Abstract Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an emerging software technology for automating business processes. RPA uses software robots to perform repetitive and error‐prone tasks previously done by human actors quickly and accurately. These robots mimic humans by interacting with existing software applications through user interfaces (UI). The goal of RPA is to relieve employees from repetitive and tedious tasks to increase productivity and to provide better service quality. Yet, despite all the RPA benefits, most organizations fail to adopt RPA. One of the main reasons for the lack of adoption is that organizations are unable to effectively identify the processes that are suitable for RPA. This paper proposes a new method, called Rule‐based robotic process analysis (RRPA), that assists process automation practitioners to classify business processes according to their suitability for RPA. The RRPA method computes a suitability score for RPA using a combination of two RPA goals: (i) the RPA feasibility, which assesses the extent to which the process or the activity lends itself to automation with RPA and (ii) the RPA relevance, which assesses whether the RPA automation is worthwhile. We tested the RRPA method on a set of 13 processes. The results showed that the method is effective at 82.05% and efficient at 76.19%.

Cross-platform mobile app development frame-works allow developers to use a single codebase to develop apps targeting different platforms. As these frame-works provide distinct features and may impact the apps' quality, their selection must be done with care. Although many works evaluated mobile frame-works, there is no synthesis on these studies. In this paper, we present a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on approaches that evaluated cross- platform frame-works. Our SLR covers 75 papers and provides insights on 1) the most studied frame-works, 2) the criteria used for evaluation, 3) the evaluation methods used and 4) the results of these evaluations. The SLR shows that prior works generally used a prototype app to evaluate the frame-works but none explored the impact of the frame-works on the app's code quality. Thus, we carried out a preliminary empirical study on 3,566 mobile apps to evaluate the impact of mobile frame-works on the number of bugs and code smells in apps. The results of the study on native Android and React Native indicate that the latter has fewer code smells than native Android apps. Native Android apps generally had worse quality considering the number of bugs and code smells.

Typical object-oriented (OO) systems implement several functional features that are interwoven into class hierarchies. In the absence of aspect-oriented techniques to develop and compose these features, developers resort to object-oriented design and programming idioms to separate features as well as possible. Given a legacy OO system, discovering existing functional features helps understand the design of the system and extract these features to ease their maintenance and reuse. We want to discover candidate functional features in OO systems. We first define functional features and then discuss the footprints that such features are likely to leave in an OO system. We identify three such footprints: (1) multiple inheritance, (2) delegation, and (3) ad-hoc. We develop a set of algorithms for identifying such footprints in OO code and implemented them for the Java language using Eclipse JDT. In this article, we present the algorithms, and the results of applying the corresponding tools on five open-source systems: FreeMind, JavaWebMail, JHotDraw, JReversePro, and Lucene. Our experimental results show that: (1) the different algorithms can identify interesting and useful candidate functional features in OO systems, (2) they can identify opportunities for refactoring, and (3) they are complementary and could help developers.

Customer experience management (CEM) denotes a set of practices, processes, and tools that aim to personalise a customer’s interactions with a company, throughout a purchasing process, around the customer’s needs and desires. The customer journey is the process by which a customer interacts with a company to achieve a goal. The complexity of the purchasing process depends on the nature of the product (cartoon of milk vs. house) and on the different paths (journey) pursued by the customers throughout the purchasing process. In this paper, we propose an approach for modeling and personalising purchasing processes by marketing analysts using a Purchasing Scenario Specification Tool (PSST). The tool enables marketing analysts to select relevant process steps and interactions to handle the different encounters of the company with their customers. We rely on Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) to represent the purchasing processes: 1) to allow marketing analysts to add and remove interactions (tasks and events in CMMN) and 2) to get a flexible process that enables company to track and interact with the different journeys pursued by their customers throughout a same purchasing process. To make the modeling easier for the marketing analyst, PSST uses a simplified notation close to CMMN. We illustrate the approach with two examples of use cases of modeling and personalising purchasing processes having different levels of complexity.