Journal of Systems and Software

The number of applications supported by blockchain smart contracts has been greatly increasing in recent years, with smart contracts now being used across several domains, such as the music industry, finance, and retail, to name a few. Despite ...

• A categorization of smart contract vulnerability detection techniques.
• The identification of smart contract vulnerabilities that are the target of current vulnerability detection tools.
• An analysis of the datasets used in smart ...

The advancement of machine learning (ML) models has led to the development of ML-based approaches to improve numerous software engineering tasks in software maintenance and evolution. Nevertheless, research indicates that despite their potential ...

• Design a novel framework to assess the reliability and consistency of rule-based XAI.
• Propose several granular-level evaluation metrics within our framework.
• Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of ...

Architecture smells are a widely established concept to describe symptoms of software degradation by measuring perceived violations of software-design principles. As such, architecture smells can help developers assess and understand the ...

• Cyclic dependency merges raise overall complexity and contribute to large instances.
• Cyclic dependency merges often lead to multi-hubs, while splits do not resolve them .
• Extreme cyclic dependencies arise over time; unstable ...

Quantum computing is considered a revolutionary technology due to its ability to solve computational problems that are beyond the capabilities of classical computers. However, quantum computing requires great amounts of energy to run. Therefore, ...

• Quantum problems tested take 679 to 903 times longer than classical computing.
• Quantum used about 155,308 times more energy than classical for the easiest problem.
• High energy use and variable times favour classical computers for ...

In the past couple of decades, significant research efforts have been devoted to the prediction of software bugs (i.e., defects). In general, these works leverage a diverse set of metrics, tools, and techniques to predict which classes, methods, ...

• Code metrics cannot predict severity (Difficulty and effort perform best).
• Static analysis tools (SpotBugs, Infer) poorly predict bugs and severity.
• Static analysis tools determine bug severity independently of code context.
• ...

Within data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) systems for industrial applications, ensuring the reliability of the incoming data streams is an integral part of trustworthy decision-making. An approach to assess data validity is data quality ...

• Adaptive framework for real-time data quality scoring in industrial applications.
• Drift-aware mechanism ensures up-to-date, dynamic data quality assessment.
• Reducing computational overhead while maintaining high assessment ...

Testing Highly Configurable Systems (HCSs) is a challenging task, especially in an evolution scenario where features are added, changed, or removed, which hampers test case selection and prioritization. Existing work is usually based on the ...

• A feature-oriented test case selection and prioritization approach is introduced.
• The approach uses only the source code, not requiring historical or training data.
• Results show the approach reduces the test suite size while ...

Currently and in the near future, Smart Cities are vital to enhance urban living, address resource challenges, optimize infrastructure, and harness technology for sustainability, efficiency, and improved quality of life in rapidly urbanizing ...

• Hybrid Quantum Architecture for Cyber Security Attacks.
• Quantum Machine Learning (QML) and SIEM to provide security based on Quantum Artificial Intelligence and patterns/rules.
• The application of Quantum Computing to reduce the ...

Software aging, characterized by an increasing failure rate or performance decline in long-running software systems, poses significant risks including financial losses and potential harm to human life. This is primarily attributed to the ...

• We propose the SGT model for feature extraction from complex software code.
• A node degree-based sub-graph sampling retains core nodes, reducing complexity.
• Random oversampling increases ARB instances, improving model training ...

• Mitigating the harmful effects of mandelbugs in cloud systems.
• Utilizing virtualized software spares as a preventive approach in cloud computing.
• Integrating automatic failover strategies to counteract mandelbugs.
• Applying ...

With the increasing popularity of cloud services, there is a growing demand for high reliability and availability of cloud computing. As viable solutions, virtualized software spares and rejuvenation scheduling have been used to maintain highly ...

Proactive self-adaptation has emerged as a vital approach in recent years, aiming to preemptively address potential goal violations or performance degradation, thus improving the system’s reliability. However, this approach encounters specific ...

• Leveraging evidence theory for improved prediction accuracy.
• Employing latency-aware stochastic model predictive control for reliability.
• Refining the decision-making process by technical debt based utility model.
• Validated ...

Software aging is one of the significant factors affecting the reliability and availability of long-running software systems, such as Android, Cloud systems, etc. The time to aging failure (TTAF) prediction for software systems plays a crucial ...

• A TTAF prediction framework with PMTT is proposed to extract degradation information from the software systems.
• Multiple sets of run-to-failure data as experimental datasets are collected.
• Ablation study and sensitivity analysis ...

Software developers often submit questions to technical Q&A sites like Stack Overflow (SO) to resolve code-level problems. In practice, they include example code snippets with questions to explain the programming issues. Existing research ...

• Missing an important part of code most severely hurts reproducibility & prevents answers.
• Users urge a tool that assists users in improving code to support reproducibility.
• Simple code-related features (e.g., LOC) can identify ...

Gender gap in education has gained considerable attention in recent years, as it carries profound implications for the academic community. However, while the problem has been tackled from a student perspective, research is still lacking from an ...

• Conduct a study of literature on gender gap in the Software Engineering community.
• Perform network analysis on co-authorship between gender groups in the SE community.
• Analyze formal bias to uncover gender disparities in the ...

• Corporatization is examined as an avenue for diversity and inclusivity.
• FLOSS contributors hold pro-/anti-corporation stances that influence participation.
• FLOSS contributors vary in orientation towards individual and collective ...

Issues associated with a lack of diversity and inclusivity persist in the domain of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) development and in software development generally. Researchers have suggested that the corporatization of FLOSS ...

Digital technologies are an essential resource for maximizing education opportunities, yet the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed learning inequities, particularly among underrepresented groups such as children with autism. In this study, we have ...

• Evaluated primary data of 54 multiplatform applications for children with autism.
• Assistive applications commonly exhibit usability and maintenance issues.
• Mainstream applications face challenges in accessibility and independent ...

The majority of Information Technology (IT)/Software Engineering (SE) professionals are male. A potential reason for the low number of female IT/SE professionals might be that the roles and the way they are advertised are biased towards male ...

• According to hiring managers and professionals IT/SE job advertisements are biased.
• Using neutral words are important.
• Male and female candidate preferences are also very important.
• Encourage inclusion, describe the team and ...

The increasing complexity of modern systems poses numerous challenges at all stages of system development and operation. Continuous software and system engineering processes, e.g., DevOps, are increasingly adopted and spread across organizations. ...

• DevOps and artificial intelligence (machine learning) are increasingly adopted.
• Continuous engineering and validation benefit from AI-enhanced solutions.
• Software architecture for model-based and intelligent automation in DevOps.