Software Development Experience Research Articles

Impermanent identifiers: Enhanced source code comprehension and refactoring

In response to the prevailing challenges in contemporary software development, this article introduces an innovative approach to code augmentation centered around Impermanent Identifiers. The primary goal is to enhance the software development experience by introducing dynamic identifiers that adapt to changing contexts, facilitating more efficient interactions between developers and source code, ultimately advancing comprehension, maintenance, and collaboration in software development. Additionally, this study rigorously evaluates the adoption and acceptance of Impermanent Identifiers within the software development landscape. Through a comprehensive empirical examination, we investigate how developers perceive and integrate this approach into their daily programming practices, exploring perceived benefits, potential barriers, and factors influencing its adoption. In summary, this article charts a new course for code augmentation, proposing Impermanent Identifiers as its cornerstone while assessing their feasibility and acceptance among developers. This interdisciplinary research seeks to contribute to the continuous improvement of software development practices and the progress of code augmentation technology.

A methodological approach for mobile applications development: MethApp4Mob

The mobile platform has challenged the software development industry, with the consequent need to adapt commonly used methodologies. The study presents MethApp4Mob: a methodological approach based on the traditional technical phases of software development and industrial project experience. It consists of 8 phases: negotiation, planning, design, implementation and alpha testing, beta testing and feedback analysis, promotion, application publication, release and maintenance, and mechanisms to optimize the software development process. MethApp4Mobile tries to keep the balance between a simple and practical approach without losing formality. Validations results encourage its possible application to offer a robust and easy-to-apply methodology in an industrial context.

Introduction to special issue on Agile UX: challenges, successes and barriers to improvement

The integration of Agile software development and User Experience (UX) has become a growing field of research, as both approaches play critical roles in building digital products and services. In this special issue on Agile UX, the current state of the field is explored through a combination of systematic literature reviews and qualitative and quantitative studies. The special issue provide an overview of the key trends, challenges, and successes in combining Agile and UX, and highlight the importance of involving stakeholders throughout development. The shift from plan-driven approaches to Agile UX approaches has brought a focus on human values and a better understanding of the importance of considering users’ needs. We present recent advances in research and practice, showing that Agile UX is a continuous journey towards changing user behavior by delivering value.

Let’s do it right the first time: Survey on security concerns in the way to quantum software engineering

Quantum computing is no longer a promise of the future but a rapidly evolving reality. Advances in quantum hardware are making it possible to make tangible a computational reality that until now was only theoretical. The proof of this is that development languages and platforms are appearing that bring physical principles closer to developers, making it feasible to begin to propose, in different areas of society, solutions to problems that until now were unsolvable. However, security vulnerabilities are also emerging that could hinder the progress of quantum computing, as well as its transition and development in industry. For this reason, this article proposes a review of some of the first artefacts that are emerging in the field of quantum computing. From this analysis, we begin to identify possible security issues that could become potential vulnerabilities in the quantum software of tomorrow. Likewise, and following the experience in classical software development, the testing technique is analysed as a possible candidate for improving security in quantum software development. Following the principles of Quantum Software Engineering, we are aware of the lack of tools, techniques and knowledge necessary to guarantee the development of quantum software in the immediate future. Therefore, this article aims to offer some first clues on what would be a roadmap to guarantee secure quantum software development.

Building an open-source system test generation tool: lessons learned and empirical analyses with EvoMaster

Research in software testing often involves the development of software prototypes. Like any piece of software, there are challenges in the development, use and verification of such tools. However, some challenges are rather specific to this problem domain. For example, often these tools are developed by PhD students straight out of bachelor/master degrees, possibly lacking any industrial experience in software development. Prototype tools are used to carry out empirical studies, possibly studying different parameters of novel designed algorithms. Software scaffolding is needed to run large sets of experiments efficiently. Furthermore, when using AI-based techniques like evolutionary algorithms, care needs to be taken to deal with their randomness, which further complicates their verification. The aforementioned represent some of the challenges we have identified for this domain. In this paper, we report on our experience in building the open-source EvoMaster tool, which aims at system-level test case generation for enterprise applications. Many of the challenges we faced would be common to any researcher needing to build software testing tool prototypes. Therefore, one goal is that our shared experience here will boost the research community, by providing concrete solutions to many development challenges in the building of such kind of research prototypes. Ultimately, this will lead to increase the impact of scientific research on industrial practice.

Co-Designing for a Hybrid Workplace Experience in Software Development

To achieve productive engineering practice, collaborative product innovation, and effective mentorship in hybrid work, we introduce a workshop approach on co-designing for a hybrid workplace experience and provide recommendations for continuously improving collaborative software development at scale.

