| 1. |
- Abualhaija, Sallam, et al.
(författare)
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Replication in Requirements Engineering : The NLP for RE Case
- 2024
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Ingår i: ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. - : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). - 1049-331X .- 1557-7392. ; 33:6
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Natural language processing (NLP) techniques have been widely applied in the requirements engineering (RE) field to support tasks such as classification and ambiguity detection. Despite its empirical vocation, RE research has given limited attention to replication of NLP for RE studies. Replication is hampered by several factors, including the context specificity of the studies, the heterogeneity of the tasks involving NLP, the tasks’ inherent hairiness, and, in turn, the heterogeneous reporting structure. To address these issues, we propose a new artifact, referred to as ID-Card, whose goal is to provide a structured summary of research papers emphasizing replication-relevant information. We construct the ID-Card through a structured, iterative process based on design science. In this article: (i) we report on hands-on experiences of replication; (ii) we review the state-of-the-art and extract replication-relevant information: (iii) we identify, through focus groups, challenges across two typical dimensions of replication: data annotation and tool reconstruction; and (iv) we present the concept and structure of the ID-Card to mitigate the identified challenges. This study aims to create awareness of replication in NLP for RE. We propose an ID-Card that is intended to foster study replication but can also be used in other contexts, e.g., for educational purposes. © 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Baldassarre, Maria Teresa, et al.
(författare)
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Affective reactions and test-driven development : Results from three experiments and a survey
- 2022
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Ingår i: Journal of Systems and Software. - : Elsevier Inc.. - 0164-1212 .- 1873-1228. ; 185
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The research on the claimed effects of Test-Driven Development (TDD) on software quality and developers’ productivity has shown inconclusive results. Some researchers have ascribed such results to the negative affective reactions that TDD would provoke when developers apply it. In this paper, we studied whether and in which phases TDD influences the affective states of developers, who are new to this development approach. To that end, we conducted a baseline experiment and two replications, and analyzed the data from these experiments both individually and jointly. Also, we performed methodological triangulation by means of an explanatory survey, whose respondents were experienced with TDD. The results of the baseline experiment suggested that developers like TDD significantly less, compared to a non-TDD approach. Also, developers who apply TDD like implementing production code significantly less than those who apply a non-TDD approach, while testing production code makes TDD developers significantly less happy. These results were not confirmed in the replicated experiments. We found that the moderator that better explains these differences across experiments is experience (in months) with unit testing, practiced in a test-last manner. The higher the experience with unit testing, the more negative the affective reactions caused by TDD. The results from the survey seem to confirm the role of this moderator. © 2021
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| 4. |
- Baldassarre, Maria Teresa, et al.
(författare)
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Studying test-driven development and its retainment over a six-month time span
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of Systems and Software. - : Elsevier Inc.. - 0164-1212 .- 1873-1228. ; 176
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper, we investigate the effect of TDD, as compared to a non-TDD approach, as well as its retainment (or retention) over a time span of (about) six months. To pursue these objectives, we conducted a (quantitative) longitudinal cohort study with 30 novice developers (i.e., third-year undergraduate students in Computer Science). We observed that TDD affects neither the external quality of software products nor developers’ productivity. However, we observed that the participants applying TDD produced significantly more tests, with a higher fault-detection capability, than those using a non-TDD approach. As for the retainment of TDD, we found that TDD is retained by novice developers for at least six months. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.
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| 5. |
- Elahidoost, Parisa, 1989-, et al.
(författare)
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Designing NLP-Based Solutions for Requirements Variability Management : Experiences from a Design Science Study at Visma
- 2024
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Ingår i: Requirements Engineering. - : Springer Science+Business Media B.V.. - 9783031573262 ; , s. 191-204
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Context and motivation: In this industry-academia collaborative project, a team of researchers, supported by a software architect, business analyst, and test engineer explored the challenges of requirement variability in a large business software development company. Question/ problem: Following the design science paradigm, we studied the problem of requirements analysis and tracing in the context of contractual documents, with a specific focus on managing requirements variability. This paper reports on the lessons learned from that experience, highlighting the strategies and insights gained in the realm of requirements variability management.Principal ideas/results: This experience report outlines the insights gained from applying design science in requirements engineering research in industry. We show and evaluate various strategies to tackle the issue of requirement variability. Contribution: We report on the iterations and how the solution development evolved in parallel with problem understanding. From this process, we derive five key lessons learned to highlight the effectiveness of design science in exploring solutions for requirement variability in contract-based environments. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.
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| 6. |
- Fagerholm, F., et al.
(författare)
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Cognition in Software Engineering: A Taxonomy and Survey of a Half-Century of Research
- 2022
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Ingår i: Acm Computing Surveys. - : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). - 0360-0300 .- 1557-7341. ; 54:11
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Cognition plays a fundamental role in most software engineering activities. This article provides a taxonomy of cognitive concepts and a survey of the literature since the beginning of the Software Engineering discipline. The taxonomy comprises the top-level concepts of perception, attention, memory, cognitive load, reasoning, cognitive biases, knowledge, social cognition, cognitive control, and errors, and procedures to assess them both qualitatively and quantitatively. The taxonomy provides a useful tool to filter existing studies, classify new studies, and support researchers in getting familiar with a (sub) area. In the literature survey, we systematically collected and analysed 311 scientific papers spanning five decades and classified them using the cognitive concepts from the taxonomy. Our analysis shows that the most developed areas of research correspond to the four life-cycle stages, software requirements, design, construction, and maintenance. Most research is quantitative and focuses on knowledge, cognitive load, memory, and reasoning. Overall, the state of the art appears fragmented when viewed from the perspective of cognition. There is a lack of use of cognitive concepts that would represent a coherent picture of the cognitive processes active in specific tasks. Accordingly, we discuss the research gap in each cognitive concept and provide recommendations for future research.
