Eduardo Santana de Almeida

A systematic mapping study of software product lines testing

ContextIn software development, Testing is an important mechanism both to identify defects and assure that completed products work as specified. This is a common practice in single-system development, and continues to hold in Software Product Lines (SPL). Even though extensive research has been done in the SPL Testing field, it is necessary to assess the current state of research and practice, in order to provide practitioners with evidence that enable fostering its further development. ObjectiveThis paper focuses on Testing in SPL and has the following goals: investigate state-of-the-art testing practices, synthesize available evidence, and identify gaps between required techniques and existing approaches, available in the literature. MethodA systematic mapping study was conducted with a set of nine research questions, in which 120 studies, dated from 1993 to 2009, were evaluated. ResultsAlthough several aspects regarding testing have been covered by single-system development approaches, many cannot be directly applied in the SPL context due to specific issues. In addition, particular aspects regarding SPL are not covered by the existing SPL approaches, and when the aspects are covered, the literature just gives brief overviews. This scenario indicates that additional investigation, empirical and practical, should be performed. ConclusionThe results can help to understand the needs in SPL Testing, by identifying points that still require additional investigation, since important aspects regarding particular points of software product lines have not been addressed yet.

On the Reliability of Mapping Studies in Software Engineering

Background: Systematic literature reviews and systematic mapping studies are becoming increasingly common in software engineering, and hence it becomes even more important to better understand the reliability of such studies. Objective: This paper presents a study of two systematic mapping studies to evaluate the reliability of mapping studies and point out some challenges related to this type of study in software engineering. Method: The research is based on an in-depth case study of two published mapping studies on software product line testing. Results: We found that despite the fact that the two studies are addressing the same topic, there are quite a number of differences when it comes to papers included and in terms of classification of the papers included in the two mapping studies. Conclusions: From this we conclude that although mapping studies are important, their reliability cannot simply be taken for granted. Based on the findings we also provide four conjectures that further research has to address to make secondary studies (systematic mapping studies and systematic literature reviews) even more valuable to both researchers and practitioners. (Less)

On strategies for testing software product lines: A systematic literature review

Context: Testing plays an important role in the quality assurance process for software product line engineering. There are many opportunities for economies of scope and scale in the testing activities, but techniques that can take advantage of these opportunities are still needed. Objective: The objective of this study is to identify testing strategies that have the potential to achieve these economies, and to provide a synthesis of available research on SPL testing strategies, to be applied towards reaching higher defect detection rates and reduced quality assurance effort. Method: We performed a literature review of two hundred seventy-six studies published from the year 1998 up to the 1st semester of 2013. We used several filters to focus the review on the most relevant studies and we give detailed analyses of the core set of studies. Results: The analysis of the reported strategies comprised two fundamental aspects for software product line testing: the selection of products for testing, and the actual test of products. Our findings indicate that the literature offers a large number of techniques to cope with such aspects. However, there is a lack of reports on realistic industrial experiences, which limits the inferences that can be drawn. Conclusion: This study showed a number of leveraged strategies that can support both the selection of products, and the actual testing of products. Future research should also benefit from the problems and advantages identified in this study.

Agile software product lines: a systematic mapping study

Background: Software product lines and Agile methods have been an effective solution for dealing with the growing complexity of software and handling competitive needs of software organizations. They also share common goals, such as improving productivity, reducing time‐to‐market, decreasing development costs and increasing customer satisfaction. There has been growing interest in whether the integration of Agile and SPL could provide further benefits and solve many of the outstanding issues surrounding software development. Objective: This study investigates the state‐of‐the‐art in Agile SPL approaches, while identifying gaps in current research and synthesizing available evidence. It also provides a basis for a deeper understanding of the issues involved in the integration of Agile and SPL. Method: A mapping study was undertaken to analyze the relation between Agile and SPL methods. A set of four research questions were defined in which the 32 primary studies were evaluated. Results: This study provides insights into the integration of Agile and SPL approaches, it identifies the current gaps in the research, synthesize the available evidence and propose specific Agile methods and practices for integration in SPL. Conclusions: In general, few studies describe the underlying Agile principles being adopted by proposed Agile SPL solutions. The most common Agile practices proposed by the studies came from the XP and Scrum methods, particularly in the pro‐active SPL strategy. We identify certain Agile methods that are being overlooked by the Agile SPL community, and propose specific SPL practices areas suitable for adoption of Agile practices. Copyright

