Simone Porru

Blockchain-oriented software engineering: challenges and new directions

In this work, we acknowledge the need for software engineers to devise specialized tools and techniques for blockchain-oriented software development. Ensuring effective testing activities, enhancing collaboration in large teams, and facilitating the development of smart contracts all appear as key factors in the future of blockchain-oriented software development.

A statistical comparison of Java and Python software metric properties

This paper presents a statistical analysis of 20 opensource object-oriented systems with the purpose of detecting differences in metrics distribution between Java and Python projects. We selected ten Java projects from the Java Qualitas Corpus and ten projects written in Python. For each system, we considered 10 class-level software metrics.We performed a best fit procedure on the empirical distributions through the log-normal distribution and the double Pareto distribution to identify differences between the two languages. Even though the statistical distributions for projects written in Java and Python may appear the same for lower values of the metric, performing the procedure with the double Pareto distribution for the Number of Local Methods metric reveals that major differences can be noticed along the queue of the distributions. On the contrary, the same analysis performed with the Number of Statements metric reveals that only the initial portion of the double Pareto distribution shows differences between the two languages. In addition, the dispersion parameter associated to the log-normal distribution fit for the total Number Of Methods can be used for distinguishing Java projects from Python projects.

Estimating Story Points from Issue Reports

Estimating the effort of software engineering tasks is notoriously hard but essential for project planning. The agile community often adopts issue reports to describe tasks, and story points to estimate task effort. In this paper, we propose a machine learning classifier for estimating the story points required to address an issue. Through empirical evaluation on one industrial project and eight open source projects, we demonstrate that such classifier is feasible. We show that ---after an initial training on over 300 issue reports--- the classifier estimates a new issue in less than 15 seconds with a mean magnitude of relative error between 0.16 and 0.61. In addition, issue type, summary, description, and related components prove to be project dependent features pivotal for story point estimation.

Hashtag of Instagram: From Folksonomy to Complex Network

The Instagram is a social network for smartphones created in 2010 and acquired by Facebook in 2012. It currently has more than 300 million registered users and allows for the immediate upload of images (square, inspired by Polaroid), to which users can associate hashtags and comments. Moreover, connections can be created between users that share the same interests. In our work, we intend to analyze the hashtags entered by users: the use of such hashtags, as it happens in other social networks like Twitter, generates a folksonomy, that is a user-driven classification of information. We intend to map that folksonomy as a complex network to which we can associate all the typical analysis and evaluations of such a mathematical model. Our purpose is to use the resulting complex network as a marketing tool, in order to improve brand or product awareness.

A Preliminary Study on Mobile Apps Call Graphs through a Complex Network Approach

Mobile apps are certainly a significant part of the software industry market, and their centrality in our economic and social life is becoming more and more relevant as time goes by. In this preliminary work we propose a complex network approach, never used before in this field, to study mobile apps from a software engineering perspective. We analyzed the networks associated to 5 popular open-source android apps, and found that they share some properties with other kinds of software systems. We employed complex networks to obtain a deeper insight both on internal and external dependencies, aiming at studying the relationship between mobile apps dependencies and software quality. Our goal is to better understand the nature of the existing relationship between mobile apps and the underlying hosting operating system thus providing developers with valuable information.

A Complex Network Approach for Museum Services

In a globalized economy, cultural heritage is a strong attractor. Thanks to ICT, it is possible to trigger new development dynamics. For cultural heritage, the contribution of new technologies can offer the highest degree of distribution and access opportunities. A modern museum can actually be seen as a complex ICT system, deeply interconnected, with typically a large quantity of data to manage, extremely dynamic due to ever-changing temporary exhibitions, and with applications that feature a high level of usability for a higher visitor involvement. The aim of this position paper is to create an approach geared to provide aggregated information on the nature, range and articulation of the belongings of the museum, through a paradigm based on the concept of complex network. Applying the complex network model, it will be possible to map a corpora of items made of works of art, artifacts and any object of interest for a museum. The implications derived from the adoption of this approach are multifarious: for example, a curator could evaluate partnership opportunities in the organization of temporary exhibitions, guided paths or catalog editing through an analysis of the relations between the items in their museum and the ones in other museums.

A Model for Digital Content Management

Digital libraries work in complex and heterogeneous scenarios. The quantity and diversity of resources, together with the plurality of agents involved in this context, and the continuous evolution of user-generated content, require knowledge to be formally and flexibly organized. In our work, we propose a library management system - which specifically addresses the Italian context - based on the creation of a metadata taxonomy that analyses the existing management standards, connects them, and associates them with the multimedia content, through a comparison with popular metadata standard employed for User-Generated Content. The approach is based on the conviction that cultural heritage should be managed in the most flexible way through the use of open data and open standards that promote knowledge interoperability and exchange. Our management model for the proposed metadata aims to be a useful instrument for the greater sharing of knowledge in a logic of reuse.

An Approach to Multimedia Content Management

Standardized formalizations of the knowledge are used by domain experts to share information in the form of reusable knowledge. The primary objective of our work is the definition of an approach for multimedia content management. We reached that goal through a validation activity which lasted for the last three years, and was carried on through the application on different case studies, some of them described in detail in previously published papers. This approach aims to represent the knowledge through a mixed-iterative approach, where top-down and bottom-up analyses are applied on the knowledge domain we want to represent. We focused our research on some issues concerning Knowledge Management, strictly related to the process of making multimedia content-related knowledge easily available to users. We need to represent and manage this knowledge, in order to formalize and codify all the knowledge in the domain. This formalization can eventually lead us to easily manage that knowledge through the use of repositories.