduate students.
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Paper Nr: 34
Title:

Mitigating Privacy Concerns by Developing Trust-related Software Features for a Hybrid Social Media Application
Authors:

Angela Borchert, Aidmar Wainakh, Nicole Krämer, Max Mühlhäuser and Maritta Heisel
Abstract: As the past has shown, many providers of social media services consistently demonstrate an insufficient commitment to user privacy. This has led to an increase in users’ privacy concerns. Several privacy-preserving alternatives were proposed in the research community and the market. However, these platforms face the challenges of proving and demonstrating that users’ privacy concerns are addressed within their scope as well as gaining users’ trust. In this work, we mitigate privacy concerns and enhance the trustworthiness of privacy-preserving social media, in particular a hybrid social media application. For that, we develop trust-related software features elicited with the TrustSoFt method. We evaluate the impact of the specified features on the privacy concerns as well as on the trustworthiness of the examined application by conducting an extensive user study. Furthermore, we analyze the relationships between information privacy concerns, trusting beliefs, risk beliefs, and willingness to use in the context of hybrid social media. Results reveal the special importance of addressing particular concerns, such as “Awareness of Privacy Practices”.
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Paper Nr: 42
Title:

An Ontology for Service-Oriented Dynamic Software Product Lines Knowledge Management
Authors:

Najla Maalaoui, Raoudha Beltaifa, Lamia L. Jilani and Raul Mazo
Abstract: Service oriented dynamic software product line (SO-DSPL) engineering provides a development paradigm for building configurable service-oriented applications and adapting them at runtime according to their context. To support context-aware and runtime adaptation of services, SO-DSPLs consider various aspects of knowledge, such as users’ contexts, product lines properties, services description and QoS. In fact, the knowledge variety produces variability that must be taken into account. Thus, wealth and diversity of this knowledge require an efficient knowledge management (KM) tool to ensure knowledge-based SO-DSPL engineering. The main challenge is to overcome the lack of a multi-dimensional and unified conceptualization of knowledge. Practically, most of existing knowledge representations consider particular dimensions that depend on specific product lines, ignore the semantic between them and do not handle knowledge variability. To tackle this challenge, we propose in this paper an ontology for SO-DSPL knowledge management that establishes a common conceptualization about SO-DSPLs dimensions and provides a unified and sharable knowledge base. This ontology can serve several SO-DSPL activities and KM-related purposes, such as defining a common vocabulary for knowledge workers with respect to the SO-DSPL domain, structuring SO-DSPL knowledge repositories, and providing a knowledge base to configure and recommend services to be used for the building and dynamic adaptation of configurable service-oriented applications. In this paper, we present the ontology dimensions by means of sub-ontologies in order to promote their reuse.
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Paper Nr: 43
Title:

A Methodology for Generating BPEL Models from a Business Process Textual Description
Authors:

Wiem Khlif, Nadia Aloui and Nourchène E. Ben Ayed
Abstract: Generating BPEL model from a Textual Description (TD) is essential to its reliable analysis. Nonetheless, creating or preserving TD-BPEL alignment is an issue when an organization develops or changes a BEPL model. Hence, it is possible to detect misalignment between BPEL model and text if changes are not applied to both representations. This paper proposes a new methodology that assists business analyst to derive BPEL models, which are aligned with their corresponding textual description. It uses the business concept’s template that is augmented by a set of transformation rules. Compared to existing methods, our methodology offers a complete alignment, which covers all BPEL elements. It is evaluated experimentally using the recall and precision rates.
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Paper Nr: 53
Title:

Software Development Context: Critiquing Often Used Terms
Authors:

Diana Kirk
Abstract: Software development practices are carried out in a range of different contexts and there is little evidence to support the likelihood that a specific practice will be effective in a specific context. The need to understand the relationships between practice and context is pressing if we are to support industry in selecting a set of practices that will provide maximum benefit for the project. An evidence based approach requires that, for each practice, we associate a ‘context profile’ that describes the operating parameters for the practice. Our earlier explorations resulted in a categorisation of the huge number of terms used when describing software development context. We found that some terms could not be included in the context profile because the term described context at a high level, was vague or its meaning was ambiguous. In this position paper, we overview the findings from our explorations of context and present and critique the inadmissible terms with respect to their application to situated software practices. The cataloguing of these terms will benefit researchers by supporting discussion and thus a deeper understanding of context for situated software practices.
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Paper Nr: 63
Title:

Transformation of BPMN Model into an OWL2 Ontology
Authors:

Mariem Kchaou, Wiem Khlif, Faiez Gargouri and Mariem Mahfoudh
Abstract: Each enterprise needs to have a clear vision of its business processes in order to increase the quality of its products/services. To fulfil this need, many enterprises rely on an Information System (IS). Most of the previous systems were previously framed by applying business process model. In addition, the current trend expresses a growing demand of reusing data from older information systems, which is very beneficial for the implementation of semantic knowledge. The transformation of a BPMN model into an ontology leads to reduce cost by reusing older systems. Although many studies are elaborated for transforming BPMN model into ontology, they have not fully proposed the transformation rules. This paper suggests the addition of rules for transforming annotated BPMN models to ontologies by accounting for the semantics of the BPMN model, and providing for all business objects and activities. In addition, the transformations have the merit of generating the OWL2 graphical representation.
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Paper Nr: 72
Title:

