Empirical Software Engineering

Context: Development of software-intensive products and services increasingly occurs by continuously deploying product or service increments, such as new features and enhancements, to customers. Product and service developers must continuously find out what customers want by direct customer feedback and usage behaviour observation. Objective: This paper examines the preconditions for setting up an experimentation system for continuous customer experiments. It describes the RIGHT model for Continuous Experimentation (Rapid Iterative value creation Gained through High-frequency Testing), illustrating the building blocks required for such a system. Method: An initial model for continuous experimentation is analytically derived from prior work. The model is matched against empirical case study findings from two startup companies and further developed. Results: Building blocks for a continuous experimentation system and infrastructure are presented. Conclusions: A suitable experimentation system requires at least the ability to release minimum viable products or features with suitable

—A study is presented that examines the distribution and the usage of some unsafe functions that are known to cause security vulnerabilities in 15 software systems, written in C/C++. The systems are commonly used for mobile computing, and they comprise almost six million lines of code. A tool that uses a static analysis approach is applied to each system, and the number of calls to unsafe functions is determined and tabulated. The results show that vulnerable functions such as strcmp, strlen, and memcpy represent the vast majority of used unsafe functions that are banned by many companies (e.g., Microsoft) in the studied systems. This fact can help software trainers better design and plan training courses and materials on secure coding practices for software developers. Additionally, findings can help software engineers to conduct more effective refactoring processes that help to clean software systems from vulnerable code, and focus primarily on the removal of vulnerable code with higher usage for better outcomes. The historical data for a number of systems, subset, is presented over a five-year period. The data shows that few of the systems examined are increasing the number of unsafe function calls over time. This is somewhat contradictory to the literature, which claims that the use of vulnerable functions is decreasing in software systems. This fact demands that more attention and effort from software engineering and mobile computing communities be put towards addressing this phenomenon.

Feature Location (FL) aims to locate observable functionalities in source code. Considering its key role in software maintenance, a vast array of automated and semi-automated Feature Location Techniques (FLTs) have been proposed. To compare FLTs, an open, standard set of non-subjective, reproducible “compare-to” FLT techniques (baseline techniques) should be used for evaluation. In order to relate the performance of FLTs compared against different baseline techniques, these compare-to techniques should be evaluated against each other. But evaluation across FLTs is confounded by empirical designs that incorporate different FL goals and evaluation criteria. This paper moves towards standardizing FLT comparability by assessing eight baseline techniques in an empirical design that addresses these confounding factors. These baseline techniques are assessed in twelve case studies to rank their performance. Results of the case studies suggest that different baseline techniques perform diff...

Numerous empirical studies analyse evolving open source software (OSS) projects, and try to estimate the activity and effort in these projects. Most of these studies, however, only focus on a limited set of artefacts, being source code and defect data. In our research, we extend the analysis by also taking into account mailing list information. The main goal of this article is to find evidence for the Pareto principle in this context, by studying how the activity of developers and users involved in OSS projects is distributed: it appears that most of the activity is carried out by a small group of people. Following the GQM paradigm, we provide evidence for this principle. We selected a range of metrics used in economy to measure inequality in distribution of wealth, and adapted these metrics to assess how OSS project activity is distributed. Regardless of whether we analyse version repositories, bug trackers, or mailing lists, and for all three projects we studied, it turns out that the distribution of activity is highly imbalanced.

When the Application Programming Interface (API) of a framework
or library changes, its clients must be adapted. This change
propagation—known as a ripple effect—is a problem that has garnered interest: several approaches have been proposed in the literature to react to these changes.
Although studies of ripple effects exist at the single system level,
no study has been performed on the actual extent and impact of these API changes in practice, on an entire software ecosystem associated with a community of developers. This paper reports on an empirical study of API deprecations that led to ripple effects across an entire ecosystem. Our case study subject is the development community gravitating around the Squeak and Pharo software ecosystems: seven years of evolution, more than 3,000 contributors, and more than 2,600 distinct systems. We analyzed 577 methods and 186 classes that were deprecated, and answer research questions regarding the frequency, magnitude, duration, adaptation, and consistency of the ripple effects triggered by API changes.

7th International Conference on Software Engineering (SOFT 2021) will provide an excellent
international forum for sharing knowledge and results in theory, methodology and applications of
Software Engineering and Applications. The goal of this Conference is to bring together researchers
and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern software
engineering concepts and establishing new collaborations in these areas.

There is a growing interest in empirical study in software engineering, both for validating mature technologies and for guiding improvements of less-mature technologies. This paper introduces an empirical methodology, based on experiences garnered over more than two decades of work by the Empirical Software Engineering Group at the University of Maryland and related organizations, for taking a newly proposed improvement to development processes from the conceptual phase through transfer to industry. The methodology presents a series of questions that should be addressed, as well as the types of studies that best address those questions. The methodology is illustrated by a specific research program on inspection processes for Object-Oriented designs. Specific examples of the studies that were performed and how the methodology impacted the development of the inspection process are also described.

