Software Development Community Research Articles

Full Native timsTOF PASEF-Enabled Quantitative Proteomics with the i2MassChroQ Software Package.

Ion mobility mass spectrometry has become popular in proteomics lately, in particular because the Bruker timsTOF instruments have found significant adoption in proteomics facilities. The Bruker's implementation of the ion mobility dimension generates massive amounts of mass spectrometric data that require carefully designed software both to extract meaningful information and to perform processing tasks at reasonable speed. In a historical move, the Bruker company decided to harness the skills of the scientific software development community by releasing to the public the timsTOF data file format specification. As a proteomics facility that has been developing Free Open Source Software (FOSS) solutions since decades, we took advantage of this opportunity to implement the very first FOSS proteomics complete solution to natively read the timsTOF data, low-level process them, and explore them in an integrated quantitative proteomics software environment. We dubbed our software i2MassChroQ because it implements a (peptide)identification-(protein)inference-mass-chromatogram-quantification processing workflow. The software benchmarking results reported in this paper show that i2MassChroQ performed better than competing software on two critical characteristics: (1) feature extraction capability and (2) protein quantitative dynamic range. Altogether, i2MassChroQ yielded better quantified protein numbers, both in a technical replicate MS runs setting and in a differential protein abundance analysis setting.

IMAGE: An Open-Source, Extensible Framework for Deploying Accessible Audio and Haptic Renderings of Web Graphics

For accessibility practitioners, creating and deploying novel multimedia interactions for people with disabilities is a nontrivial task. As a result, many projects aiming to support such accessibility needs come and go, or never make it to a public release. To reduce the overhead involved in deploying and maintaining a system that transforms web content into multimodal renderings, we created an open-source, modular microservices architecture as part of the IMAGE project. This project aims to design richer means of interacting with web graphics than is afforded by a screen reader and text descriptions alone. To benefit the community of accessibility software developers, we discuss this architecture and explain how it provides support for several multimodal processing pipelines. Beyond illustrating the initial use case that motivated this effort, we further describe two use cases outside the scope of our project in order to explain how a team could use the architecture to develop and deploy accessible solutions for their own work. We then discuss our team’s experience working with the IMAGE architecture, informed by discussions with six project members, and provide recommendations to other practitioners considering applying the framework to their own accessibility projects.

ScrumSpiral: An Improved Hybrid Software Development Model

In the lightning-quick world of software development, it is essential to find the most effective and efficient development methodology. This thesis represents "Scrum Spiral" which is an improved hybrid software development model that combines the features of Scrum and Spiral approach to enhance the software development process. This thesis aims to identify the usefulness of "ScrumSpiral" methodology and compare it with other hybrid software development models to encourage its use in software development projects. To develop this hybrid model, we did extensive research on the software engineering domain and decided to create a hybrid model by using Scrum and Spiral, named "Scrum Spiral" which is suitable for complicated projects and also for those projects whose requirements are not fixed. Traditional software development models face numerous challenges in rapidly changing markets. By developing this kind of hybrid model, we want to overcome these kinds of limitations and present the software development community with a novel concept for better project results. Final outcome of this thesis was that we developed a model that should be able to complete the project according to the expected schedule, satisfy customer requirements, and obtain productivity through team coordination. The significance of the hybrid model "Scrum Spiral" is reflected in its ability to offer flexibility towards various size projects, proactive risk management to identify all risks before developing the system, and result in higher-quality outcomes for those projects whose requirements are not properly described initially in the project.

Advances in automated support for requirements engineering: a systematic literature review

