ABSTRACT Context Rapid Reviews are secondary studies aiming to deliver evidence to experts in a more timely manner and with lower costs than traditional literature reviews. Previous studies have shown that experts and researchers are positive toward Rapid Reviews. However, little is known about how Rapid Reviews differ from traditional Systematic Reviews. Objective The goal of this paper is to compare a Rapid Review with a Systematic Review in terms of their methods (e.g., search strategy, study selection, quality assessment, and data extraction) and findings to understand how optimizing the traditional Systematic Review method impacts what we obtain with Rapid Review. Method To achieve this goal, we conducted a Systematic Review with the same research questions answered by a pre‐existing Rapid Review and compared those two studies. Also, we surveyed experts from industry and academia to evaluate the relevance of the findings obtained from both the secondary studies. Results The Rapid Review lasted 6 days, while the Systematic Review took 1 year and 2 months. The main bottlenecks we identified in the Systematic Review are (i) executing the search strategy and (ii) selecting the procedure. Together, they took 10 months. The researchers had to analyze the information from 11,383 papers for the Systematic Review compared with 1973 for the Rapid Review. Still, most ( 78%) of the papers included in the Systematic Review were returned by the Rapid Review search, and some papers that could be included were unduly excluded during the Rapid Review's selection procedure. Both secondary studies identified the same number of pieces of evidence (30), but the pieces of evidence are not the same. Conclusion The Rapid Review and Systematic Review results are inherently different and complementary. The time and cost to conduct a Systematic Review can be prohibitive in experts' contexts. Thus, at least in such situations, a Rapid Review may be an adequate choice. Moreover, a Rapid Review may be executed in the experts' context as a previous low‐cost step before deciding to invest in a high‐cost Systematic Review.

Previous research identifies facilitators and barriers related to the use of Alternative and Augmentative Communication Systems, however, more evidence is needed to understand aspects related to introduction of such systems in an outpatient setting. This paper aims to analyze theses aspects by identifying the facilitators and barriers that comprise systems' use by aphasic people at a University Clinic in Brazil. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and the collected data were analyzed based on qualitative techniques like open coding and constant comparison. In addition to the factors found in previous research, this study identified new factors such as: cost, infantilized systems and sentences' quality produced, that can be considered as facilitators or barriers in using AAC systems. The results of this research can be used to improve the current and new AAC systems.

Background: One of the most important current challenges of Software Engineering (SE) research is to provide relevant evidence to practice. In health related fields, Rapid Reviews (RRs) have shown to be an effective method to achieve that goal. However, little is known about how the SE research community perceives the potential applicability of RRs. Aims: The goal of this study is to understand the SE research community viewpoints towards the use of RRs as a means to provide evidence to practitioners. Method: To understand their viewpoints, we invited 37 researchers to analyze 50 opinion statements about RRs, and rate them according to what extent they agree with each statement. Q-Methodology was employed to identify the most salient viewpoints, represented by the so called factors. Results: Four factors were identified: Factor A groups undecided researchers that need more evidence before using RRs; Researchers grouped in Factor B are generally positive about RRs, but highlight the need to define minimum standards; Factor C researchers are more skeptical and reinforce the importance of high quality evidence; Researchers aligned to Factor D have a pragmatic point of view, considering RRs can be applied based on the context and constraints faced by practitioners. Conclusions: In conclusion, although there are opposing viewpoints, there are also some common grounds. For example, all viewpoints agree that both RRs and Systematic Reviews can be poorly or well conducted.

Background: Continuous Integration (CI) systems are now the bedrock of several software development practices. Several tools such as TravisCI, CircleCI, and Hudson, that implement CI practices, are commonly adopted by software engineers. However, the way that software engineers use these tools could lead to what we call “Continuous Integration Theater”, a situation in which software engineers do not employ these tools effectively, leading to unhealthy CI practices. Aims: The goal of this paper is to make sense of how commonplace are these unhealthy continuous integration practices being employed in practice. Method: By inspecting 1,270 open-source projects that use TravisCI, the most used CI service, we quantitatively studied how common is to use CI (1) with infrequent commits, (2) in a software project with poor test coverage, (3) with builds that stay broken for long periods, and (4) with builds that take too long to run. Results: We observed that 748 (~60%) projects face infrequent commits, which essentially makes the merging process harder. Moreover, we were able to find code coverage information for 51 projects. The average code coverage was 78%, although Ruby projects have a higher code coverage than Java projects (86% and 63%, respectively). However, some projects with very small coverage (~4%) were found. Still, we observed that 85% of the studied projects have at least one broken build that take more than four days to be fixed. Interestingly, very small projects (up to 1,000 lines of code) are the ones that take the longest to fix broken builds. Finally, we noted that, for the majority of the studied projects, the build is executed under the 10 minutes rule of thumb. Conclusions: Our results are important to an increasing community of software engineers that employ CI practices on daily basis but may not be aware of bad practices that are eventually employed.

