Requirements Engineering (RE) is critical to the success of software development projects. Industrial software projects that apply poor RE practices usually suffer from severe quality challenges and even project failures. Even though RE has been drawing more attention in the literature, there is a lack of empirical evidence of RE practices and challenges at industrial contexts. To address this we carried out a study to evaluate the perspectives of software engineers on their RE practices to understand more about how software engineers approach RE process and what are the challenges they face. We conducted a multi-case study by interviewing 8 participants from 5 software development companies in Palestine. Our results show that for all the RE process seems to be fairly systematic with whole team involvement. Further, the agile RE model is the dominant model, and over half reported that key challenges are caused by issues that originated from the client side. Finally, we highlight interesting future RE research from the perspective of industrial practitioners.

Context: A number of secondary studies in the form of systematic reviews and systematic mapping studies exist in the area of mobile application software engineering. Objective: The focus of this paper is to provide an overview and analysis of these secondary studies of mobile app software engineering for researchers and practitioners. Method: We conducted a systematic tertiary study following the guidelines by Kitchenham et al. to classify and analyze secondary studies in this area. Results: After going through several filtration steps, we identified 24 secondary studies addressing major software engineering phases, such as initiation, requirements engineering , design, development and testing. The majority of the secondary studies focused on testing and design phases. Specific research topics addressed by the included studies were: usability evaluation , test automation, context-aware testing, cloud-based development, architectural models , effort and size estimation models, defect prediction , and GUI testing. We found that the trend in secondary studies is towards more specific areas of mobile application software engineering such as architectural design models, context-aware testing, testing of non-functional requirements, mobile cloud computing , and intelligent mobile applications. Research directions and some identified practices for practitioners were also identified. Conclusions: Mobile application software engineering is an active research area. The area can benefit from additional research in terms of secondary studies targeting evolution, maintenance, requirements engineering, and cross-platform mobile application development. Additionally, some of the secondary studies identify some useful practices for practitioners.

Software development involves many activities, and decision making is an essential one. Various factors can impact a decision-making process, and by understanding such factors, one can improve the process. Since people are the ones making decisions, some human-related aspects are amongst those influencing factors. One such aspect is the decision maker’s personality. This research investigates the relationship between decision-making style and personality within the context of software project development. We conducted a survey in a population of Brazilian software engineers to gather data on their personality and decision-making style. Data from 63 participants was gathered and resulted in the identification of seven statistically significant correlations between decision-making style and personality (personality factor and personality facets). Furthermore, we built a regression model in which decision-making style (DMS) was the response variable and personality factors the independent variables. The backward elimination procedure selected only agreeableness to explain 4.2% of DMS variation. The model accuracy was evaluated and deemed good enough. Regarding the moderation effect of demographic variables (age, educational level, experience, and role) on the relationship between DMS and Agreeableness, the analysis showed that only software engineers’ role has such effect. This paper contributes toward understanding the relationship between DMS and personality. Results show that the personality variable agreeableness can explain the variation in decision-making style. Furthermore, someone’s role in a software development project can impact the strength of the relationship between DMS and agreeableness.

Most of software products, especially mobile applications (apps) rely on a back-end web services to communicate with a shared data repository. Statistics have demonstrated exponential demand on web services, mainly REST, due to the continuous adoption of IoT (Internet of Things) and Cloud Computing. However, the development of back-end REST web services is not a trivial task, and can be intimidating even for seasoned developers. Despite the fact that there are several studies that focus on automatic generation of REST APIs, we argue that those approaches violate the rules of code flexibility and are not appropriate for novice developers. In this study, we present an approach and a framework, named RAAG (REST Api Auto-Generation), that aims to improve productivity by simplifying the development of REST web services. Our RAAG framework abstracts layers, where code generation has been avoided due its limitations. A preliminary evaluation shows that RAAG can significantly improves development productivity and is easy to operate even by novice developers.

Integrating value-oriented perspectives into the principles and practices of software engineering is critical to ensure that software development and management activities address all key stakeholders' views and also balance short-and-long-term goals. This is put forward in the discipline of Value-Based Software Engineering (VBSE). In this paper, a mapping study of VBSE is detailed. We classify evidence on VBSE principles and practices, research methods, and the research types. This mapping study includes 134 studies located from online searches, and backward snowballing of references. Our results show that VB Requirements Engineering (22%) and VB Planning and Control (19%) were the two principles and practices mostly investigated in the VBSE literature, whereas VB Risk Management, VB People Management and Value Creation (3% respectively) were the three less researched. In terms of the research method, the most commonly employed method is case-study research. In terms of research types, most of the studies (28%) proposed solution technique(s) without empirical validation.

Context From a point of view, software development is a set of decisions that need to be made while the software is developed. Many alternatives should be considered, such as the technology to employ, or the most important features to implement. However, many factors can influence one’s decision-making, such as the decision maker’s personality. Objective This paper reports the state of the art with regard to the relationship between decision-makers’ personality and decision-making aspects. Method We conducted a Systematic Literature Review to search and analyze published primary studies that discuss the abovementioned relationship in the context of companies that develop any kind of product or service. Results Despite the recognized influence of personality in decision-making activities, we were not able to find any study in Software Engineering field that discusses this relationship. We included 15 studies and most of them are from Management field, excluding one from Information System field. From these studies, we identified 75 reported relationships between 28 different personality aspects and 30 different decision-making aspects. Conclusion The interest in this topic born on 80’s and it has grown after 2002. However, despite the number of reported relationships, and the number of personalities and decision-making aspects investigated, more research on this topic is necessary. In particular, it is important to verify how someone’s personality influences the decision-making considering the software development context. This can help in improving how a decision is made in software engineering context.