Requirements Engineering (RE) has undergone several transitions over the years, from traditional methods to agile approaches emphasising increased automation. In many software development projects, requirements are expressed in natural language and embedded within large volumes of text documents. At the same time, RE activities aim to define software systems' functionalities and constraints. However, manually executing these tasks is time-consuming and prone to errors. Numerous research efforts have proposed tools and technologies for automating RE activities to address this challenge, which are documented in published works. This review aims to examine empirical evidence on automated RE and analyse its impact on the RE sub-domain and software development. To achieve our goal, we conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) following established guidelines for conducting SLRs. We aimed to identify, aggregate, and analyse papers on automated RE published between 1996 and 2022. We outlined the output of the support tool, the RE phase covered, levels of automation, development approach, and evaluation approaches. We identified 85 papers that discussed automated RE from various perspectives and methodologies. The results of this review demonstrate the significance of automated RE for the software development community, which has the potential to shorten development cycles and reduce associated costs. The support tools primarily assist in generating UML models (44.7%) and other activities such as omission of steps, consistency checking, and requirement validation. The analysis phase of RE is the most widely automated phase, with 49.53% of automated tools developed for this purpose. Natural language processing technologies, particularly POS tagging and Parser, are widely employed in developing these support tools. Controlled experimental methods are the most frequently used (48.2%) for evaluating automated RE tools, while user studies are the least employed evaluation method (8.2%). This paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge by providing an updated overview of the research literature, enabling a better understanding of trends and state-of-the-art practices in automated RE for researchers and practitioners. It also paves the way for future research directions in automated requirements engineering.

APPROACHES OF IMPLEMENTATION CHATGPT IN A SOFTWARE TESTING AUTOMATION PROCESS

Automation of software testing is a crucial aspect of the software development process. It helps to improve the accuracy, speed, and efficiency of testing, and reduce the cost and effort associated with manual testing. With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and recently released Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT), new opportunities for automating software testing have emerged. The use of AI in software testing has the potential to revolutionize the quality assurance process, enabling organizations to deliver high-quality software to their customers. Along with implementing ChatGPT into an ad hoc testing process we can implement the following into CI/CD. This article aims to explore the potential of ChatGPT in software testing and examine how it can be applied in a software development process - both manual and automation - along with describing benefits of using ChatGPT3 in software quality assurance in order to encourage its adoption in the software development community.

Real-Time Collaboration in Code Development: A Comprehensive Review of Code Jett

CodeJett is a pioneering collaborative real-time code editor that serves as a beacon of innovation in the field of software development. With the increasing prevalence of remote work and distributed development teams, the need for tools that facilitate seamless collaboration among developers is paramount. CodeJett rises to this challenge by offering an array of features, including real-time synchronization, syntax highlighting, version control integration, and a built-in chat system. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of CodeJett, highlighting its significance and the evolving landscape of collaborative development tools. In a world where software development transcends borders and time zones, CodeJett acts as a unifying force, enabling developers to work together harmoniously on coding projects. The real-time nature of the tool eliminates the need for manual synchronization, enhancing productivity and reducing the likelihood of errors. CodeJett's versatility extends to its support for multiple programming languages, making it accessible to a broad spectrum of developers. This abstract underscore the role of CodeJett in facilitating collaboration, real-time development, and efficient communication within the software development community. The paper also explores the technical challenges faced in the development of CodeJett and offers insights into its future potential as a transformative tool in an ever-changing software development landscape. With keywords such as collaboration, real-time synchronization, syntax highlighting, and version control, this abstract encapsulates the essence of CodeJett's importance and its enduring impact on the field of software development.

A Comparative Analysis of the Rise of Git-Based Distributed Collaborative Hosting Platforms: Survey, Performance Test, and Comparison

With the widespread use of the Internet, cloud services have steadily become more prevalent worldwide. The Internet is a typical pattern of distributed network structure. Initially, the term “distributed collaboration” [1] was mostly used in the computer-related industries to describe how individuals may work together remotely to accomplish a common goal at various times and locations in the network era with improved mobility. The community of software developers is constantly searching for an essential collaborative platform for organizing software projects and collaborative learning. This research study offers a thorough examination of cloud-based Git repository hosting services, examining both their present situation and potential for the future. The article meticulously examines year-by-year upgrades and follows the release dates of major cloud-based Git hosting platforms to offer insights into how these platforms have changed over time. Market share information and the importance of the main companies are evaluated, providing insightful information on platform preferences among enterprises and developers. The study explores the complex ecosystems of Bitbucket Server [7], GitLab [6], GitHub [5], and Bitbucket, as well as Azure DevOps [9] and AWS CodeCommit [8]. The report presents well-informed projections regarding the future of these services based on meticulous data analysis and professional observations. Deeper interaction with DevOps pipelines, improved security, and expanded support for containerization and micro-services architectures are some of the trends that are anticipated.