Software Engineering Code Workshop Based on B-RRT ∗ FND Algorithm for Deep Program Understanding Perspective

Developers will perform a lot of search behaviors when facing daily work tasks, searching for reusable code fragments, solutions to specific problems, algorithm designs, software documentation, and software tools from public repositories (including open source communities and forum blogs) or private repositories (internal software repositories, source code platforms, communities, etc.) to make full use of existing software development resources and experiences. This paper first takes a deep programmatic understanding view of the software development process. In this paper, we first define the software engineering code search task from the perspective of deep program understanding. Secondly, this paper summarizes two research paradigms of deep software engineering code search and composes the related research results. At the same time, this paper summarizes and organizes the common evaluation methods for software engineering code search tasks. Finally, the results of this paper are combined with an outlook on future research.

Large-Scale Agile Transformations for Software Quality Assurance: An Empirical Case Study from Pakistan

Software quality plays an important role in the easy and quick adoption of a software product by the end users. Agile methods have proven to play an effective role in ensuring software quality; however, the public sector is hesitant in its adoption. This study evaluates the adoption of agile methods in the public sector in-house software development and capitalization of potential benefits. A quantitative approach is used with 28 survey questionnaires based on budget, time, quick debugging and correction, maintenance, easy testing, and installation as software quality components to assess the employability of agile methods. The questionnaire was served to 216 information technology (IT) professionals (project managers: 6%, developers: 61%, quality assurance (QA) leads: 8%, and testers: 25%) from the public sector companies having experience in software development using agile and waterfall methods. The quality components and hypotheses are evaluated using the T-test and chi-square test, respectively, with a 95% confidence interval. The results highlight the benefits of using agile methodologies for software quality components in the public sector. Additionally, the findings demonstrate how agile software development approaches significantly affect the quality of software products and successful delivery within budget and deadline.

Classification and intuitionistic fuzzy set based software bug triaging techniques

Software development is a modular approach involving multiple developers and multi-tasking teams working at different locations. A particular term in a software bug can belong to multiple modules and multiple developers’ profiles. Also, many people who report software bugs are unfamiliar with the exact technical terminology of software development, which causes the software bug to be unlabeled, vague, and noisy. Hence, analyzing, understanding, and assigning the newly reported bugs to the most appropriate developer is a challenging task for the triager. Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets (IFS) consider the non-membership and hesitant values along with the membership values of the software bug terms mapped to the developers and thus provide a powerful tool for better analysis in cases where the same term can belong to multiple categories. Two IFS similarity measure-based techniques, namely, the Intuitionistic Fuzzy Similarity Model for Developer Term Relation (IFSDTR) and the Intuitionistic Fuzzy Similarity Model for Developer Category Relation (IFSDCR), are proposed in this work. In IFSDTR, a developer-term vocabulary is constructed based on the previous bug-fixing experience of software developers by considering the most frequent terms in the IFS representation of bugs they fixed earlier. In IFSDCR, software bugs are categorized into multiple categories and a developer-category relation is constructed. When a new bug is reported, the IFS similarity measure is calculated with the developer-term and developer-category relationship, and a fuzzy α-cut is applied to find a group of expert developers to fix it. The proposed techniques are evaluated on the available data set and compared with existing approaches to bug triaging. On the Eclipse, Mozilla, and NetBeans data sets, the IFSDTR techniques yield an accuracy of 0.90, 0.89, and 0.87, respectively, whereas the IFSDCR yields a greater accuracy of 0.93, 0.90, and 0.88 for the Eclipse, Mozilla, and NetBeans data sets, respectively. Similarly, in all other performance measures, the proposed approaches outperform the state-of-the-art approaches.

Автоматизация функций систем электронного документооборота посредством применения технологий искусственного интеллекта

The article discusses the use of artificial intelligence technologies in performance of documentation processes in electronic document management systems in order to improve existing practices and to develop methods of using such technologies and implementing some functions automatically without or with minimal human intervention. The scientific novelty of the research is due to an attempt to generalize practical experience of using artificial intelligence technologies to automate electronic document management systems functions by direct development and modernization of such systems and also by introduction of outsourced software for simplification of some tasks for specialists in the field of document management. The study is to analyze the functionality of electronic document management systems implemented with use of intelligent solutions. It draws on works of national and foreign experts in the field of document management, archival science, and information technology. The article reviews electronic document management systems based on artificial intelligence technologies, as well as software solutions integrated into information systems for intellectualization of various processes pertaining to working with documents. It analyzes specific software products of Russian developers involved in various areas of the economy and in direct creation of software in the field of electronic document management, as well as foreign experience in development and use of software for solving practical problems in the field of document management. The article describes the main functions for registering, indexing, routing, and searching for documents, as well as technical support for users that are already implemented within the framework of electronic document management systems using artificial intelligence technologies, which may indicate sufficient practical benefits of using intelligent solutions in document management. The author focuses not only on obvious benefits of using artificial intelligence technologies to improve efficiency and to expand functionality of electronic document management systems, but also on possible risks pertaining to ensuring information security while working with such systems, which indicates a need for further study of this area by specialists in records management and archival science.

