Context: Developers' interaction traces (ITs) are commonly used in software engineering to understand how developers maintain and evolve software systems. Researchers make several assumptions when mining ITs, e.g., edit events are considered to be change activities and the time mined from ITs is considered to be the time spent by the developers performing the maintenance task. Goal: We investigate the extent to which these assumptions are correct. We examine noises in developers'''' ITs data and the impact of these noises on previous results derived from these traces. Approach: We perform an experiment with 15 participants, whom we asked to perform bug-fixing activities and collect Mylyn ITs and VLC video captures. We then investigate noises between the two data sets and propose an approach to correct noises in ITs. Results: We find that Mylyn ITs can miss on average about 6% of the time spent performing a task and contain on average about 28% of false edit-events. We report that these noises may have led researchers to mislabel some participants'''' editing styles in about 34% of the cases and that the numbers of edit-events performed by developers and the times that they spent on tasks are correlated, when they were considered not to be. Conclusion: We show that ITs must be carefully cleaned before being used in research studies.

Software development practitioners are increasingly interested in adopting agile methods and generally recommend customisation so that the adopted method can fit the organisational reality. Many studies from the literature report agile adoption and customisation experiences but most of them are hardly generalisable and few are metric-based. They therefore cannot provide quantitative evidence of the suitability of the customised agile method, neither assess the organisation readability to adopt it, nor help in decision-making concerning the organisation transformation strategy. In this paper, we first describe the Agile Methods Quality-Integrated Customisation framework (AM-QuICk) that relies on measurements and aims to continuously assist agile methodologists throughout the agile adoption and customisation process, i.e., during the initial organisation adoption, the method design and throughout the working development process. Then, we present a case study using AM-QuICk within an organisation. With this study, we aim to analyse the current development process and its level of agility and identify the initial risk factors. The data were collected using preliminary interviews with the different team members and two questionnaires. The results reveal that though most respondents are enthusiastic towards agile principles, a progressive transformation strategy would be beneficial.

ABSTRACT Websites are an important and efficient means of communication for companies wishing to interact with their clients. Therefore, research has focused on evaluating how websites should be structured to ensure their quality. The majority of this research has focused on evaluating the quality of individual pages or that of a site as a whole. In this article, we propose the use of two‐level models that combine evaluations at the page level with evaluations at the site level, and applied them to the problem of evaluating the navigability of websites. To test our models, we conducted a study with 21 subjects who had to complete navigation tasks on several websites, and compared their quality judgments to those produced by single and two‐level quality models. We found that two‐level models are better predictors of navigability. Finally, we show how two‐level models are able to suggest modifications to improve site navigability. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Several software quality models can be found in the literature with different status regarding normalization issues. Besides, a vast amount of assessment and measurement methods have been proposed in order to monitor the different quality characteristics of various artefacts. The difficulty to integrate them meaningfully into the development process often results in a vastly inefficient use of measurement. One reason for this is related to the waste of time needed to select and integrate different methods. The Model-Centric Quality Assessment (MoCQA) framework is designed to support a flexible integration of different types of quantitative quality assessment, possibly based on different models, all along the software development lifecycle. Among the efforts to assist the task of designing MoCQA models, this paper introduces QuaTALOG, a tool designed to support the Model-Centric Quality Assessment by providing effective information about available measurement and assessment methods to analysts using the framework.

Correction: During the proofing stage of our article [1] we made an error by forgetting to put on the list of authors a biology expert Fabrice Beger who cross-checked the reliability and the quality of our database, tested it and gave comments on the manuscript. We apologize for any inconvenience.

BACKGROUND: Microarray experiments have become very popular in life science research. However, if such experiments are only considered independently, the possibilities for analysis and interpretation of many life science phenomena are reduced. The accumulation of publicly available data provides biomedical researchers with a valuable opportunity to either discover new phenomena or improve the interpretation and validation of other phenomena that partially understood or well known. This can only be achieved by intelligently exploiting this rich mine of information. DESCRIPTION: Considering that technologies like microarrays remain prohibitively expensive for researchers with limited means to order their own experimental chips, it would be beneficial to re-use previously published microarray data. For certain researchers interested in finding gene groups (requiring many replicates), there is a great need for tools to help them to select appropriate datasets for analysis. These tools may be effective, if and only if, they are able to re-use previously deposited experiments or to create new experiments not initially envisioned by the depositors. However, the generation of new experiments requires that all published microarray data be completely annotated, which is not currently the case. Thus, we propose the PathEx approach. CONCLUSION: This paper presents PathEx, a human-focused web solution built around a two-component system: one database component, enriched with relevant biological information (expression array, omics data, literature) from different sources, and another component comprising sophisticated web interfaces that allow users to perform complex dataset building queries on the contents integrated into the PathEx database.

In the software engineering literature, many works claim that the use of design patterns improves the comprehensibility of programs and, more generally, their maintainability. Yet, little work attempted to study the impact of design patterns on the developers' tasks of program comprehension and modification. We design and perform an experiment to collect data on the impact of the visitor pattern on comprehension and modification tasks with class diagrams. We use an eye-tracker to register saccades and fixations, the latter representing the focus of the developers' attention. Collected data show that the visitor pattern plays a role in maintenance tasks: class diagrams with its canonical representation requires less efforts from developers.

This paper describes our experience with Software Engineering education at the University of Namur (Belgium). Emphasis is put an the evolution of SE education from one technical 30-hrs module to a group of several modules representing a central part of our curriculum. In particular, Software Engineering project-course was extended in order to integrate aspects which are not usually considered as parr of software engineering classical teaching. Aspects like team management, communication skill, leadership, meetings management,... are learned more naturally by-doing than by classroom teaching. The purpose of our experience is take profit of the rich experience students have to live anyway in the project-oriented course. In fact, the size of the project, its extend over the whole life-cycle, and the requirement to achieve it by teams make it an ideal place to make students sensitized to such aspects. Our believe is that the software development process of any sizable project should be to the human nature of participants should not be ignored (nor overestimated). The experience is practiced for two years. At the beginning, students were troubled because they used to focus on techniques and to ignore completely human aspects. But finally, at the end of year the experience has been judged positively by them. Subsequently they showed better understanding of human aspects related to their jobs. The paper develops this enlarged view of SE education and, in particular it describes the integration of "people-side" topics within technical material.

An implemented system for on-line analysis of multiple distributed data streams is presented. The system is conceptually universal since it does not rely on any particular platform feature and uses format adaptors to translate data streams into its own standard format. The system is as powerful as possible (from a theoretical standpoint) but still efficient enough for on-line analysis thanks to its novel rule-based language (RUSSEL) which is specifically designed for efficient processing of sequential unstructured data streams. The generic concepts are applied to security audit trail analysis. The resulting system provides powerful network security monitoring and sophisticated tools for intrusion/anomaly detection. The rule-based and command languages are described as well as the distributed architecture and the implementation. Performance measurements are reported, showing the effectiveness of the approach.>