Determining requirements process efficiency, and measuring the corresponding monetary impacts, is a challenging but necessary aspect of project management. In this paper, we perform an independent analysis of scoping decisions from a large industrial project with the goal of providing visualizations that facilitate investigations of process efficiency , agility, and the effects of scoping decisions. The visualizations proposed in this paper can be used to analyze scoping dynamics and support process management decisions on a quantitative rather than a qualitative basis.

The International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications (IJSEA) is a bi-monthly open access peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles which contribute new results in all areas of the Software Engineering & Applications. The goal of this journal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern software engineering concepts & establishing new collaborations in these areas.

Inflows of remittances to India have experienced a sharp rise in recent years. Remittances have
also emerged as a more important and stable source of foreign exchange inflow compared to
official development assistance, foreign direct investment or other types of capital flowsin
particular in developing countries.The top 10 migrant destination countries were the United
States, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Russia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), United Kingdom, France,
Canada, Spain and Australia. The top 10 migrant source countries were India, Mexico, Russia,
China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and United Kingdom
(World Bank 2016).The three main recipient countries are India, China and Philippines. In the
other hand US, Saudi Arabia and Germany are the three main source countries. India, with a vast
reservoir of both highly skilled and semi-skilledand unskilled labour force, is aone of the major
contributor to the contemporary global labour flows.

Software provided under open source licenses is widely used, from forming high-profile stand-alone applications (e.g., Mozilla Firefox) to being embedded in commercial offerings (e.g., network routers). Despite the high frequency of use of open source licenses, there has been little work about whether software developers understand the open source licenses they use. To our knowledge, only one survey has been conducted, which focused on which licenses developers choose and when they encounter problems with licensing open source software. To help fill the gap of whether or not developers understand the open source licenses they use, we conducted a survey that posed development scenarios involving three popular open source licenses (GNU GPL 3.0, GNU LGPL 3.0 and MPL 2.0) both alone and in combination. The 375 respondents to the survey, who were largely developers, gave answers consistent with those of a legal expert's opinion in 62% of 42 cases. Although developers clearly understood cases involving one license, they struggled when multiple licenses were involved. An analysis of the quantitative and qualitative results of the study indicate a need for tool support to help guide developers in understanding this critical information attached to software components.

Scope & Topics The International journal of Software Engineering & Applications (IJSEA) is a BiMonthly open access peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles which contribute new results in all areas of the Software Engineering & Applications. The goal of this journal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern software engineering concepts & establishing new collaborations in these areas. Authors are solicited to contribute to the journal by submitting articles that illustrate research results, projects, surveying works and industrial experiences that describe significant advances in the areas of software engineering & applications.

The International journal of Software Engineering & Applications (IJSEA) is a Bi-Monthly open access peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles which contribute new results in all areas of the Software Engineering & Applications. The goal of this journal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern software engineering concepts & establishing new collaborations in these areas.

Continuous delivery (CD) has emerged as an auspicious alternative to traditional release engineering, promising to provide the capability to release valuable software continuously to customers. Paddy Power has been implementing CD for the past two years. This article explains why Paddy Power decided to adopt CD, describes the resulting CD capability, and reports the huge benefits and challenges involved. These experiences can provide fellow practitioners with insights for their adoption of CD, and the identified challenges can provide researchers valuable input for developing their research agendas.

Context: Large-scale offshore software development programmes are complex, with challenging deadlines and a high risk of failure. Agile methods are being adopted, despite the challenges of coordinating multiple development teams. Agile processes are tailored to support team coordination. Artefacts are tangible products of the software development process, intended to ensure consistency in the approach of teams on the same development programme. Objective: This study aims to increase understanding of how development processes are tailored to meet the needs of large-scale offshore software development programmes, by focusing on artefact inventories used in the development process. Method: A grounded theory approach using 46 practitioner interviews, supplemented with documentary sources and observations, in nine international companies was adopted. The grounded theory concepts of open coding, memo-ing, constant comparison and saturation were used in data analysis. Results: The study has identified 25 artefacts, organised into five categories: feature, sprint, release, product and corporate governance. It was discovered that conventional agile artefacts are enriched with artefacts associated with plan-based methods in order to provide governance. The empirical evidence collected in the study has been used to identify a primary owner of each artefact and map each artefact to specific activities within each of the agile roles. Conclusion: The development programmes in this study create agile and plan-based artefacts to improve compliance with enterprise quality standards and technology strategies, whilst also mitigating risk of failure. Management of these additional artefacts is currently improvised because agile development processes lack corresponding ceremonies.

10th International Conference on Software Engineering & Trends (SE 2022) will provide an excellent international forum for sharing knowledge and results in theory, methodology and applications of Software Engineering. The goal of this conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern software engineering concepts and establishing new collaborations in these areas

This paper asserts that the software engineering (SE) research literature describes open source software development (OSSD) as a homogenous phenomenon. Through a discourse analysis of the SE research literature on OSSD, it is argued that the view of OSSD as a homogenous phenomenon is not grounded in empirical evidence. Rather, it emerges from key assumptions held within the SE research discipline about its identity and how to do SE research. As such, it is argued that the view of OSSD as a homogenous phenomenon may constitute a systematic bias in the SE research literature. Implications of this are drawn for future SE research to avoid reproducing this bias.