Productivity and Quality Challenges of Novice Developers in Agile Engineering Environments - A Comparative Study

The Agile methodology has significantly transformed the landscape of software development, offering a dynamic approach that prioritizes adaptability and customer feedback. This paper harnesses insights from the authoritative State of Agile report, an annual publication produced by CollabNet and Digital.ai. Findings of six financial years (2015-2021) reveal the current positioning of the software development community in terms of agile adoption and the prevalent trends. This finding was elaborated with a micro survey, conducted targeting various agile roles within software development companies focusing on novice developers. An in-depth exploration offers a granular view, underscoring the reasons behind the significance pinpointed in the State of Agile reports. Overall, this research provides a comprehensive understanding of Agile's impact, its evolving trends, and its implications for diverse software development teams.

A new taxonomy of global software development best practices using prioritization based on a fuzzy system

AbstractEffective management of development projects is crucial to delivering high‐quality software within time and budget constraints. However, organizing geographically distributed software development activities presents unique challenges, including difficulties in face‐to‐face interaction and coordination. To assist the global software development community in updating and developing new project management techniques, identifying and prioritizing best practices is essential. This study aims to develop a taxonomy based on the prioritization of management practices for software development, drawing from empirical data. Fifty‐five best practices associated with the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) fields were identified from the existing literature. The study also empirically examines the acceptability and relevance of these practices within the industry. An analytic hierarchy process within a fuzzy system is employed to prioritize these practices based on their importance in managing global software development.

A community detection approach based on network representation learning for repository mining

In this paper, we propose a novel heterogeneous graph-based model for capturing and handling all the complex and strongly-correlated information of a software Developer Social Network (DSN) to support several analytic tasks. In particular, we challenge the problem of automatically discovering communities of software developers sharing interests for similar projects by relying on Social Network Analysis (SNA) findings. To overcome the huge graph-size issue, we leverage different graph embedding techniques. Eventually, we evaluate the proposed approach with respect to state-of-the-art approaches from an efficiency and an effectiveness point of view by carrying out an experiment involving the GitHub dataset.

An Empirical Investigation Into the Influence of Software Communities’ Cultural and Geographical Dispersion on Productivity

Estimating and understanding software development productivity represent crucial tasks for researchers and practitioners. Although different works focused on evaluating the impact of human factors on productivity, a few explored the influence of cultural/geographical diversity in software development communities. More particularly, all previous treatise addresses cultural aspects as abstract concepts without providing a quantitative representation. Improved knowledge of these matters might help project managers to assemble more productive teams and tool vendors to design software analytics toolkits that may better estimate productivity. This paper has the goal of enlarging the existing body of knowledge on the factors affecting productivity by focusing on cultural and geographical dispersion of a development community—namely, how diverse a community is in terms of cultural attitudes and geographical collocation of the members who belong to it. To reach this goal, we performed a mixed-method empirical study. First, we built a statistical model relating dispersion metrics with the productivity of 25 open-source communities on Github. Then, we performed a confirmatory survey with 140 practitioners. The key results of our study indicate that cultural and geographical dispersion considerably impact productivity, thus encouraging managers and practitioners to consider such aspects during all the phases of the software development lifecycle. We conclude our paper by elaborating on the main insights from our analyses and instilling implications that may drive further research.

Knowledge sharing in open-source software development communities: a review and synthesis

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the state of the literature on knowledge sharing in open source software (OSS) development communities by examining the existing research and identifying the knowledge gaps and opportunities that can inform areas for future research. Design/methodology/approach A systematic literature review was conducted of literature published between January 2011 and February 2023. A total of 24 papers were identified and reviewed. Findings The findings reveal that the literature on knowledge sharing in OSS development communities from developing countries are limited. Additionally, there exists a limited focus on the development of frameworks to support knowledge sharing in OSS communities. The transient nature of OSS development contributors’ results in knowledge loss; thus, knowledge retention needs further investigation. Research limitations/implications This study only included papers whose titles, keywords or abstracts included the search keywords “knowledge sharing” and “Open Source Software”. While the keywords were carefully applied, when applying the search, it cannot be ruled that some relevant studies might have been missed. The study was also limited to conferences and journal papers published in English. Despite the limitations, the study provides a systematic review of knowledge sharing in OSS communities and presents findings that can be useful to researchers and practitioners interested in this area. Originality/value The study provides a systematic literature review of published papers and identifies themes and future research areas on knowledge sharing in OSS communities. Additionally, this review offers insights into future research avenues for theory, content and context on knowledge sharing in OSS development communities.