Using Design-Based Research to Layer Career-Like Experiences onto Software Development Courses

Using Design-Based Research to Layer Career-Like Experiences onto Software Development Courses

Code-free cloud computing service to facilitate rapid biomedical digital signal processing and algorithm development

Background and Objective: Cloud computing has the ability to offload processing tasks to a remote computing resources. Presently, the majority of biomedical digital signal processing involves a ground-up approach by writing code in a variety of languages. This may reduce the time a researcher or health professional has to process data, while increasing the barrier to entry to those with little or no software development experience. In this study, we aim to provide a service capable of handling and processing biomedical data via a code-free interface. Furthermore, our solution should support multiple file formats and processing languages while saving user inputs for repeated use.Methods: A web interface via the Python-based Django framework was developed with the potential to shorten the time taken to create an algorithm, encourage code reuse, and democratise digital signal processing tasks for non-technical users using a code-free user interface. A user can upload data, create an algorithm and download the result. Using discrete functions and multi-lingual scripts (e.g. MATLAB or Python), the user can manipulate data rapidly in a repeatable manner. Multiple data file formats are supported by a decision-based file handler and user authentication-based storage allocation method.Results: The proposed system has been demonstrated as effective in handling multiple input data types in various programming languages, including Python and MATLAB. This, in turn, has the potential to reduce currently experienced bottlenecks in cross-platform development of bio-signal processing algorithms. The source code for this system has been made available to encourage reuse. A cloud service for digital signal processing has the ability to reduce the apparent complexity and abstract the need to understand the intricacies of signal processing.Conclusion: We have introduced a web-based system capable of reducing the barrier to entry for inexperienced programmers. Furthermore, our system is reproducable and scalable for use in a variety of clinical or research fields.

Safety Requirements Analysis using Misuse Cases Method

Safety requirements analysis is an activity inside software requirements engineering that focuses on finding and solving safety gaps inside a software product. One method to do safety requirements analysis is misuse cases, a technique adopted from the security analysis method. Misuse cases provide a safety analysis approach which allows detailed steps from different stakeholders' perspective. In this research, we evaluate the misuse cases method's understandability by implementing it to analyze safety requirements for an electric car's autopilot system. We assessed the developed models using the walkthrough method. We found differences between how the model understood from someone with experience in software development and those who don't.

A process-tailoring method for digital manufacturing projects.

Most digital manufacturing projects follow the software-development process. However, the application of all the characteristics and processes specific to a digital manufacturing project cannot be generalized to all other engineering projects. Therefore, digital manufacturing project teams typically design and apply process principles that can be customized to individual use cases by project members. Tailoring these principles, including developing and referencing them, is a knowledge-intensive activity that requires the gradual improvement of development processes. This paper proposes a knowledge-oriented digital manufacturing ontology model and a semantic rule-based tailoring system that can derive tailoring strategies from knowledge ontologies via an inference-rule design and engine. The proposed model and system can assist in concrete project implementations based on software-development experience. A practical example is demonstrated through the 3D-modeling digital manufacturing of a hospital kitchen.

DEVELOPING INTELLIGENT SOFTWARE FOR COMPUTING PARALLELIZATION RESEARCH

One of the most important ways of improving the speed of complex task solving is employing a multiprocessor computational system. This paper describes the experience of software development for research management and solving educational problems using parallel computing technologies. The authors describe approaches to computation parallelization using a multiprocessor system with shared memory within a task of finding a numerical root of a system of linear equations with a tridiagonal coefficient matrix that appears when solving a boundary problem for a partial differential equation of parabolic type, the heat equation. Additionally, the approaches to parallelization implementation of the tridiagonal matrix method for the heat equation in the two-dimensional case within a numerical root-finding algorithm using the alternating-direction implicit method for a multiprocessor system with shared memory are described. A finite-difference method of variable directions is used to find a numerical root of a heat equation in the two-dimensional case. Sequential and parallel algorithms (two-sided Thomas algorithm and multithread horizontal block Thomas algorithm) that fit an execution on computational systems with shared memory have been used to implement a tridiagonal matrix method. Two parallel computation organization technologies for computational systems with shared memory have been used for computation parallelization: one based on OpenMP technology and one using .NET framework facilities. The parallelization process and load balance serving have been performed by means of the environment in the first case as manual operation of threads parallelization process is allowed in the latter one. As an assessment of the described approach performance, the calculation time for sequential and parallel algorithms is given depending on the task’s size and the number of threads used. Comparison of the considered parallelization algorithms and implementation technologies is performed based on the analysis of the resulting acceleration. This paper shows that total computation time is several times smaller and calculation acceleration is several times bigger when using Thread instead of OpenMP. An application has been developed that allows obtaining a visual result of modelling of process of temperature propagation in the study area using parallel calculation technologies in real time.

