| 1. |
- 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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| 2. |
- Lenberg, Per, 1976, et al.
(författare)
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Behavioral Aspects of Safety-Critical Software Development
- 2020
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Ingår i: Proceedings - 2020 IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops, ICSEW 2020. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. ; , s. 173-176
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- We are becoming increasingly dependent on software systems also for highly critical tasks in society. To minimize the risk of failures, regulatory institutions define standards that software organizations must meet. However, the quality of the safety-critical software is, ultimately, determined by the software engineers' behavior. Even though previous studies have recognized the significance of such behavioral aspects, research that studies them is limited. The aim of this initial study was, therefore, to identify how and in what way, behavioral aspects affect the quality of safety-critical software. Thematic analysis of interviews with six software engineers identified four themes linking developer behavior to safety. Our analysis suggests that developing safety-critical systems imposes stress on software engineers and that to reduce such pressure it is critical to enhance organizational trust. It also indicates that the agile way-of-working has the potential to improve safety by facilitating the sharing of domain knowledge. Our findings provide directions for future studies into these important aspects and can be of wider relevance, in particular for the development of secure software, but potentially also for general software engineering.
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| 3. |
- Lenberg, Per, et al.
(författare)
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Qualitative software engineering research : Reflections and guidelines
- 2024
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Ingår i: Journal of Software. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 2047-7473 .- 2047-7481. ; 36:6
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Researchers are increasingly recognizing the importance of human aspects in software development. Because qualitative methods are used to explore human behavior in-depth, we believe that studies using such methods will become more common. Existing qualitative software engineering guidelines do not cover the full breadth of qualitative methods and the knowledge on how to use them like in social sciences. The purpose of this study was to extend the software engineering community's current body of knowledge regarding available qualitative methods and their quality assurance frameworks and to provide recommendations and guidelines for their use. With the support of an epistemological argument and a survey of the literature, we suggest that future research would benefit from (1) utilizing a broader set of research methods, (2) more strongly emphasizing reflexivity, and (3) employing qualitative guidelines and quality criteria. We present an overview of three qualitative methods commonly used in social sciences but rarely seen in software engineering research, namely interpretative phenomenological analysis, narrative analysis, and discourse analysis. Furthermore, we discuss the meaning of reflexivity in relation to the software engineering context and suggest means of fostering it. Our paper will help software engineering researchers better select and then guide the application of a broader set of qualitative research methods. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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