Derivation of Logical Aspects in Praxeme from ReLEL Models
Authors:

Rapatsalahy M. Andrianjaka, Razafimahatratra Hajarisena, Ilie Mihaela, Mahatody Thomas, Ilie Sorin and Razafindrakoto N. Raft
Abstract: The Praxeme methodology for enterprise architecture combines MDA (Model Driven Architecture) and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) approaches by structuring the information system with a basic unit called the logical service. To capture the complexity of the system, it separates the facets of the company into a homogeneous set called aspects. The eLEL (elaborate Lexicon Extended Language) requirement model groups together the terms used by the company with their precise definition which makes it well suite to be integrated into the initial phase of Praxeme called the intentional aspect. From this aspect, eLEL can derive business logic services for the logical aspect of Praxeme. The logical aspect of Praxeme plays an important intermediary role between the enterprise and IT. It offers the possibility of describing the computer system in terms independent of technology. However, business logic services obtained from eLEL are not exploitable as skeletons of code of an object-oriented application, which is the next phase of Praxeme called the software aspect. For this reason we chose to use the ReLEL (Restructuring extended Lexical elaborate Language) requirement model for the initial phase of Praxeme, the intentional aspect. ReLEL is a terminology database and has very precise information about the conceptual representation of an information system. For this reason, we were able to create an automated derivation process using ATL (ATLAS Transformation Language) that uses the intentional aspect represented with ReLEL, to obtain the semantic and logical aspects of Praxeme. To validate our approach, we evaluated the performance of the two different methods on the same case study. The performance show our proposed approach is superior to eLEL, the most recent comparable requirements model. ReLEL offers 92% accuracy on the generated logic model in the logical aspect of the Praxeme methodology compared to eLEL which offers just 61.3%.
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Paper Nr: 81
Title:

Decision Model and Notation for Describing Variability in Business Process Product Lines
Authors:

Andreas Speck, Aljoscha Jagenow and Melanie Windrich
Abstract: Product line techniques have proven being a successful concept of software reuse. Hence, product line techniques have been applied for business process models. Although there are well established models for describing business processes such as BPMN or ARIS there is a lack of describing the variability in business processes. In the paper, we propose to apply Decision Model and Notation (DMN) for modeling process variability. DMN has the advantage that it is a known concept and well understood. DMN supports the decision techniques by defining the variability in business processes and with the rules defining the variability.
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Paper Nr: 9
Title:

Time Influence on Security Protocol
Authors:

Sabina Szymoniak
Abstract: The paper discusses the problem of influence of time parameters on protocols security. It is a significant issue because some periods may affect us to be or not to be in the real and virtual world. Time can decide about the security of our private data, money and many others. It is necessary to check whether used protocols provide an appropriate security level of our data. Also, Intruder capabilities and knowledge may evolve with time. With wrongly selected time parameters, the Intruder may perform an attack on protocol and deceive honest users. The research has expanded the formal model and computational structure designed previously. Based on this, we implemented a tool. This tool can calculate the correct protocol execution and carry out simulations. Thanks to this checking the possibility of Intruder attack including various time parameters was possible. We presented experimental results on NSPK protocol and WooLamPi protocol examples.
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Paper Nr: 18
Title:

Problem of Inconsistency in Textual Requirements Specification
Authors:

David Šenkýř and Petr Kroha
Abstract: In this contribution, we investigate the inconsistency problem in the textual description of functional requirements specifications. In the past, the inconsistency problem was investigated using analysis of the UML models. We argue that some sources of inconsistency can be revealed in the very first steps of textual requirements analysis using linguistic patterns that we developed. We cluster the sentences according to their semantic similarity given by their lexical content and syntactic structure. Our contribution focus on revealing linguistic contradictions (e.g., a combination of passive voice, antonyms, negated synonyms, etc.) of facts and rules described in different parts of requirements together with contradictions of the internally generated model.
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Paper Nr: 22
Title:

An Integrated Dependability Analysis and Design Method for Distributed Systems Engineering
Authors:

Claus Pahl
Abstract: Dependability Engineering is a critical importance for the now huge number of software systems that are directly linked to people (and can damage them – be that physically or through security and data protection issues) and that operate in open and distributed environments that expose them to reliability problems. We present here an integrated dependability analysis and design methods for reliability, safety and security that targets beginners and that can be applied without specific tools support. We introduce this analysis and design method here in a concrete educational setting that is made up of beginners and works without tools. We will look at this specifically in the context of Internet-of-Things data with realistic application cases.
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Paper Nr: 35
Title:

Hybrid Recommendation Systems: A State of Art
Authors:

Fatima Z. Trabelsi, Amal Khtira and Bouchra El Asri
Abstract: Recommendation systems have become more important and popular in many application areas such as music, movies, e-commerce, advertisement and social networks. Recommendation systems use either collaborative filtering, content-based filtering or hybrid filtering in order to propose items to users, and each type has its weaknesses and strengths. In this paper, we present the results of a literature review that focuses specifically on hybrid recommendation systems. The objective of this review is to identify the problems that hybrid filtering tends to solve and the different techniques used to this end.
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Paper Nr: 38
Title:

Public Processes Legal Issues Verification using YAWL
Authors:

Kaouther Mezaache and Latifa Mahdaoui
Abstract: Improving public processes to build an effective e-government system has become a necessity for many governments. For the purpose of providing quality electronic services to citizens, businesses and other public institutions. However, this is not as easy as it seems, due to the nature of e-government system and the requirements of its processes specially the legal ones. As a matter of fact, the law is one of the important sources of knowledge that rigorously describes administrative procedures and their end results. Hence, process verification will be a mandatory task to detect and to prevent process problems at the deployment phase. Therefore, this paper aims to introduce an approach to assess public process legal issues against soundness property using YAWL.
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Paper Nr: 40
Title:

Supporting Automated Verification of Reconfigurable Systems with Product Lines and Model Checking
Authors:

Faiz U. Muram, Samina Kanwal and Muhammad A. Javed
Abstract: The capability to dynamically reconfigure in response to change of mode or function, failures, or unanticipated hazardous conditions is fundamental for many critical systems. The modelling and verification of such systems are frequently carried out with product lines and model checking, respectively. At first, the objectives and related requirements of reconfigurable systems are mapped to a feature model, whereas the units related to operational modes are selected in individual configurations. After that, the proposed approach performs automated transformation of particular models into formal constraints and descriptions for leveraging the analytical powers of model checking techniques; the formal verification of completeness, consistency and conflict is carried out with NuSMV model checker. Finally, in circumstances when the counterexample is produced, its analysis is performed for the identification of corresponding problems and their resolutions. The applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated through case study of attitude and orbit control system.
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Paper Nr: 64
Title:

A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Feature Model Maintainability Improvement
Authors:

Olfa Ferchichi, Raoudha Beltaifa and Lamia L. Jilani
Abstract: Software Product Lines (SPLs) evolve when there are changes in their core assets (e.g., feature models and reference architecture). Various approaches have addressed assets evolution by applying evolution operations (e.g., adding a feature to a feature model and removing a constraint). Improving quality attributes (e.g., maintainability and flexibility) of core assets is a promising field in SPLs evolution. Providing a proposal based on a decision maker to support this field is a challenge that grows over time. A decision maker helps the human (e.g., domain expert) to choose the convenient evolution scenarios (change operations) to improve quality attributes of a core asset. To tackle this challenge, we propose a reinforcement learning approach to improve the maintainability of a PL feature model. By learning various evolution operations and based on its decision maker, this approach is able to provide the best evolution scenarios to improve the maintainability of a FM. In this paper, we present the reinforcement learning approach we propose illustrated by a running example associated to the feature model of a Graph Product Line (GPL).
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Paper Nr: 77
Title:

Towards Profiling Runtime Architecture Code Contributors in Software Projects
Authors:

Quentin Perez, Alexandre L. Borgne, Christelle Urtado and Sylvain Vauttier
Abstract: Empirical software engineering has leveraged open software repositories to profile and categorize project contributors. The objective of our work is to conduct a similar but original study, focused on architectural contributions, to evaluate the profiles of contributors playing this specific development role and their evolution over time. This paper presents an approach to study a first kind of architectural contributions: deployment descriptors that define runtime architectures of applications. A categorization model is proposed, reflecting the importance of contributions based on data mined from code repositories (contents, timestamps, authors, etc.). Then, it groups contributors in several categories (profiles) and studies their evolution in projects over time. A case study is conducted on a selected long-life, quality project. It shows that the specific architectural development responsibility we measure is chosen and sustained by experienced and committed contributors. As a proof of concept, these results are very promising and will lead to broader scale studies in order to classify projects based on their management policies regarding architectural contributors.
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Paper Nr: 79
Title:

Preliminary Evaluation of a Survey Checklist in the Context of Evidence-based Software Engineering Education
Authors:

Kai Petersen and Jefferson S. Molléri
Abstract: Background: In order to judge evidence it is important to be able to assess study quality. Checklists are means to objectify the assessment. In an earlier study we proposed and evaluated a checklist for surveys, which was assessed by experts. Objective: (1) To assess whether the use of the checklist enables students with limited experience in research to consistently and accurately assess the quality of a research paper. (2) To elicit qualitative feedback to identify improvements to the checklist. Method: The students reviewed a survey in a one-group posttest-only quasi-experiment using the checklist. In total 13 students participated in the context of the course Evidence-based software engineering as part of the study program Information Systems at Flensburg University of Applied Sciences. Results: In total the students achieved 74% percent of agreement among each other. However, the Kappa values indicated mostly a poor level of agreement considering the classification by Fleiss. In addition, the students were quite inaccurate assessing the questions. Though, they performed well on questions for research objectives and the identification of population. Conclusion: Findings indicate that students do not assess reliably. However, further investigations are needed to substantiate the findings.
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