A Comparison between Agile and Traditional Software Development Methodologies

Agile and Traditional software development methodologies, both are being used in different projects of software development industry. Agile software development technology is an incremental software development process. On the other hand, Traditional software development methodologies or plan-driven software can be explained as a more formal approach to software development. These methodologies come with a fully completed set of systems requirements followed by an architectural and high level design development and inspiration. This research focuses on the software development life cycle, role and responsibilities of agile and traditional software development methodologies and their technical practices. It performs a comparison between both the software development methodologies. Here a questionnaire is used to collect data from the various experts of different IT related organizations of Bangladesh. In the questionnaire, there are three sections to bring out the individual knowledge from different organization, methodology knowledge of the respondents and software development experience of the respondents. The respondents are mainly software engineer, system analyst, software developer etc. A comparison is also performed between this survey result and a survey done by Ambler.

UX information in the daily work of an agile team: A distributed cognition analysis

The integration of agile software development and user experience (UX) design has been a topic of investigation for practitioners and researchers for many years, and agile teams have become increasingly aware of the importance of UX design. Most studies have focused so far on the integration of UX theories and methods with agile practices. The objective of this research is to investigate whether and how UX information is embedded in the daily work of an agile team. We conducted an ethnographic study of an agile team based in the UK. We performed a qualitative analysis using different data sources and three complementary analytical lenses: Distributed Cognition of Teamwork, Garrett's set of UX elements and planes, and Hassenzahl's content-oriented model of UX. This combination provided an understanding of the different types of UX information available to the agile team through artefacts and face-to-face meetings, how the information flowed within and around the agile team, and the type of engagement they have with UX information. The findings reveal that: (1) agile team members were consumers of UX information not producers; (2) the most common type of UX information found in the system related to how the user interacts with the product rather than to user goals or needs; (3) information focusing on the user perspective appears in verbal communication rather than being captured in artefacts; and, (4) the flow of UX information around the team is complex. In combination, these factors indicate a potential breakdown in the communication of UX information. We argue that these findings have relevance for other agile teams because the artefacts and methods used by this team are commonly used by other agile teams. To improve the situation, we suggest a number of recommendations to engage agile team members in UX work, and reduce the complexity of UX information flow.

Developing an automated VR cognitive treatment for psychosis: gameChange VR therapy

The automated delivery of psychological treatment using virtual reality (VR) has the potential to revolutionise patient access to evidence-based care. VR creates immersive, interactive computer simulations, which elicit responses similar to the real world. VR simulations provide an ideal opportunity for the experimentation and experiential learning that are key to successful cognitive therapy. If automated, and using the latest consumer kit, VR treatment can substantially scale-up the delivery of psychological therapy. However, the successful application of automated VR to mental health difficulties requires precise treatment targets linked to the right psychological theory and techniques. This paper describes the process of development of an automated VR cognitive therapy targeting anxious avoidance of everyday social situations by patients with psychosis. In the gameChange project, a person-centered design process was used involving people with lived experience of psychosis, clinical psychologists, designers, and software developers. The six-session gameChange VR therapy consists of six everyday scenarios: a street, a bus, a café, a pub, a doctor's waiting room, and a shop. Each scenario has five levels of difficulty. Every level provides an opportunity to test out fearful cognitions while limiting the use of safety-seeking behaviours, allowing patients to build confidence in their ability to cope. Learning is facilitated by a virtual coach and therapeutic gaming elements are included. Data from user testing indicates that the gameChange VR therapy is easy to use and engaging. The clinical effectiveness of gameChange VR therapy is now being tested in a randomised controlled trial with several hundred patients with psychosis.

How to Avoid Mistakes in Software Development for Unmanned Vehicles

The purpose of this paper is to propose design and development methodology, in terms of robustness, of unmanned vehicles (UV) software development, which minimizes the risk of software failure in both experimental and final solutions. The most common dangers in UV software development were determined, classified and analysed, on the basis of literature studies, and the author's own experience in software development and in analysis of open-source code. As a conclusion, “good practices” and failure countermeasures were proposed.

Capstones and Large Projects in Computing Education

Capstone and large projects in computing education are used as a vehicle for giving students as close to a “real-world” experience in software development as possible within the constraints of a computing degree program. This special issue presents four articles that focus on empirical research on capstone or other large-scale projects. These articles discuss areas such as project selection, working with external stakeholders, choosing the appropriate development methodology, incorporating creative activities to support student engagement, and learning.