Mobile applications (apps) are becoming ubiquitous and at the same time getting more complex to develop. Specific development tools and techniques are always essential to facilitate the development of reliable and cost effective mobile apps. However, a large fraction of Android app developers are known to be novice and come from non-computing background. To assist developers, this paper addresses the problem of automatic generation of Android database components, and presents a technique for creating SQLite database and APIs. The technique is based on a tool named Android SQLite Creator (ASQLC) that can automatically generate Android SQLite database as well as the API classes that perform read/write operation on that database. To evaluate the tool, a preliminary experiment was conducted by junior computer science students in building a small size Android database. This preliminary evaluation shows that our tool can be usable and promising particularly for novice developers.

This paper describes a formal experiment carried out to investigate the effect of the personality factor Openness to experience on the academic performance of students who practiced pair programming (PP) in higher education. The experiment was carried out at the University of Auckland, using as subjects undergraduate students attending an introductory software programming course. Our results showed that differences in Openness level could significantly affect academic performance of students who pair programmed. In addition, our results also showed that most students gained higher satisfaction from the PP experience and their confidence level in solving programming exercises was also high.

Background: A systematic literature review (SLR) is a methodology used to aggregate all relevant existing evidence to answer a research question of interest. Although crucial, the process used to select primary studies can be arduous, time consuming, and must often be conducted manually. Objective: We propose a novel approach, known as 'Systematic Literature Review based on Visual Text Mining' or simply SLR-VTM, to support the primary study selection activity using visual text mining (VTM) techniques. Method: We conducted a case study to compare the performance and effectiveness of four doctoral students in selecting primary studies manually and using the SLR-VTM approach. To enable the comparison, we also developed a VTM tool that implemented our approach. We hypothesized that students using SLR-VTM would present improved selection performance and effectiveness. Results: Our results show that incorporating VTM in the SLR study selection activity reduced the time spent in this activity and also increased the number of studies correctly included. Conclusions: Our pilot case study presents promising results suggesting that the use of VTM may indeed be beneficial during the study selection activity when performing an SLR.

The objective of this paper is to present the current evidence relative to the effectiveness of pair programming (PP) as a pedagogical tool in higher education CS/SE courses. We performed a systematic literature review (SLR) of empirical studies that investigated factors affecting the effectiveness of PP for CS/SE students and studies that measured the effectiveness of PP for CS/SE students. Seventy-four papers were used in our synthesis of evidence, and 14 compatibility factors that can potentially affect PP's effectiveness as a pedagogical tool were identified. Results showed that students' skill level was the factor that affected PP's effectiveness the most. The most common measure used to gauge PP's effectiveness was time spent on programming. In addition, students' satisfaction when using PP was overall higher than when working solo. Our meta-analyses showed that PP was effective in improving students' grades on assignments. Finally, in the studies that used quality as a measure of effectiveness, the number of test cases succeeded, academic performance, and expert opinion were the quality measures mostly applied. The results of this SLR show two clear gaps in this research field: 1) a lack of studies focusing on pair compatibility factors aimed at making PP an effective pedagogical tool and 2) a lack of studies investigating PP for software design/modeling tasks in conjunction with programming tasks.

This paper reports on an empirical study that investigates the effects of the personality trait of neuroticism on the academic performance of students who practiced pair programming during one academic semester. The experiment was conducted at The University of Auckland involving 270 first year undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory programming course. In this study, we hypothesized that neuroticism or lack of 'emotional stability' potentially affects pair students' academic performance. However, from the analysis of our results we found lack of evidence to support this. A correlation analysis showed significant positive associations between the conscientiousness personality trait and almost all performance criteria, thus corroborating evidence reported in the educational psychology literature.

This paper describes a formal experiment carried out to investigate the effect of the Personality factor conscientiousness on the effectiveness of Pair Programming as a pedagogical tool in higher Education. This experiment took place at the University of Auckland, using as subjects undergraduate students attending an introductory programming course. Conscientiousness was chosen because it has been shown to be the most consistent predictor of academic achievement. Our findings showed that differences in conscientiousness level did not significantly affect the academic performance of students who pair programmed, which could have been due to the short duration of the tasks used throughout the experiment. However, results revealed that another Personality factor - Openness to experience - presented a significant correlation with paired students' academic performance.

Pair Programming (PP) has been long researched in industry and academia. Although research evidence about its usefulness is somewhat inconclusive, previous studies showed that its use in an academic environment can benefit students in programming and design courses. In our study, we investigated the ldquohumanrdquo aspect of PP; in particular the effects that personality attributes may have on PP's effectiveness as a pedagogical tool. We conducted a formal experiment at the University of Auckland to investigate the influence of personality differences among paired students using the five-factor model as a personality measurement framework. The aim of our study was to improve the implementation of PP as a pedagogical tool through understanding the impact the variation in the personality profile of paired students has towards their academic performance. Our findings showed that differences in personality traits did not significantly affect the academic performance of students who pair programmed.