Twenty-eight years of component-based software engineering

We defined more precisely the identification of the gaps.We also defined more precisely the incentives for further research.In Section 4.3 we made explicit connection to the Fig. 15 and identified gaps.All pointed typos were fixed. The idea of developing software components was envisioned more than forty years ago. In the past two decades, Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) has emerged as a distinguishable approach in software engineering, and it has attracted the attention of many researchers, which has led to many results being published in the research literature. There is a huge amount of knowledge encapsulated in conferences and journals targeting this area, but a systematic analysis of that knowledge is missing. For this reason, we aim to investigate the state-of-the-art of the CBSE area through a detailed literature review. To do this, 1231 studies dating from 1984 to 2012 were analyzed. Using the available evidence, this paper addresses five dimensions of CBSE: main objectives, research topics, application domains, research intensity and applied research methods. The main objectives found were to increase productivity, save costs and improve quality. The most addressed application domains are homogeneously divided between commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS), distributed and embedded systems. Intensity of research showed a considerable increase in the last fourteen years. In addition to the analysis, this paper also synthesizes the available evidence, identifies open issues and points out areas that call for further research.

Strategies for testing products in software product lines

The software product line engineering strategy enables the achievement of significant improvements in quality through reuse of carefully crafted software assets across multiple products. However, high levels of quality in the software product line assets, which are used to create products, must be accompanied by effective and efficient test strategies for the products in the software product line. The goal of this study is to understand which strategies for testing products in software product lines have been reported in the literature, enabling discussions on the significant issues, and also pointing out further research directions. A systematic literature review was carried out that identified two hundred seventy-three papers, published from the years 1998 and early in 2012. From such a set of papers, a systematic selection resulted in forty-one relevant papers. The analysis of the reported strategies comprised two important aspects: the selection of products for testing, and the actual test of products. The findings showed a range of strategies, dealing with both aspects, but few empirical evaluations of their effectiveness have been performed, which limits the inferences that can be drawn.

Towards metamodel support for variability and traceability in software product lines

In Software Product Lines (SPL), where a greater variety of products are derived from a common platform and constantly changed and evolved, it is important to manage the SPL variability and the traceability among its artifacts. This paper presents a metamodel which aims to coordinate SPL activities, by managing different SPL phases and their responsibles, and to maintain the traceability and variability among different artifacts. The metamodel was built for a SPL project in a private company working in the medical information management domain, which includes four products encompassing 102 different modules and 840 features. The metamodel is divided into five sub-models: project and risk management, scoping, requirements and testing. It is represented in the UML notation. Organizations using this metamodel as basis for their approaches, can easily understand the relationships between the SPL assets, communicate to the stakeholders, and facilitate the evolution and maintenance of the SPL. The metamodel can also be adapted to the single system development context.

Challenges and opportunities for software change request repositories: a systematic mapping study

Software maintenance starts as soon as the first artifacts are delivered and is essential for the success of the software. However, keeping maintenance activities and their related artifacts on track comes at a high cost. In this respect, change request (CR) repositories are fundamental in software maintenance. They facilitate the management of CRs and are also the central point to coordinate activities and communication among stakeholders. However, the benefits of CR repositories do not come without issues, and commonly occurring ones should be dealt with, such as the following: duplicate CRs, the large number of CRs to assign, or poorly described CRs. Such issues have led researchers to an increased interest in investigating CR repositories, by considering different aspects of software development and CR management. In this paper, we performed a systematic mapping study to characterize this research field. We analyzed 142 studies, which we classified in two ways. First, we classified the studies into different topics and grouped them into two dimensions: challenges and opportunities. Second, the challenge topics were classified in accordance with an existing taxonomy for information retrieval models. In addition, we investigated tools and services for CR management, to understand whether and how they addressed the topics identified. Copyright

An Initial Study on the Bug Report Duplication Problem

According to recent work, duplicate bug report entries in bug tracking systems impact negatively on software maintenance and evolution productivity due to, among other factors, the increased time spent on report analysis and validation, what in some cases take over 20 minutes. Therefore, a considerable amount of time is lost mainly with duplicate bug report analysis. This work presents an initial characterization study using data from bug trackers from private and open source projects, in order to understand the possible factors that cause bug report duplication and its impact on software development.

A software component quality framework

One of the major problems with Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) is the quality of the components used in a system. The reliability of a component-based software system depends on the reliability of the components that is made of. In CBSE, the proper search, selection and evaluation process of components is considered the cornerstone for the development of any effective component-based system. So far the software industry was concentrated on the functional aspects of components, leaving aside the difficult task of assessing their quality. In this way, we propose a software component quality framework to evaluate the quality of software components in an efficient way. Moreover, an experimental study was accomplished in order to evaluate the viability of the proposed framework.