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| 7. |
- Ferrari, Alessio, et al.
(författare)
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Using Voice and Biofeedback to Predict User Engagement during Product Feedback Interviews
- 2024
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Ingår i: ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. - : ACM Digital Library. - 1049-331X .- 1557-7392. ; 33:4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Capturing users’ engagement is crucial for gathering feedback about the features of a software product. In a market-driven context, current approaches to collecting and analyzing users’ feedback are based on techniques leveraging information extracted from product reviews and social media. These approaches are hardly applicable in contexts where online feedback is limited, as for the majority of apps, and software in general. In such cases, companies need to resort to face-to-face interviews to get feedback on their products. In this article, we propose to utilize biometric data, in terms of physiological and voice features, to complement product feedback interviews with information about the engagement of the user on product-relevant topics. We evaluate our approach by interviewing users while gathering their physiological data (i.e., biofeedback) using an Empatica E4 wristband, and capturing their voice through the default audio-recorder of a common laptop. Our results show that we can predict users’ engagement by training supervised machine learning algorithms on biofeedback and voice data, and that voice features alone can be sufficiently effective. The best configurations evaluated achieve an average F1 ∼ 70% in terms of classification performance, and use voice features only. This work is one of the first studies in requirements engineering in which biometrics are used to identify emotions. Furthermore, this is one of the first studies in software engineering that considers voice analysis. The usage of voice features can be particularly helpful for emotion-aware feedback collection in remote communication, either performed by human analysts or voice-based chatbots, and can also be exploited to support the analysis of meetings in software engineering research. © 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
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| 8. |
- Fischbach, Jannik, et al.
(författare)
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What makes agile test artifacts useful? : An activity-based quality model from a practitioners' perspective
- 2020
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Ingår i: International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement. - New York, NY, USA : IEEE Computer Society. - 9781450375801
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: The artifacts used in Agile software testing and the reasons why these artifacts are used are fairly well-understood. However, empirical research on how Agile test artifacts are eventually designed in practice and which quality factors make them useful for software testing remains sparse. Aims: Our objective is two-fold. First, we identify current challenges in using test artifacts to understand why certain quality factors are considered good or bad. Second, we build an Activity-Based Artifact Quality Model that describes what Agile test artifacts should look like. Method: We conduct an industrial survey with 18 practitioners from 12 companies operating in seven different domains. Results: Our analysis reveals nine challenges and 16 factors describing the quality of six test artifacts from the perspective of Agile testers. Interestingly, we observed mostly challenges regarding language and traceability, which are well-known to occur in non-Agile projects. Conclusions: Although Agile software testing is becoming the norm, we still have little confidence about general do's and don'ts going beyond conventional wisdom. This study is the first to distill a list of quality factors deemed important to what can be considered as useful test artifacts. © 2020 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.
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| 9. |
- Frattini, Julian, 1995-, et al.
(författare)
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A Live Extensible Ontology of Quality Factors for Textual Requirements
- 2022
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering. - : IEEE. - 9781665470001 ; , s. 274-280
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Quality factors like passive voice or sentence length are commonly used in research and practice to evaluate the quality of natural language requirements since they indicate defects in requirements artifacts that potentially propagate to later stages in the development life cycle. However, as a research community, we still lack a holistic perspective on quality factors. This inhibits not only a comprehensive understanding of the existing body of knowledge but also the effective use and evolution of these factors. To this end, we propose an ontology of quality factors for textual requirements, which includes (1) a structure framing quality factors and related elements and (2) a central repository and web interface making these factors publicly accessible and usable. We contribute the first version of both by applying a rigorous ontology development method to 105 eligible primary studies and construct a first version of the repository and interface. We illustrate the usability of the ontology and invite fellow researchers to a joint community effort to complete and maintain this knowledge repository. We envision our ontology to reflect the community's harmonized perception of requirements quality factors, guide reporting of new quality factors, and provide central access to the current body of knowledge.
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| 10. |
- Frattini, Julian, 1995-, et al.
(författare)
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An initial theory to understand and manage requirements engineering debt in practice
- 2023
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Ingår i: Information and Software Technology. - : Elsevier. - 0950-5849 .- 1873-6025. ; 159
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Context: Advances in technical debt research demonstrate the benefits of applying the financial debt metaphor to support decision-making in software development activities. Although decision-making during requirements engineering has significant consequences, the debt metaphor in requirements engineering is inadequately explored. Objective: We aim to conceptualize how the debt metaphor applies to requirements engineering by organizing concepts related to practitioners’ understanding and managing of requirements engineering debt (RED). Method: We conducted two in-depth expert interviews to identify key requirements engineering debt concepts and construct a survey instrument. We surveyed 69 practitioners worldwide regarding their perception of the concepts and developed an initial analytical theory. Results: We propose a RED theory that aligns key concepts from technical debt research but emphasizes the specific nature of requirements engineering. In particular, the theory consists of 23 falsifiable propositions derived from the literature, the interviews, and survey results. Conclusions: The concepts of requirements engineering debt are perceived to be similar to their technical debt counterpart. Nevertheless, measuring and tracking requirements engineering debt are immature in practice. Our proposed theory serves as the first guide toward further research in this area.
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