Pengaruh Flexible Working Space dan Flexible Working Time terhadap Kinerja Tim melalui Kerja Sama Tim pada Perusahaan Pengembangan Perangkat Lunak di Indonesia

The terms flexible working space and flexible working time have become popular recently after the occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the emergence of technology startup companies that adopt a new work model where work arrangements are flexible in terms of both place (Flexible Working Space) and time (Flexible Working Time). However, there are concerns from management regarding the decline in employee performance if these work arrangements are adopted, due to a decrease in team collaboration effectiveness caused by separate workspaces (flexispace). This article aims to examine the impact of Flexible Working Space and Flexible Working Time on team performance through team collaboration in software development companies in Indonesia and contribute by providing findings on the impact of flexible work arrangements in terms of place and time that can be useful for companies that have or will implement flexible work systems and require information regarding the impact of such work arrangements. The population consists of team leads/managers from across Indonesia who are part of various software developer communities. Data was collected using convenience sampling technique through a questionnaire. The number of samples used was 97. The data analysis method used is PLS-SEM with the assistance of SmartPLS software.

Roadmap on electronic structure codes in the exascale era

Abstract Electronic structure calculations have been instrumental in providing many important insights into a range of physical and chemical properties of various molecular and solid-state systems. Their importance to various fields, including materials science, chemical sciences, computational chemistry, and device physics, is underscored by the large fraction of available public supercomputing resources devoted to these calculations. As we enter the exascale era, exciting new opportunities to increase simulation numbers, sizes, and accuracies present themselves. In order to realize these promises, the community of electronic structure software developers will however first have to tackle a number of challenges pertaining to the efficient use of new architectures that will rely heavily on massive parallelism and hardware accelerators. This roadmap provides a broad overview of the state-of-the-art in electronic structure calculations and of the various new directions being pursued by the community. It covers 14 electronic structure codes, presenting their current status, their development priorities over the next five years, and their plans towards tackling the challenges and leveraging the opportunities presented by the advent of exascale computing.

MBSE Model Management Pain Points – Wait, this looks familiar!

AbstractIt has been almost 20 years since INCOSE and the OMG kicked off an effort to create a standardized model‐based systems engineering modeling language. That effort culminated in 2006 with the creation of the Systems Modeling language (SysML). Over the past several years, numerous industries have increased their adoption of SysML and MBSE as a core practice within their engineering lifecycles. However, they have not achieved many of the originally envisioned benefits. On closer inspection, many of the challenges and barriers with which MBSE practitioners are currently struggling are remarkably similar to the problems seen in large DoD software programs from the 1970s and 80s and were resolved decades ago by the software development community regarding scale and complexity. System models are becoming larger and more complex. Yet, in this expanding and maturing MBSE environment, projects continue to experience problems with model integration, repository performance and model lifecycle management. It is time to go back and take another look at how the software community attacked problems of extreme scale.The similarity between MBSE's model management pain points and those experienced years ago by the software industry is not unexpected. Adoption of MBSE requires the replacement of the largely manual, document‐based engineering processes with a complex engineering information processing system. Unlike documents, the models produced by that system are living artifacts that require management over the project lifecycle and which have all the characteristics and complexity of software.This paper presents a framework for MBSE planning and model lifecycle management based on the key practices from Systems Engineering and Software Engineering to provide an actionable set of best practices that can be applied today to address current MBSE lifecycle management issues. We have organized these best practices around three key MBSE Model Management Imperatives.

The SunPy Project: An interoperable ecosystem for solar data analysis

The SunPy Project is a community of scientists and software developers creating an ecosystem of Python packages for solar physics. The project includes the sunpy core package as well as a set of affiliated packages. The sunpy core package provides general purpose tools to access data from different providers, read image and time series data, and transform between commonly used coordinate systems. Affiliated packages perform more specialized tasks that do not fall within the more general scope of the sunpy core package. In this article, we give a high-level overview of the SunPy Project, how it is broader than the sunpy core package, and how the project curates and fosters the affiliated package system. We demonstrate how components of the SunPy ecosystem, including sunpy and several affiliated packages, work together to enable multi-instrument data analysis workflows. We also describe members of the SunPy Project and how the project interacts with the wider solar physics and scientific Python communities. Finally, we discuss the future direction and priorities of the SunPy Project.