Context: Recent work on Evidence Based Software Engineering (EBSE) suggests that systematic reviews lack connection with Software Engineering (SE) practice. In Evidence Based Medicine there is a growing initiative to address this kind of problem, in particular through what has been named as Rapid Reviews (RRs). They are adaptations of regular systematic reviews made to fit practitioners constraints.

Context: Through the years researchers have proposed several approaches to foster the growth and quality of experiments in Software Engineering. Among these approaches, there are some initiatives that rely on tool support for specifying controlled experiments. Goal: This paper reports results from a study, which aims to organize, analyze and outline the specifications of each initiative through a comparative analysis. Method: Specifications of each initiative have been compared through a comparative analysis, carried out according to eight criteria: (i) standard empirical concepts, (ii) goals and targets, (iii) involved variables, (iv) subject description, (v) design of experiment, (vi) tasks and activities, (vii) instruments and measurements, and (viii) the threats to research validity. Results: The results show that, among the tools currently existing and used in literature, the eSEE (Experimental Software Engineering Environment) is a complete model. However, it is also the most complex. In the other hand, the most flexible one is Experiment DSL. Conclusion: Based on our results, the currently existing solutions have strengths and weaknesses that should address efforts to make improvements in this area. In principal, our general suggestion is to place emphasis on methodological quality âĂŞ more than on method quantity.

Context: For more than 15 years, Agile Software Development (ASD) has been used to improve software development, process, and quality. However, there are scenarios where the effectiveness of these methods and practices has not been rigorously evaluated.

Questions and Answers (Q&A) websites maintain a long history of needs, problems, and challenges that software developers face. In contrast to Q&A websites, which are strongly tied to practitioners' needs, there are systematic reviews (SRs), which, according to recent studies, lack a connection with software engineering practice. In this paper, we investigate this claim by assessing to what extent systematic reviews help to solve questions posted on Q&A websites. To achieve this goal, we propose and evaluate a coverage method. We applied this method to a set of more than 600 questions related to agile software development. Results suggest that 12% of the related questions were covered. When considering specific agile methods, the majority of them have coverage below 50% or were not covered at all. We also identified 27 recurrent questions.

This paper proposes the questions and method to conduct a research intending to promote the first steps towards a better integration between evidence from systematic reviews and software engineering practice. First, we are planning to conduct a tertiary study to identify systematic reviews in software engineering. Second, we intend to investigate how those reviews relate to practitioners' issues reported in a leading software engineering Question & Answer platform. Third, we plan to generate and evaluate Evidence Briefings from those reviews in order to establish a medium to transfer knowledge acquired from systematic reviews to practice. This paper also presents some preliminary results from pilot studies we have been conducting.

Context: Integrate research evidence with practice is one of the main goals of evidence-based software engineering. However, recent studies show that the connection between systematic reviews and practitioners has not fully established.

Object cloning is demanded by the prototype design pattern, copy-on-write strategy, some graph transformations, and many other scenarios. We have been developing a static analysis tool that clones objects frequently. In that context, issues related to performance, memory usage, and code maintainability might arise. Traditional deep cloning with dynamic allocation, reflection, and serialization, have not fulfilled those requirements. Thus, we developed novel implementations of lazy cloning with dynamic proxies and aspect-oriented programming (AOP). We defined benchmarks based on real workload to quantitatively assess the benefits of each implementation. AOP was chosen since it better harmonizes performance, memory usage and code maintainability. It was 88% faster than serialization, consumed 9 times less memory than reflection, and required 25 times less modifications on source code than dynamic allocation. In summary, we believe that the results can be extrapolated to broader contexts helping developers to make evidence-based decisions when object cloning is needed.

This work evaluates cache algorithms for block devices in terms of hit rate for different replacement and prediction algorithms, and also focuses on choosing suitable replacement and prediction strategies to be implemented in a storage array caching solution employing solid-state drives. As case study, a real workload was continuously collected from web proxy server network. Such replacement and prediction algorithms were evaluated in detail and compared between them considering traced SCSI commands collected from Linux kernel. Comparison results for replacement algorithms LRU, CLOCK, LRFU and LRU-WAR applied to real workload indicates that LRU obtained good results in the majority of the cases. GHB and ReadAhead prefetching algorithms also were integrated and improvements of about 5.5% were achieved when ReadAhead was used.

New processes, patterns, structures, tools, languages, and practices are being proposed for software development, but technology transfer is hard to achieve. One of the objectives of empirical studies is easing technology transfer from academy to industry. On the other hand, there are a number of issues that hinder the application of empirical studies, more specifically, controlled experiments. This paper defines a visual DSL for modeling controlled experiments supporting researchers that are not experts in such study. By using the language, the researcher is guided to define the elements of an experimental plan and connections, which is automatically generated, resulting a complete document of experimental plan. The proposed environment assists the definition of controlled experiments, increasing empirical evaluation of the proposed technologies. More specifically, the current version of our proposal generates the experimental plan from the experiment model defined using the DSL.