The rise of mobile devices and gaming platforms has transformed the mobile gaming industry. A game’s playability, driven by functionality, usability, and satisfaction, directly affects player experience. Online app stores provide reviews that reveal gameplay strengths, issues, and user concerns, enabling developers to assess popularity and address problems. Yet, game development relies heavily on internal play-testing, often overlooking real user experiences. This study analyses mobile game playability through the lens of human values neglected in user reviews. Using Schwartz’s theory of human values and Sánchez’s playability model, we examined 20,346 reviews from the top 15 Google Play Store games. A fine-grained analysis identified 42 functionalities, concerns, and negligence issues. Results show nearly 30% of reviews report violations of human values, significantly affecting playability. Among value categories, Socialism emerged as the most neglected, while Emotion was the least. These findings highlight critical gaps in current mobile game design practices.

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a key yet often challenging phase that demands a good understanding of stakeholder needs, domain, elicitation methods, and documentation practices. Teaching RE is challenging due to the complexity of technical processes paired with critical soft skills. Role-Playing is a common and efficient technique in RE Education (REE), strengthening students’ comprehension of stakeholder interaction and requirement elicitation. The quality and consistency of traditional role-playing are nevertheless susceptible to the instructor’s facilitation abilities, students’ role-playing capabilities, and the dynamic of each group. The emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) and subsequent Large Language Models (LLMs) has introduced new opportunities for providing tailored support to students beyond conventional learning resources. In this paper, we explore the potential of LLMs for REE and how LLMs can assist in teaching RE concepts to students. We have conducted a pilot study with forty-six students to explore teaching RE concepts and developing pedagogy in REE by assigning the role of co-analyst to the LLM. Our results show that LLMs help students understand problems from various perspectives, providing a realistic view of the underlying complexities and alternative solutions for the RE tasks.

RTs generally possess a fixed syntactic structure and comprise pre-defined slots, and requirements written in the format of RTs must conform with the template structure. If the requirements do not conform to the RT, manually rewriting them to adhere to the RTs structure is tedious. In this paper, we develop the AutoReco tool for the automated recommendation of functional requirements for non-conformance with requirement templates (RTs). Our preliminary results on nine case studies show an accuracy of 83.9% for providing recommendations to non-conformant requirements with RTs. Demonstration video: https://youtu.be/OSX71cP-oXw

Model-based Testing (MBT) has been proposed to create test cases more efficiently and effectively. In contrast, analysis techniques (e.g., model checking) have been used separately from testing and have shown great potential when applied early in the development process. Still, these are confronted by applicability and scalability issues and work on specific modeling languages. The combined use of MBT and analysis techniques can support engineers in using both dynamic and static techniques. This paper proposes a hybrid approach by combining MBT using GraphWalker (GW) with Model-Based Analysis using UPPAAL by transforming the GW model into UPPAAL timed automata and supporting a combined analysis and testing process. The approach enables the automatic verification of both reachability and deadlock freedom properties to exploit the results obtained from this analysis step to improve the test model before generating and executing test cases on the system under test. The proposed approach can improve the combination of analysis and testing using a promising open-source MBT tool and is currently being evaluated in the context of actual use cases.

This paper aims to develop a tool for automated translation of NL text into RTs. As a result, we developed a prototype to translate NL text within EARS and RUPP’s RTs. The prototype also computes six quality metrics values before and after processing the NL text into RTs. Preliminary results show improvement in the quality of NL requirements and translation approach. We have evaluated the working process and capabilities of the prototype by applying 16 problem specifications. Demonstration video: https://youtu.be/4Ac3jZpLacc Source code & Artifacts: https://tinyurl.com/nl2rt-git

Modern Code review (MCR) techniques are widely adopted in both open-source software platforms and organizations to ensure the quality of their software products. However, the selection of reviewers for code review is cumbersome with the increasing size of development teams. The recommendation of inappropriate reviewers for code review can take more time and effort to complete the task effectively. In this paper, we extended the baseline of reviewers' recommendation framework - RevFinder - to handle issues with newly created files, retired reviewers, the external validity of results, and the accuracies of the state-of-the-art RevFinder. Our proposed hybrid approach, CORMS, works on similarity analysis to compute similarities among file paths, projects/sub-projects, author information, and prediction models to recommend reviewers based on the subject of the change. We conducted a detailed analysis on the widely used 20 projects of both Gerrit and GitHub to compare our results with RevFinder. Our results reveal that on average, CORMS, can achieve top-1, top-3, top-5, and top-10 accuracies, and Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) of 45.1%, 67.5%, 74.6%, 79.9% and 0.58 for the 20 projects, consequently improves the RevFinder approach by 44.9%, 34.4%, 20.8%, 12.3% and 18.4%, respectively.

Software requirements are described in some form of natural language (NL) text so that stakeholders with limited experience can also comprehend them easily. However, the NL text written document is inherently ambiguous, and this makes it hard to examine requirements manually to find inconsistencies, duplicates, and/or missing requirements. Use Case Analysis is a graphical depiction used to explain the interaction between the user and the system for the given user's task. Additionally, it denotes the extension/dependency of one use case to another to understand the system flow. It is often used to identify, clarify, and categorize system requirements. However, generating use cases from a textual written description of requirements is an arduous task involving a significant manual work, which can be automated using data-driven techniques. In this poster paper, we present an initial approach for the automated identification of use case names and actor names from the textual requirements specification using machine learning techniques.

