Yguaratã Cerqueira Cavalcanti

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.

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.

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 Regression Testing Approach for Software Product Lines Architectures

In the Software Product Lines (SPL) context, where products are derived from a common platform, the reference architecture can be considered the main asset. In order to maintain its correctness and reliability after modifications, a regression testing approach based on architecture specification and code was developed. It aims to reduce the testing effort, by reusing test cases, execution results, as well as, selecting and prioritizing an effective set of test cases. Taking advantage of SPL architectures similarities, this approach can be applied among product architectures and between the reference and product architecture. This study also presents an evaluation performed in order to calibrate and improve the proposed approach.

One Step More to Understand the Bug Report Duplication Problem

According to recent work, duplicate bug reports impact negatively on software maintenance and evolution productivity due to, among other factors, the increased time spent on report analysis and validation. Therefore, a considerable amount of time is lost mainly with duplicate bug report analysis. In this sense, this work presents am exploratory study using data from bug trackers from private and open source projects, in order to understand the possible factors (i.e. software life-time, size, amount of bug reports, etc.) that cause bug report duplication and its impact on software development. This work also discusses bug report characteristics that could help identifying duplicates.

Combining rule-based and information retrieval techniques to assign software change requests

Change Requests (CRs) are key elements to software maintenance and evolution. Finding the appropriate developer to a CR is crucial for obtaining the lowest, economically feasible, fixing time. Nevertheless, assigning CRs is a labor-intensive and time consuming task. In this paper, we present a semi-automated CR assignment approach which combine rule-based and information retrieval techniques. The approach emphasizes the use of contextual information, essential to effective assignments, and puts the development team in control of the assignment rules, toward making its adoption easier. Results of an empirical evaluation showed that the approach is up to 46,5% more accurate than approaches which rely solely on machine learning techniques.

Low-level variability support for web-based software product lines

The Web systems domain has faced an increasing number of devices, browsers, and platforms to cope with, driving software systems to be more flexible to accomodate them. Software product line (SPL) engineering can be used as a strategy to implement systems capable of handling such a diversity. To this end, automated tool support is almost indispensable. However, current tool support gives more emphasis to modeling variability in the problem domain, over the support of variability at the solution domain. There is a need for mapping the variability between both abstraction levels, so as to determine what implementation impact a certain variability has. In this paper, we propose the FeatureJS, a FeatureIDE extension aiming at Javascript and HTML support for SPL engineering. The tool combines feature-oriented programming and preprocessors, as a strategy to map variability at source code with the variability modeled at a higher level of abstraction. We carried out a preliminary evaluation with an industrial project, aiming to characterize the capability of the tool to handle SPL engineering in the Web systems domain.

Towards understanding software change request assignment: a survey with practitioners

Context: Change Request (CR) repositories play an important role in the software maintenance and evolution process. Through a CR repository, software changes are reported and assigned to developers. Finding the appropriate developer to a CR is crucial for obtaining the lowest, economically feasible, fixing time. Nevertheless, assigning CRs is a labor-intensive and time consuming task. Although many work have proposed automated approaches for CR assignment, they have been implemented without investigating the fundamental aspects which characterize the task itself. Objective: This paper investigates the effort that is taken to assign CR to appropriate developers and identifies the fundamental aspects that characterize it, such as the strategies to perform the assignments and the complexity involved in them. Such investigation improves the current knowledge on the topic, providing researchers and practitioners with useful information towards developing effective solutions. Method: A survey was performed with software developers to understand CR assignment in the Brazilian Federal Organization for Data Processing. The questionnaire was composed of 38 questions, being them both open-ended and closed-ended. We analyzed the answers of 36 respondents. Results: We find that: there is a significant amount of time being spent on assignments (e.g., assigning 20 CRs can take up to 3.3 hours); there are many strategies used to assign CRs, which are complementary to those used in current automated solutions; and CR assignment is very complexity due to a process that requires cognitive abilities for information seeking, communication, and memorization. Conclusion: CR repositories are fundamental to software maintenance, however assigning CRs to developers is an expensive activity. Although we understand that fully and totally accurate automation of assignments is unlikely, further improvements on this direction are feasible and necessary to reduce costs. This way, this paper brings relevant findings to guide new research on automated CR assignment.