Pedro de Alcântara dos Santos Neto

Turning Real-World Software Development into a Game

Software development is a challenging, but seldom amusing activity. At the same time, gamification, a recent trend that brings game mechanics to websites and interactive media, together with many past works that propose the use of serious games to teach software engineering in a fun way, show evidence that this type of real-world activity can also incorporate game design elements. In this work, we propose a novel approach: incorporating game mechanics directly into a software development process, effectively turning it into a live game. We show interesting results from a case study with a production team of a software house, and firmly believe it is important that the game academic community spreads this type of knowledge to influence other research areas.

A method for information systems testing automation

This paper presents MODEST, a MethOD to hElp System Testing. MODEST can reduce the overall effort required during software construction, using an extended design specification produced in a UP-like software process. This specification is used to automate test generation and execution, decreasing the effort required during test activities. The method deals with Information Systems that follow an architecture composed of a user interface layer, a business rule layer and a storage mechanism abstracted by a persistence layer.

Model Verification of Dynamic Software Product Lines

Dynamic Software Product Lines (DSPLs) extend the concept of Software Product Lines enabling adaptation at runtime according to context changes. Such dynamic behavior is typically designed using adaptation rules, context-triggered actions responsible for features activation and deactivation at runtime. The erroneous specification and the interleaving of adaptation rules (i.e., the parallel execution of adaptation rules) can lead DSPL to reach an undesired (improperly or defective) product configuration at runtime. Thus, in order to improve the reliability of DSPL behavior, design faults must be rigorously identified and eliminated in the early stages of DSPL development. In this paper, we address this issue introducing Dynamic Feature Transition Systems (DFTSs) that allow the modeling and formal verification of the DSPLs adaptive behavior. These transition systems are derived from the adaptation rules and a Context Kripke Structure, which is a context evolution model. Furthermore, we formally define five properties that can be used to identify existing design faults in DSPL design. Aiming to assess the feasibility of our approach, a feasibility study was conducted using two DSPLs, Mobile Visit Guides and Car. In both cases, design faults were automatically detected indicating that our formalism can help in the detection of design faults in the DSPLs adaptive behavior.

Templates for textual use cases of software product lines: results from a systematic mapping study and a controlled experiment

Use case templates can be used to describe functional requirements of a Software Product Line. However, to the best of our knowledge, no efforts have been made to collect and summarize these existing templates and no empirical evaluation of the use cases’ comprehensibility provided by these templates has been addressed yet. The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we present a systematic mapping study about the SPL variability description using textual use cases. From this mapping, we found twelve SPL use case templates and observed the need not only for the application of these templates in real SPL but also for supporting tools. Secondly, this work presents an evaluation of the comprehensibility of SPL use cases specified in these templates through a controlled experiment with 48 volunteers. The results of this experiment show that the specification of variabilities in the steps’ numeric identifiers of the textual use cases is better to the use case understanding than the other approaches identified. We also found evidence that the specification of variabilities at the end of the use cases favors the comprehension of them and the use of questions associated to the variation points in the use cases improves the understanding of use cases. We conclude that each characteristic of the existing templates has an impact on the SPL use case understanding and this should be taken into account when choosing one.

Athena: A Visual Tool to Support the Development of Computational Intelligence Systems

Computational Intelligence (CI) embraces techniques designed to address complex real-world problems in which traditional approaches are ineffective or infeasible. Some of these techniques are being used to solve several complex problems, such as the team allocation, building products portfolios in a software product line and test case selection/prioritization. However, despite the usefulness of these applications, the development of solutions based in CI techniques is not a trivial activity, since it involves the implementation/adaptation of algorithms to specific context and problems. This work presents Athena, a visual tool developed aiming at offering a simple approach to develop CI-based software systems. In order to do this, we proposed a drag-and-drop approach, which we called CI as a Service (CIaaS). Based on a preliminary study, we can state that Athena can help researchers to save time during the development of computational intelligence approaches.

A hybrid approach for test case prioritization and selection

Software testing consists in the dynamic verification of the behavior of a program on a set of test cases. When a program is modified, it must be tested to verify if the changes did not imply undesirable effects on its functionality. The rerunning of all test cases can be impossible, due to cost, time and resource constraints. So, it is required the creation of a test cases subset before the test execution. This is a hard problem and the use of standard Software Engineering techniques could not be suitable. This work presents an approach for test case prioritization and selection, based in relevant inputs obtained from a software development environment. The approach uses Software Quality Function Deployment (SQFD) to deploy the features relevance among the system components, Mamdani fuzzy inference systems to infer the criticality of each class and Ant Colony Optimization to select test cases. An evaluation of the approach is presented, using data from simulations with different number of tests.

Working and Playing with Scrum

Software development is sometimes considered a boring task. To avoid this fact we propose an approach based on the incorporation of game mechanics into Scrum framework, in order to change its use to a more amusing task, by taking advantage of the gamification trend. Gamification is applied to non-game applications and processes, trying to encourage people to adopt them. This work shows a suggestion of Scrum gamification together with an evaluation of the proposed approach in a case study of a software house. The use of this concept can help the software industry to increase the team productivity in a natural way.

How to Describe SPL Variabilities in Textual Use Cases: A Systematic Mapping Study

In the Software Product Line (SPL) paradigm, the variability description is an important issue for the requirements engineering process. In this scenario, there are several approaches in the literature focusing on how to describe variability in use cases. However, to the best of our knowledge, no efforts have been made to collect and summarize the existing templates for textual use case description in the SPL paradigm. This paper addresses this gap, presenting a systematic mapping study about SPL variability description in textual use cases. We found with this mapping, nine use case templates and four different ways to describe SPL variabilities in a use case description. From these templates, only one deal with the five variability types identified and we did not find any experimental study comparing these templates in terms of ease of use or comprehensibility.

Optimized Feature Selection for Initial Launch in Dynamic Software Product Lines.

A Dynamic Software Product Line (DSPL) allows the generation of products that can adapt dynamically according to changes in requirements or environment at runtime. This runtime adaptation is often made by the activation and deactivation of features, introducing a cost (e.g., an overhead regarding resource consumption). To reduce this cost, a solution is the partial product configuration at the static binding time. Thus, in DSPLs, one challenge is the feature selection to define which features should be bound permanently before the initial launch and which features should be bound at runtime. In this paper, we address this challenge presenting a graph model formulation to the feature selection problem for the initial launch in DSPLs that considers both static and dynamic binding. This model allows the application of efficient optimization algorithms to solve the problem. We also present a proof of concept showing that the model can be used to generate optimized solutions to the feature selection problem for initial launch in DSPLs.

Analysis of Code Familiarity in Module and Functionality Perspectives

Maintenance is one of the most important phases in the software life cycle. Usually, during this phase the assignment of tasks to developers is made based on the familiarity degree that they have with the source code related to each task. However, it is not simple nor immediate to infer the relationship between the developers and the source code, especially when it is considered the level of functionality, which may have code archives dispersed in many locations of a project. This work presents an approach to infer the familiarity between developer and source code considering the functionality perspective, a view more appropriate in a real context of software development. The approach was applied during the evaluation of real softwares. Through an analysis of the familiarity between the module and functionality perspectives, it was possible to perceive the gain of information that can be obtained to understand better how it is the familiarity distribution among members of a team.