Abstract The flexibility of the use cases in specifying requirements from informal textual descriptions to more formal ones makes them usable in different contexts and purposes. However, the versatility of use cases regarding their admissible structure raises a natural concern about the specification completeness. This paper reports on the analysis of the eight different variants of use case template regarding their functional completeness, ability to express the set of particular functionalities, by comparing their information contents exercised by comprehensive questionnaires on five different problem specifications. The questionnaire was obtained from two sources: one based on the understanding of the functionality to be implemented and the other based on the functionality documented in eight different use case templates under study. Our results suggested that use cases can be used to specify a complete set of requirements intended to develop a software system. We found that the choice of a use case template influences the completeness of the specification. A more detailed analysis of the eight different variants of use case template resulted in the identification of 21 significant use case elements. We showed that by incorporating these significant use case elements in a given template, the completeness of the specification could be further enhanced.

A software process model (SPM) provides an abstract description of the order in which related activities of software development will be undertaken. Many process models available that can be adapted for software development. However, the selection of the best suitable process model with reference to the problem definition, constraints, and stakeholder requirements is a challenging task. Typically, in a Software Engineering (SE) course, students gain knowledge about SPM and realize their usage via classroom lectures and course projects. It is felt that if the basic knowledge imparted, through the fundamental SE course, is supplemented with some focused sessions about the SPM, then it will not only enable students to think in terms of the SPM but will also motivate them to harness the best practices of software development. This paper presents a preliminary study highlighting our experience on SPM-oriented teaching to impart the concept of requirement elicitation and process modeling, by performing a play (drama skit) annotating real-world scenarios. The feedbacks of students have been collected to evaluate whether this exercise helped them in understanding the processes they have to undergo during software development. Additionally, we have compared the student's feedback and performance in the project and reported the finding of the study.

This paper is an experience report about introducing Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) at Volvo (Construction Equipment) and describes lessons learned. The recent growth in technologies such as electromobility, automation etc. in heavy construction machinery such as loaders, haulers, excavators etc. leads to increased complexity being addressed within embedded systems and software. Hence there is an increasing need for model-based development methodologies to facilitate flexible and distributed development scenarios, enhance communication among cross-functional teams, more importantly, traceability from requirements to system and software architectures. In this paper, we describe how the MBSE methodology was initially conceived, applied in an ongoing project, the challenges faced, and lessons learned. The paper also points to related works and future directions towards a holistic Model-Driven Development (MDD) framework.

Use case modeling is a popular and widely used specification documentation strategy that facilitates a developer to specify the functional requirements of a software system. There have been many efforts made to document problem specification in the use cases by employing a restricted form of natural language, authoring guidelines and checklist, but no tool support is available to assess and validate their quality. In this paper, we present a tool, UCAnalyzer, to analyze use case textual descriptions. UCAnalyzer has three key modules: (1) a use case textual description editor module, (2) an analysis module to assess the quality of use case textual description, and (3) a module to highlight errors and provide suggestions.

A software is associated with certain modes of failure. Occurrence of such failures may be hazardous for the regular functioning of the software. Majority of these failures occur because of the unforeseen faults that manifest themselves during the execution of the software. The contemporary trends in the software industry indicate dedicated efforts to minimize these unforeseen faults, thereby minimizing the chances of unforeseen failures. One of the definitive ways is to analyze the specifications thoroughly for the potential faults it may contain. Fault tree analysis (FTA) is one such approach that scans the specifications to identify potential failure modes and has been used successfully in many domains including software. In this paper, we propose an approach to generate test cases from UML activity diagram specifications by first transforming an activity diagram into a Software Success Tree (SST) and a Software Fault Tree (SFT). Subsequently, the SST and the SFT are then used to generate test cases for testing the normal and exceptional behavior of the system, respectively. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach using an illustrative example and compare its effectiveness with the other activity diagram based test case generation techniques.

Use case models, that include use case diagrams along with their documentations, are typically used to specify the functional requirements of the software systems. Use cases are usually semi-structured and documented using some natural language hence issues like ambiguity, inconsistency, and incompleteness are inevitably introduced in the specifications. There have been many efforts to formalize the use case template that make use of certain grammatical construction to guide the structure or style of the description. This paper describes an empirical work to assess the usefulness of eight such use case templates against a set of five judging criteria, namely, completeness, consistency, understandability, redundancy and fault proneness. We conducted a controlled experiment where a group of postgraduate students applied these use case templates on multiple problem specifications. In our results, Yue's template was found to be more consistent and less fault prone, Cockburn's template was found to be more complete and more understandable and, Tiwari's template was found to be less redundant as compared to the other use case templates, though the results were not statistically significant.

In this paper, we propose an approach for transforming use case requirements into actor-oriented activity charts. In this approach, we first specify requirements using a relatively more formalized use case template. Next, we generate actor-oriented activity charts by identifying various interactions of an actor with the system and the events sequenced thereafter. The resulting activity charts can be useful in various software planning and development activities like release planning, test planning, execution and others.

An office document mashup called 'Dual Forms' is presented to demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of imbuing an office document with intelligent interaction capabilities, access to web services of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), digital signatures for legally binding contractual agreements, and a self-submission capability that allows the document to flow through a collaborative network or business process.