A Rhetorical Analysis of the Agile Manifesto on its 20th Anniversary

The Agile Software Development (ASD) method is guided by the Agile manifesto which consists of an Agile philosophy and a set of 12 principles. However, despite the indisputable impact of Agile philosophy and principles on software development around the world, the phenomenon of its popularity has not received requisite attention by researchers. In this article we use the rhetorical analysis by focus group of eight industry experts and academics to understand the appeal and attractiveness of ASD to the software development community. We discover that the time was ripe for its introduction with many paradigms and established approaches getting challenged due to rapid pace of technological changes and rise in business uncertainties. The Agile manifesto and its principles tapped into the mood of the moment and perhaps unwittingly through an amalgamation of popular theories of the time from management and manufacturing created a movement generally welcomed by the software developers, but which intrigued many among the software engineering community who were traditionally strong adherents of Taylorism and its principles.

A Practical Guide to Reproducible Modeling for Biochemical Networks.

While scientific disciplines revere reproducibility, many studies - experimental and computational alike - fall short of this ideal and cannot be reproduced or even repeated when the model is shared. For computational modeling of biochemical networks, there is a dearth of formal training and resources available describing how to practically implement reproducible methods, despite a wealth of existing tools and formats which could be used to support reproducibility. This chapter points the reader to useful software tools and standardized formats that support reproducible modeling of biochemical networks and provides suggestions on how to implement reproducible methods in practice. Many of the suggestions encourage readers to use best practices from the software development community in order to automate, test, and version control their model components. A Jupyter Notebook demonstrating several of the key steps in building a reproducible biochemical network model is included to supplement the recommendations in the text.

Artificial intelligence from the perspective of polish intellectual property law. Selected issues

Keywords: artificial intelligence, intellectual property law, copyright, industrialproperty law, computer programs
 In Poland, as in other countries, there is an ongoing discussion on legal issues related to artificial intelligence. Formany people, there is no doubt that this intelligence should be protected. The problem rather narrows down to what conditions must be met for this protection. Some Polish scientists want to wait for solutions to be developed in the European Union.Poland, as a member state of the European Union, must respect the regulations emerging at the EU level. These regulations are only being planned. There is a certain risk in introducing new regulations in Poland without waiting for EU solutions.It could turn out that the laws adopted by Poland would be incompatible, not in compliance with European law.On the other hand, the software producers' communities are pushing for the introductionof relevant legislation now. They claim that this is needed to protect the funds that are being invested in artificial intelligence in Poland. In their view, without proper legislation, investors will reduce financial support for the developmentof artificial intelligence. In fact, however, the computer manufacturers' communityis not at all concerned with protecting 'mere' artificial intelligence. It is protected in Poland and can be provided by copyright law in particular. The most important issue in Poland already relates to the protection of creations generatedby artificial intelligence. This is in fact what the computer software development community and beyond cares most about.However, the protection of creations of artificial intelligence is not only about benefits, but also about threats. This will be discussed further in the article. Some lawyers are considering how to interpret the existing legislation so that the protectionof artificial intelligence creations is already possible. They want to use existing theoretical constructs to justify this protection.

Achieving stepwise construction of cyber physical systems in EX-MAN component model

For industry 5.0, constructing new large scale systems by using existing and new technologies is the latest research trend; being a combination of hardware and software technologies, these are referred to as hybrid systems. For constructing large and complex systems, the process of incremental and iterative development is popular for many decades. In the component based software development community, using EX-MAN component model (EX-MAN) a new incremental development process is proposed in this paper. With a new definition on increments, this proposed process is different and beneficial for building systems from existing components in a developer-friendly way. This claim is backed by comparing and contrasting the proposed work with the existing approaches in the component-based development domain. We evaluate our approach by constructing a smart ATM system effective to be used in a pandemic situation. For the support of system construction in EX-MAN, a tool Exogenous Composition Framework is created for modeling and simulation of systems.